Stalin, Volume 1

79. Pravda, January 3, 1924. Krupskaya had also delivered a speech, published in Pravda (January 11, 1924), at Moscow’s Bauman ward party organization, in connection with elections to the party conference, on behalf of the ruling triumvirate (she praised only Zinoviev by name). McNeal, Bride of the Revolution, 233–4.

80. “It is well known among Trotsky’s friends,” Max Eastman would write, “that he received a letter from Lenin’s wife some days after Lenin died, reminding him of their early friendship.” Eastman, Since Lenin Died, 13.

81. Kudriashov, Krasnaia armiia, 96–102 (APRF, f. 3, op. 50, d. 254, l. 77, 83–84ob., 99–99ob., 103–7). The replacement was formalized on March 11, 1924. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 424, l. 8. Dzierzynski, at the Supreme Council of the Economy, took Sklyansky in, naming him head of a Moscow textile trust. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 424, l. 8.

82. Lakoba, “‘Ia Koba, a ty Lakoba’,” 55.

83. Velikanova, Making of an Idol, 52–3 (citing RGASPI, f. 16, op. 2s, d. 49, l. 2–4; d. 48, l. 12; op. 3, d. 412, l. 1; op. 2s, d. 49, l. 37); Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine [1965], 435; Izvestiia, January 26, 1924. Krupskaya vehemently objected to the Lenin mummification plan and the religious-like veneration. Pravda, January 30, 1924. One scholar has pointed out that when Egyptian king Tut’s mummy had been discovered at an unplundered site at Luxor in 1922, to worldwide fascination, it received ample coverage in the Soviet press. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 179–80. Soviet Russia in 1924 happened to have no crematoria.

84. Religious imagery had already made its appearance when Lenin had been shot in 1918 and Lev Sosnovsky, then editor of the newspaper for peasant activists (Bednota), had described Lenin as a Christ figure, asserting that “Lenin cannot be killed . . . because Lenin is the rising of the oppressed.” Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! 83–4 (citing L. Sosnovskii, “K pokousheniiu na tov. Lenina,” Petrogradskaia Pravda, September 1, 1918).

85. Kotyrev, Mavzolei V. I. Lenina.

86. Nikolai Gorbunov, the head of the government’s business directorate, had pinned his own Order of the Red Banner to the dead Lenin’s jacket on January 22. Lenin was awarded his own such medal the next day. But Gorbunov’s seems to have stayed on Lenin until perhaps 1943. It is likely Gorbunov received the one awarded to Lenin.

87. Krasin, “Arkhitekturnye uvekovechenie Lenina,” Izvestiia, February 3, 1924; Ennker, Die Anfänge des Leninkults, 234. See also Ennker, “The Origins and Intentions of the Lenin Cult,” 118–28.

88. Izvestiia, August 2, 1924.

89. New York Times, August 4, 1924.

90. “So long as he is there, so long as he does not change, Communism is safe and the new Russia will prosper,” noted the visiting American writer Theodore Dreiser. “But—whisper—if he fades or is destroyed, ah, then comes the great, sad change—the end of his kindly dream.” Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia, 31.

91. Pravda, July 8, 1923. The Lenin Museum would attract 37,000 visitors during the first seven months of 1925, most on organized tours. Arosev, “Institut V. I. Lenina”; Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 125; Holmes and Burgess, “Scholarly Voice or Political Echo?,” 387.

92. Annenkov, “Vospominaniia o Lenine,” 144. The museum had received Lenin’s brain, as well as his heart, on January 25, 1924.

93. The professor tried to explain the Lenin “cult” by its function of inspiring the party’s “active element to greater activity,” for whom “Lenin is the guide—to be studied and followed, his precepts to be carried out faithfully.” For the broad masses, Lenin is portrayed with a suggestion of the supernatural, a “sun breaking through clouds with a bright ray of light.” Harper, Civic Training, 39–40.

94. Izvestiia, August 22, 1923, and September 28, 1927; Pravda, October 27, 1923.

95. Kamenev would be removed as director in January 1927.

96. Izvestiia, January 21, 1927; Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi akademii, 1928, no. 27: at 298; Zapiski Instituta Lenina, 1927, no. 1: 176; “IML k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia V. I. Lenina.” Kommunist, 1968, no. 17. There were other initiatives: one was the formation of a project to write the history of the party (known in Russian as Istpart), which derived from Lenin’s conviction that the October coup had vindicated his theory of party organization; another was the conversion of the Marx cabinet, dedicated to the collection and study of documents about and by Marx and Engels, into the Marx-Engels Institute. Both initiatives eventually merged in the Lenin Institute. PSS, XLI: 176 (Mikhail Pokrovsky and Vladimir Adoratsky); Komarov, “Sozdanie i deietel’nost’ Istparta 1920–1928 gg.”; Volin, “Istpart i Sovetskaia istoricheskaia nauka,” 189–206; Burgess, “The Istpart Commission”; Komarov, “K istorii instituta Lenina,” 181–91; Ivanova, “Institut Marksa-Engelsa-Lenina,” IV: 214–23.

97. Lenin, Sobranie sochinenii; Lenin, Sobranie sochinenii, 2nd and 3rd eds. In 1925, 6,296 publications of Leniniana would be catalogued. Karpovich, “Russian Revolution of 1917,” 258.

98. Otchet 15 s”ezdu partii, 71.

99. Velikanova, Making of an Idol, 110–1 (citing RGASPI, f. 12, op. 2, d. 41, l. 1–1ob). On February 19, 1925, the politburo asked Krupskaya to write Lenin’s biography. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 489, l. 4.

100. Pravda, February 12, 1924.

101. Gor’kii, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, 10. Victor Chernov, the emigre former Socialist Revolutionary Party head, in a shrewd portrait that appeared in the American journal Foreign Affairs, concluded that Lenin had been a “lifelong schismatic” yet lived in mortal fear of a schism in the party. “Lenin’s intellect was energetic but cold . . . an ironic, sarcastic and cynical intellect,” he added. “Nothing to him was worse than sentimentality, a name he was ready to apply to all moral and ethical considerations in politics.” Chernov, “Lenin.” Bertrand Russell, who had gone to Russia as a Communist but developed doubts, noted of Lenin, “I think if I had met him without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox.” Russell, Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 42.

102. Chuev, Sto sorok, 184.

103. Soldatskaia pravda, May 1917, reprinted in Zapiski instituta lenina, 1927, no. 2: 24–33; Pravda, April 16, 1927, reprinted in PSS, XXXII: 21; Savitskaia, “Razrabotka nauchnoi biografii V. I. Lenina,” 4. By the summer of 1924, the combination Marxism-Leninism was appearing in many documents. Shcherbakov, “A kratkii kurs blagoslovil,” Pravda, September 13, 1990. See also Nikolai Babakhan [Sisak Babakhanyan], “Marksizim i leninizm,” Pravda, April 6, 1923.

104. The Sverdlovka, as it was known, at Miusskaya Square, no. 6, in the former Shanyavsky Moscow City People’s University, was best equipped of all institutions of higher education in Soviet Russia. Reznik, Trotzkizm i Levaia oppozitsiia, 38; Desiat’ let Kommunisticheskogo universiteta; Ovsiannikov, Miusskaia ploshchad’, 6; Harper, Civic Training, 285. Originally, the Communist University had managed to get hold of the premises of the former Moscow merchant association club at Malaya Dmitrovka, 6, executed in the art moderne style (down to the lights, furniture, and drapes), but in 1923 it opened a cinema and a jazz hall.

105. Sochineniia, VI: 52–64, 69–188. Sverdlov Communist University eventually gave way to the Higher Party School (established in 1939).

106. Mikoian, Tak bylo, 370. Back at the 7th Party Congress in 1918, when Stalin was nominated to serve on the commission to write a new party program, some people objected that he had no theoretical writings, but the session chairman pointed to Stalin’s work on the national question and that quieted the objection. VII ekstrennyi s”ezd RKP (b), mart 1918 goda, 163.

107. On December 30, 1926, in another private letter, Stalin refused to allow Ksenofontov to cite the 1924 letter. Sochineniia, IX: 152.

108. Uchenie Lenina o revoliutsii. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 821–2.

109. Ksenofontov, Lenin i imperialisticheskaia voina 1914–1918 gg., 16. Filipp Ksenofontov would become editor of the newspaper Volga commune in 1929, but was soon removed as a rightist; in the fall of 1930 he left for Moscow’s Institute of Red Professoriate. He would be arrested on March 16, 1937, in Samara, and accused of Trotskyism. The Kuibyshev province GB Lieutenant Detkin wrote: “In 1929, serving as editor of the regional newspaper, he grouped around himself a group of Trotskyites from among the workers of the newspaper.” Ksenofontov refused to confess, was sent to Moscow, but in Lefortovo still refused to confess. Officially, he died January 1, 1938, during interrogation.

110. Stalin, O Lenine; Sochineniia, VI: 69–71.

111. Trotskii, O Lenine. See also Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 356.

112. Kransaia nov’, 1924, no. 4: 341–3.

113. Za leninizm, 186.

114. Leningradskaia Pravda, June 13, 1924; Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 14.

115. Zinoviev, “O zhizni i deiatel’nosti V. I. Lenina,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 7: at 178. Ivan Maisky, who was then working in the former capital, wrote to Molotov (March 10, 1924), that “Comrade Zinoviev does not spend a lot of time in Leningrad.” But Zinoviev was there on April 16, 1924, the anniversary (under the new calendar) of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station, laying of the foundation stone for a Lenin monument. Pravda, April 18, 1924; U Velikoi mogily, 517–9.

116. Zinoviev also wrote: “Lenin is the Genius of Leninism.” Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, 281 (citing RGASPI, f. 324, d. 246, l. 2; d. 267, l. 4–7), 285 (citing RGASPI, f. 324, op. 1, d. 490, l. 2). Zinoviev’s principal Lenin work was his report to the 13th Party Congress, which he published as a book: Po puti Il’icha (Leningrad: Priboi, 1924). See also Zinov’ev, Leninizm.

117. Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power, 170–1.

118. The Institute of Red Professors had been founded in 1921, and by 1924 would produce its first graduating class, 51 of the 105 who had started (that year the original three-year course of study was extended to four); more than two thirds were white collar, only a tiny handful were workers. It suffered from a shortage of teachers. Initially it was located inside a former nunnery, the Passion (Strastnoi), which had been seized by the war commissariat in 1919 but retaken by the nuns in 1921–2 (who lived alongside the students); soon the institute moved to Ostozhenka, 51, the former Katkov Lycee. By 1929, 19 of the 236 graduates were workers. In April 1928 the nunnery would be given over to the Central Archives; the structure would be torn down in 1937 and replaced by a Pushkin statue and later a cinema. The Red Professors at Ostozhenka, meanwhile, would acquire dormitories in 1932.

119. Slepkov questioned Stalin’s presentation of Lenin’s conception of NEP (in the chapter “The Peasant Question”), arguing that the worker-peasant “alliance” had not been an afterthought, for in 1917 “the peasantry was compelled, if it wanted land, to support the proletariat in its struggle against capital.” Bol’shevik, 1924, no. 9 (August 5): 102–5. The next month, Slepkov became a co-editor of Bolshevik, under the patronage of editor in chief Bukharin. Slepkov was also named to Pravda’s editorial board, under Bukharin as well, in 1924. In 1925, he would concurrently become editor of Komsolskaya pravda.

120. Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 332–3.

121. XIII s”ezd VKP (b), mai 1924 g., 749–66.

122. Vera Dridzo, Krupskaya’s long-time, faithful secretary, recalled that negotiations between Krupskaya and the triumvirate “lasted three and a half months, and only on the eve of the congress itself, May 18,” did she “turn over the Testament, agreeing to its being read to the delegations of the congress.” Dridzo, “O Krupskoi,” 105. Evidently unable to win over the ruling triumvirate, she tried to force their hand: on May 18, the very eve of the congress, she sent a handwritten letter to the Central Committee. Sakharov points out that the note indicates Krupskaya had already handed the documents to Zinoviev a year before, and that this document, known as a “protocol of handing over,” did not resemble a typical such Central Committee document of that time, and instead concerned publication or distribution, not handing over. Sakharov, Politicheskoe zaveshchanie, 535; PSS, XLV: 594.

123. Trotsky later asserted that Stalin opened the package in the presence of his aides, Lev Mekhlis and Sergei Syrtsov, and cursed Lenin, but it is not clear how Trotsky could have learned this, if it happened. Trotsky, Stalin, 37.

124. Tomsky, Bukharin, Molotov, and Kuibyshev (Central Control Commission presidium) concurred. Trotsky’s summary labeled it a meeting of the politburo and Central Control Commission presidium, but did not indicate when the discussion took place. Fel’shtinskii, Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia v SSSR, I: 56.

125. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 129, l. 1–3. Stalin had the secretariat direct the package from Krupskaya to a special “Central Committee commission” consisting of himself, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Kalinin, and Alexander Smirnov (agriculture commissar), which resolved “to bring the documents to the attention of the Central Committee plenum with the suggestion to bring them to the attention of the party congress.” Sakharov, Politicheskoe zaveshchanie, 579 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 246 IV vyp., s. 65).

126. The German writer Emil Ludwig, citing a conversation with Radek, falsely asserted that Stalin read aloud the Testament, an assertion that Trotsky repudiated. Trotsky falsely claimed that the opposition first learned of the Testament now, on May 22, at the council of elders of the congress delegations. Trotsky, “On the Testament of Lenin [December 31, 1932],” in Trotsky, Suppressed Testament, 11–3; Sakharov, Politicheskoe zaveshchanie, 577–8; Trotskii, “Zaveshchanie Lenina,” 267–8.

127. Trotskii, “Zaveshchanie Lenina” [Gorizont], 38–41.

128. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 398–9, 455–7, 506; Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 4: 192–207; Chuev, Sto sorok, 183.

129. Bazhanov has Zinoviev proposing that Stalin be reelected general secretary, and Trotsky failing to object, and some voting against and a few abstaining (Bazhanov claims he was charged with counting the hands), but this seems garbled: no outgoing Central Committee before a Party Congress had the right to vote on the reelection of the general secretary; this would only be done after the Party Congress by the Central Committee newly elected at the congress. It is possible that Bazhanov has merged the post-congress and pre-congress Central Committee meetings. Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 75–6; Bazhanov, Vospominaniia [1980], 106–7; Bazhanov, Avec Staline dans le Kremlin, 43–5; Bazhanov, Stalin, 32–4. Other accounts include Eastman, Since Lenin Died, 28–31; Wolfe, Khrushchev and Stalin’s Ghost, 258–9; McNeal, Stalin, 110; and Stalin, “Trotskistkaia oppozitsiia prezhde i teper’: rech’ na zasedanii ob”edinennogo plenuma TsK I TsKKK VKP (b) 23 oktiabria 1927 g.,” in Sochineniia, X: 172–205. The Stalin loyalist Yaroslavsky recalled that “when these few pages written by Lenin were read to the members of the Central Committee the reaction was one of incomprehension and alarm.”

130. The Young Pioneers, formed in 1922, had just 161,000 members Union-wide; on Red Square that day, they recited a new, modified oath “to unswervingly observe the laws and customs of the young pioneers and the commandments of Ilich.” XIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1924], 629–33. See also Balashov and Nelepin, VLKSM za 10 let v tsifrakh, 34–7.

131. XIII s”ezd RKP (b), 106–7. He had it published as a pamphlet: Zinov’vev, Po puti Il’icha: politicheskii otchet TsK XIII-mu s”ezdu RKP (b) (Leningrad: Priboi, 1924). Stalin, having allowed Zinoviev to serve as the attack dog, followed with a report on organizational work and appeared reasonable. (Later in the proceedings, Stalin would let loose on Trotsky.) Sochineniia, VI: 220–23; XIII s”ezd RKP (b), 259–67.

132. XIII s”ezd RKP (b) 153–68 (at 158, 165–6); XIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1924], 372; XIII s” ezd RKP (b) [1963], 167.

133. Sochineniia, VI: 227; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 127–8.

134. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, July 24, 1924: 13. Stalin’s people attacked, with Nikolai Uglanov stating that at the Sormovo Engineering Works, the workers had voted for “the Central Committee,” while the engineers—holdovers of the old regime—had voted for Trotsky, thereby indicating an alien class basis to the opposition; Molotov repeated this assertion that the opposition was rooted in class aliens. XIII s”ezd RKP (b), 169, 523.

135. Sakharov, Politicheskoe zaveshchanie, 584–5 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 246 IV vyp., 62, 64: a letter from Stalin to the politburo, July 17, 1925, demanding that Trotsky repudiate the Max Eastman book of 1925, which Trotsky would do).

136. Komsomol’skaia Pravda, June 11, 1988. Milchakov, who spent sixteen years in Norilsk and Magadan camps, died in 1973.

137. Sakharov, Politicheskoe zaveshchanie, 582–3 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op.1, d. 57, l. 184–6). Khrushchev, in his secret speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, confirmed that Lenin’s “Testament” “was made known to the delegates at the 13th Party Congress who discussed the question of transferring Stalin from the position of Secretary General.” Khrushchev, “Secret Speech,” 7.

138. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 130.

139. The unemployed had jumped from 160,000 as of January 1922 to 1.24 million by January 1924, according to registrations at the labor exchanges run by the labor commissariat. Rogachevskaia, Likvidatsiia bezrabotitsy, 76–7.

140. APRF, f. 3, op. 27, d. 13, l. 53–4, in Istochnik, 1995, no. 3: 132–3.

141. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 16, d. 175, l. 165; Rozhkov, “Internatsional durakov,” 61–6.

142. Half the members of the Italian fascist party in 1922 did not even renew their membership. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, 152.

143. Italy’s government resigned in protest, instead of forming a broad anti-fascist coalition, which would have had to include reformist Socialists, instead of including the fascists in government, on the condition that they renounce their illegal, extra-parliamentary behavior. The latter, however, could only have been achieved by splitting the fascist movement and co-opting its more politically responsible elements, which had not been done. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 79.

144. “All authority depends on confidence,” the great historian of Italian fascism Adrian Lyttelton explained, “and the King, rational to a fault and with a low opinion of man in general, had none. He gave way . . . the only man who could do anything was convinced of his impotence.” Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 93. The king additionally was worried about palace intrigues that placed hopes in his more imposing cousin.

145. Lyttelton, Seizure of Power, 85 (Michele Bianchi).

146. Berezin, Making the Fascist Self, 81.

147. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 263–5 (RGASPI, f. 5, op. 2, d. 326, l. 20–2). Bukharin, in commentary that went little remarked, also marveled at Italian fascism. “It is characteristic of fascist methods of combat that they, more than any other party, have adopted and applied in practice the experiences of the Russian revolution,” he told the delegates to the 12th Party Congress. “If one regards them from the formal point of view, that is, from the point of view of the technique of their political methods, then one discovers in them a complete application of Bolshevik tactics, and especially those of Russian Bolshevism, in the sense of rapid concentration of forces, energetic action of a tightly structured military organization, in the sense of a particular system of committing one’s forces, personnel-assignment-organs, mobilization, etc., and the pitiless destruction of the enemy, whenever this is necessary and demanded by the circumstances.” XII s”ezd RKP (b), 273–4.

148. Pravda, October 31, November 1, 1922.

149. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 253.

150. V vsemirnyi kongress, I: 156–7, 175–92; Diskussiia 1923 goda, 262 (Rykov-sponsored Comintern resolution, June 27, 1924).

151. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 141–51.

152. Boersner, The Bolsheviks, 152 (citing Protokoll des Fuenften Kongresses der Kommunistischen International, 2 vols. [Hamburg: Carl Hoym, 1924], I: 237).

153. Izvestiia, June 19, 1924; New York Times, June 20, 1924; Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, 193–4. Delegates to the 13th Party Congress back in May 1924 had also been given a glimpse of Lenin’s body in a pre-completion mausoleum preview. Pravda, June 13, 1924; Zbarskii, Mavzolei Lenina, 41.

154. Firsov, “Nekotorye voprosy istorii Kominterna,” 89; Claudin, Communist Movement, 152–3. Stalin also wrote an enigmatic note: “The defeat of the revolution in Germany is a step towards war with Russia.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 25, l. 101 (no date). Stalin, along with Zinoviev, went further, meeting secretly with the German ultraleftists Arkadi Maslow and Ruth Fischer, whose destructive actions had helped sabotage the coup effort. They were soon promoted, however, being the enemies of the Soviet triumvirate’s Left opposition enemies (Radek and Pyatakov).

155. Matteotti, Un anno di dominazione fascista.

156. Canali, Il delitto Matteotti, 218.

157. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, 197.

158. De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, I: 632–6.

159. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power, 242–3.

160. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, 212–3.

161. In dialogue with Frunze about a document that labeled Trotsky “the Leader [vozhd’] of the Red Army,” Stalin advised, “I think that it would be better if we spoke about a vozhd only in terms of the party,” meaning himself. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 298–9 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5254, l. 1: Dec. 10, 1924).

162. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, July 24, 1924: 11–2.

163. With Lenin sidelined, Chicherin perhaps imagined he would enjoy greater freedom of action, but soon enough, he would be complaining of Stalin’s “interference” in foreign affairs. Debo, “G. V. Chicherin,” 27–8; Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodtsvo, 295.

164. By 1924, Albania, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Norway, Sweden, Afghanistan, Iran, China, Mexico, and Turkey had also recognized the USSR, as well as the former tsarist territories Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland.

165. Anin, Radioelektronnyi shpionazh, 24.

166. On Stalin’s and Lenin’s views of foreign trade missions as spying operations, see Sochineniia, V: 117–20; and Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, III: 349–50.

167. Izvestiia, January 26, 1924.

168. Chicherin had Soviet diplomats duplicitously vow to China that the USSR “recognizes that Outer Mongolia is an integral part of the Republic of China and respects China’s sovereignty therein,” and promise to withdraw Soviet troops once a timetable had been agreed upon at an upcoming Sino-Soviet conference. Elleman, Diplomacy and Deception.

169. Ballis, “The Political Evolution of a Soviet Satellite”; Thomas T. Hammond, “The Communist Takeover of Outer Mongolia: Model for Eastern Europe,” in Hammond and Farrell, Anatomy of Communist Takeovers; Barany, “Soviet Takeover.”

170. The German warned that “the Russians will take up the old tsarist imperialist policy against China.” Quoted in Elleman, “Secret Sino-Soviet Negotiations,” 546. See also Tang, Russian and Soviet Policy, 388–9; and Rupen, How Mongolia Is Really Ruled, 44.

171. Murphy, Soviet Mongolia, 89–90.

172. The action was known in an extremely narrow circle: most officials in Stalin’s apparatus were kept in the dark. Balashov and Markhashov, “Staraia ploshchad’, 4 (20-e gody),” no. 6: 187.

173. Zinoviev had evidently concluded from the earlier failures that strikes and mass public protests had only served to put the authorities on alert, and so this time, the Comintern plotted a lightning coup, which would presumably inspire a workers’ revolt of support for an Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Fischer, Stalin and German Communism, 463; Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, 64–5; Leonard, Secret Soldiers, 34–7.

174. Saar, Le 1-er décembre 1924; Kuusinen, Rings of Destiny, 66.

175. “The Reval Uprising,” in Neuberg [false name], Armed Insurrection, 61–80.

176. Pil’skii, “Pervoe dekabrai,” I: 218–9.

177. Rei, Drama of the Baltic Peoples, 180–6; Sunila, Vosstanie 1 dekabria 1924 goda. See also Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, 48.

178. Stalin, Na piutiakh k Oktiabriu; Sochineniia, VI: 348–401. Marx and Engels had categorically denied that revolution could succeed in just one country, but their European Social Democrat followers had revised this view. “The final victory of socialism in any one single state or several states” was possible, a Bavarian democratic socialist had allowed in 1878: von Vollmar, Der isolierte sozialistiche Staat, 4. Kautsky’s Erfurt Program of the German Social Democrats in 1891 had adopted a similar position: Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm, 115–6.

179. PSS, XLV: 309; van Ree, “Socialism in One Country,” which supersedes Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 49–50; and Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 368–94. Stalin, in a private letter, dated January 25, 1925, responding to a critical note sent to him about his “Socialism in One Country” article, asserted the rootedness of his views in Lenin’s writings, though the explicit case was weak.Sochineniia, VII: 16–8.

180. Tsakunov, V labirinte, 143–4 (citing RGASPI, f. 325, op. 1, d. 108, l.44–5).

181. McNeal, Stalin’s Works, 110–1; Sochineniia, VI: 61–2.

182. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” would become institutionalized in the Comintern. Claudin, Communist Movement, 76–7.

183. Kamenev, in his article against Trotskyism in November 1924, had cut to the nub, noting that Trotsky’s permanent revolution “put the workers’ government in Russia in exclusive and complete dependence on an immediate proletarian revolution in the West.” Kamenev, “Leninizm ili Trotkizm (Uroki partiinoi istorii),” Pravda, November 26, 1924, reprinted in Kamenev, Stat’i i rechi, 188–243 (at 229); Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 57.

184. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, June 20, 1925: 21.

185. Sochineniia, VI: 358–9.

186. Le Donne, Russian Empire and the World, 222.

187. On March 10, 1921, Maxim Litvinov, then Soviet ambassador to Estonia, had sent a note to the Estonian foreign minister protesting the formation of units on Estonian territory from the former Northwest Army for the defense of Kronstadt (“Thus criminal elements are intending to transform Estonia into a base for enemy actions against the Russian Republic”). The Estonian minister categorically denied their presence. Kronstadtskaia tragediiia, I: 348–9, 371. Soviet counterintelligence evidently detained more than one hundred Estonian agents and their collaborators in the five years from 1922, of whom thirty-five were executed or killed by Chekists in attempted capture. Tumshis and Papchinskii, 1937, bol’shaia chistka, 307–8.

188. Litvinov and Sidunov, Shpiony i diversanty, 39.

189. “A ring formed around the great USSR of small countries, where the bourgeois has held on thanks to the support of the predator nations of Western Europe,” Anatoly Lunacharsky, the enlightenment commissar, wrote of Estonia and other former tsarist territories, which he called “mere patches of land.” A. V. Lunacharskii, “Okrovavlennaia Estoniia” [1925], in Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinenii, II: 308.

190. In early 1925, Stalin had sent a ciphered telegram to Emanuel Kwiring, whom he had appointed party boss of Ukraine, noting of Trotsky, “It’s necessary to dismiss him from the Revolutionary Military Council,” but Stalin added, so far the majority considers it “not expedient to put Trotsky out of the politburo, but to issue a warning,” so that in the event of repeat violations of Central Committee policies, the politburo could “immediately remove him from the politburo and from work in the Central Committee.” “A minority,” according to Stalin, stood for “immediately driving him out of the politburo but retaining him in the Central Committee.” Stalin put himself in the ranks of this minority. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 7: 183.

191. Pravda, January 20, 1925. Officially, Trotsky was removed by resolution of the Soviet central executive committee on January 26, 1925. A translation of Trotsky’s long resignation letter appears in Eastman, Since Lenin Died, 155–8. Mikhail Lakoba, Nestor’s stepbrother, and the Abkhazia deputy interior minister, was put in Trotsky’s bodyguard detail. So was Shalva Tsereteli of the Georgian Cheka. Hoover Institution Archives, Lakoba papers, 1–47, 1–37.

192. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 484.

193. Józef Unszlicht, who had been moved from the Cheka to head war commissariat supply, became Frunze’s first deputy. Pravda, February 7, 1925.

194. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 162, l. 62; Sochineniia, VII: 11–4.

195. “Literatura po leninizmu,” Sputnik politrabotnika, 1925, no. 8–9: 24–40. See also “Pomoshch’ samoobrazovaniiu: kratkaia programma po izucheniiu leninizma po skheme Stalina,” Krasnyi boets, 1924, no. 13: 58. Stalin also wrote that day to the editorial board of Worker Newspaper calling Lenin “teacher” and summoning Soviet inhabitants to love and study the departed “leader” [vozhd]. Rabochaia gazeta, January 21, 1921, in Sochineniia, VII: 15.

196. Pravda, January 30, 1925, in Sochineniia, VII: 25–33 (at 27).

197. Some observers believe Chicherin evinced a strong pro-German bias, coupled with a forward policy against the British empire, meaning support for national independence struggles and Communist parties in the East, while Maxim Litvinov, Chicherin’s first deputy, plumped for a British-French orientation. Haslam, Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 17.

198. See the wrangling in 1923: DBFP, VIII: 280–306.

199. Izvestiia, August 10, 1924; Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, VII: 609–36; Adibekov, Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 48–9.

200. DVP SSSR, VII: 556–60, 560–1; Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 136–9.

201. A Belorussian group objected, sending an article to Pravda (“On the English Treaty”), dated August 18, 1924, citing Rakovski to the effect that “we are paying the old debts” just in order for Britain to offer a new loan. “And so, we have to liquidate almost all the effects of the October Revolution on the foreign bourgeoisie,” they wrote. “No one asked us about signing the treaty.” They called the treaty “a defeat of the revolution without a fight,” and called for a discussion by the whole party. Khromov, Po stranitsam, 216–7 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 290, l. 5–7). The article was signed by N. Makarov, P. Leblev, and A. Vasilev, from a settlement in Minsk province. Pravda sent the draft article to Stalin. On August 25, 1924, Stalin sent it to the Belorussian Central Committee (party boss Asatkin): “It is necessary to verify whether the named people are Communists, whether they signed the article, and if yes, what spurred its contents. No repressive measures should be taken against the authors” (l. 3). In other words, the positions of the British conservative Tories and the Belroussian leftist Communists coincided.

202. In fact the Soviets attached a high value to relations with Britain, as reflected in the envoys sent: Krasin, Rakovski, Dovgalevsky, and Maisky.

203. Hilger and Meyer, Incompatible Allies, 124.

204. Pro-Western Germans admitted that “the Rapallo agreement gave us a lot and afforded a certain weight in international politics, but the Bolsheviks used it more,” and they railed against Comintern agents. D’iakov and Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR, 60–4 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 98, l. 153–7: February 5, 1925).

205. The count had been instrumental in getting Karl Radek released from a German prison in 1919. Debo, Survival and Consolidation, 67–70.

206. Ulrich Brockdorff-Rantzau, Dokumente, 146ff.

207. Rosenbaum, Community of Fate; O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution, 95–6.

208. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, xxxiii (RGASPI, f. 2, op. 2, d. 515, l. 1).

209. Akhmatzian, “Voennoe sotrudnichestvo SSSR,” Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee [1994].

210. Dyck, “German-Soviet Relations,” 68 (citing Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, L337/L1oo564–68: Rantzau to Stresemann, March 9, 1925).

211. Dyck, “German-Soviet Relations,” 69 (citing Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, 5265/E317849–52: Rantzau to the Foreign Ministry, Dec. 1, 1924).

212. Carr, Socialism in One Country, III: 257.

213. Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 156–8.

214. “K mezhdunarodnomy polozheniiu i zadacham kompartii,” Pravda, March 22, 1925, in Sochineniia, VII: 52–9 (53).

215. By 1933, 450 German Luftwaffe pilots trained at Liptesk.

216. Gorlov, Sovershenno sekretno: al’ians Moskva-Berlin, 146.

217. Schroeder, “The Lights That Failed.” Beck, Dernier rapport. See also Salzmann, Great Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union; Johnson, Locarno Revisited; Wright, “Locarno: A Democratic Peace?”

218. Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 174. As Jacobson summarized elsewhere, “The security of France was Germany’s insecurity; the security of Germany was Poland’s insecurity.” Jacobson, “Is There a New International History of the 1920s?,” 620.

219. Pravda, October 20, 1925; Izvestiia, November 24, 1925 (Litvinov).

220. A top analyst for the Soviets, the Hungarian economist Jeno Varga (b. 1879), the finance minister in the shortlived Bela Kun Hungarian Soviet government, had been delivering long reports at Comintern congresses on the “crisis of capitalism,” but with Locarno, Varga, along with others, began to write of a “stabilization of capitalism.” In 1926 Varga would side with Stalin against the united opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev; Varga would soon become one of Stalin’s top foreign policy aides, heading the Institute of World Economy and World Politics, which had been created in 1925. He took over for Fyodor A. Rothstein, who had been born in tsarist Lithuania, and spent thirty years in Great Britain, but published Trotsky in the institute’s journal. Eran, The Mezhdunarodniki, 32; Duda, Jeno Varga, 37, 85, 97–8; Mommen, Stalin’s Economist.

221. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 23, l. 126–7: notes for the main political report to the 14th Party Congress, December 1925. For the report he delivered: Sochineniia, VII: 273–4.

222. Sochineniia, VII: 12–13, 28, 280.

223. White, “Early Soviet Historical Interpretations.” Sergei Kirov, reporting to the Baku party organization he headed in February 1925 on Trotsky’s Lessons of October, stated that “Here the matter is not some simple theoretical fistfight, rather here the matter in the literal sense, is the fate of our party and our revolution”—an admission, perhaps, of the exhaustion induced by the all-consuming polemics. Bakinskii rabochii, February 5, 1925.

224. Lenoe, “Agitation, Propaganda, and the ‘Stalinization’ of the Soviet Press,” 6.

225. Volkogonov, Trotsky, 207. An exhibition for the fifth anniversary of the Red Army in 1923 had devoted an entire room to Trotsky’s fabled civil war train, but the train, which made its last trip in 1922, was officially decommissioned in July 1924. Iubileinaia vystavka Krasnykh; Argenbright, “Documents from Trotsky’s Train.”

226. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 145. Isaac Zelensky had only just been appointed as one of the CC secretaries in June 1924; in August he was shipped out to Tashkent.

227. Uglanov would later remark that Zinoviev and Kamenev “carried on conversations with me from which I understood that they were trying in a roundabout way to fasten on me their disagreements with Stalin,” but he “declined their invitation.” XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 193. Back in Leningrad, when Uglanov and a number of young party officials clashed with Zinoviev, Lenin, along with Stalin and Molotov, had supported the youngsters. Merridale, Moscow Politics, 29 (citing Moskovskaia Pravda, February 12, 1989). See also Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 142; and Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 62.

228. Nadtocheev, “‘Triumvirat’ ili ‘semerka’?,” 61–82. The group was also known as the “leading collective.” Trotsky certainly suspected people were gathering behind his back. In 1926, Zinoviev, after Stalin had run roughshod over him, too, confessed the existence of the septet to Trotsky. But Trotsky did not speak out against the septet until 1927. Fel’shtinskii, Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia v SSSR, III: 87; Lars Lih, “Introduction,” in Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 5.

229. The Stalin-Bukharin alliance appears to have begun, at Stalin’s initiative, in late 1924: XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 136, 397–8, 459–60, 501; Cohen, Bukharin, 429, n1. On the breakdown of the triumvirate, see Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution, 235–7; Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: ch. 13.

230. Trotskii, Sochineniia, III/i: xi–lxvii; Uroki Oktiabria; “Lessons of October,” in Trotsky, The Essential Trotsky, 125, 157, 172, 175. See also Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 151ff; and Pavliuchenkov, Rossia nepovskaia, 97 (citing RGASPI, f. 325, op. 1, d. 361, l. 3). Already on October 16, 1924, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had convened at Kamenev’s apartment to plot how they would go after Trotsky, using Pravda and other forums, to put him on the back foot—but he ambushed them. Trotsky wrote “Lessons” as a long introduction to volume III of his Collected Works, which dealt with 1917 and was published out of chronological order. Twenty-one volumes would be published by 1927: more than for any other top leader, including Lenin. Trotskii, Sochineniia. See also Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’, December 10, 1924. Like Trotsky, Zinoviev had aides record his speeches for subsequent publication. Six volumes of Zinoviev’s “works” were published in 1924 (the preface to the first volume bore the date October 1923): Zinov’ev, Sobranie sochinenii, I, II, III, V, XV, XVI. Kamenev, who edited Lenin’s Collected Works, did not publish his own; he had tried to issue a three-volume edition in 1907 (a contract was signed but nothing came of it), but in 1924 issued three volumes (I, X, XII) of his Speeches. Publication was soon discontinued.

231. Pravda, November 2, 1924 (Bukharin), reprinted in Za leninizm, 9–25; Trotskizm i molodezh’, 41–7 (Zinoviev); Bol’shevik, 1925, no. 14 (November 5): 105–13 (Sokolnikov); Za leninizm, 28–30, 60–2 (Kamenev).

232. Pravda, November 26, 1924. See also Kamenev, Stat’i i rechi, I: 188–243; Za leninizm, 87–90, 94–5; and Stalin, Sochineniia, VI: 324–57. See also Zinoviev, Bol’shevizm ili trotzkizm?

233. Pravda, December 16, 1924, in Krupskaia, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 142–3; McNeal, Bride of the Revolution, 249. It is unclear who might have inserted these pointed words into Krupskaya’s bland text.

234. “Yenukidze” [January 8, 1938], in Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov [1991], 233–44 (at 241), [1984], 251–72 (at 264–6). On March 22, 1925, Alexander Myasnikyan, known as Myasnikov, the deputy chairman of the South Caucasus Council of People’s Commissars, and Solomon Mogilevsky, the head of the South Caucasus Cheka, were killed in the crash of a Junkers plane after takeoff near the Tiflis aerodrome. Two days later, a different plane arrived with friends of Trotsky’s, members of the central executive committee: the Soviet ambassador to France Rakovski and the people’s commissar of the post Smirnov, who claimed that Avel Yenukidze, a close Stalin associate and the secretary of the central executive committee, had provided them with the airplane. The plane that crashed had caught fire while still in the air; the cause of the fire was never established. Both pilots also died. Beria headed the first, inconclusive investigatory commission; a second and then a third commission headed by Karl Pauker from Moscow never got to the bottom of the incident. Trotsky, who suspected Georgian Mensheviks, went to Tiflis from Sukhum for the funeral. Trudovaia Abkhazia, March 25, 1925; Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1925, no. 6: 234–6; Biulleten’ oppozitsii, January 1939: 2–15.

235. Nazarov, Stalin i bor’ba za liderstvo, 108–9 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 179, l. 105).

236. Anfert’ev, Smerch, 233. Sokolnikov had met Galina (b. 1905) when she was seventeen—they shared an entrance to their living quarters at the Metropole (she lived one floor above him)—just before she went on to study at Moscow University’s medical faculty; he would come by in the evenings to play chess with her first husband, Leonid Serebryakov, whom she married in 1923 but left in 1925 to marry Sokolnikov. Galina Serebriakova, “Iz vospominanii,” in Anfert’ev, Smerch, 235.

237. Anfert’ev, Smerch, 233–4.

238. Woodruff, Money Unmade, 27; Sokol’nikov, Novaia finansovaia politika, 200–1.

239. Johnson and Temin, “The Macroeconomics of NEP,” 753. On the skepticism, see Barmine, One Who Survived, 125; and Serge, Ot revoliutsii k totalitarizmu, 177.

240. Bourne and Watt, British Documents on Foreign Affairs, VII: 376 (undated, date deduced from content).

241. Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, 1924, no. 8: 47–116, reprinted in Novaia ekonomika (1926), 52–126. A rejoinder, from Bukharin, was entitled “How to Wreck the Worker-Peasant Alliance” (Pravda, December 12, 1924). See also Carr, Socialism in One Country, I: 219–26.

242. L. A. Neretina, “Reorganizatsiia gosudarstvennoi promyshlennosti v 1921–25 godakh: prontsipy i tendentsii razvitiia,” in Davies, NEP, 75–87; Brovkin, Russia After Lenin, 179–81. Private trade was far more substantial than private industry, but was being harassed. Davies, Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 76–9.

243. Sokol’nikov, Gosudarstvennyi kapitalizm; Leninskii sbornik, XXIII: 192–3.

244. Zinoviev made a bid to seize agricultural policy with a call for the party to “turn its face to the countryside,” part of a gambit to enhance his stature as Lenin’s heir. Zinoviev’s cluelessness, however, was evident: as late as July 3, 1924, Leningrad pravda, his newspaper, had foreseen major grain exports. Pravda, July 30, 1924; Leningradskaia pravda, July 30, 1924; Zinov’ev, Litsom k derevne.

245. Izvestiia, September 3, 1924 (Rykov); Reswick, I Dreamt Revolution, 84–96. (Reswick was an American citizen, born in Russia, who was willing to be used by the Soviet regime in exchange for nonpareil access.)

246. Andrei Andreyev, a Central Committee secretary, traveled around Siberia, the Urals, and the North Caucasus, and got to the heart of the matter. “A bureaucratic [chinovnich’e] introduction of laws magnifies to the scary red-tape of our institutions—here is the main evil,” he stated. “Our soviet and party functionaries devote little attention to small concrete matters that the peasant raises, but spend most of their time spewing general answers. The peasant tiller asks a concrete question and he is subjected to verbiage about major state and international issues.” Gimpel’son, NEP, 384 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 112, d. 733, l. 170).

247. At a January 3, 1925, politburo session Stalin instructed those present to read the feuilleton of David Dallin, serialized in several issues of the emigre Menshevik newspaper, because “it has wonderful data on how the muzhik thinks about agricultural cooperatives and why he prefers them.” Stalin disagreed with Sokolnikov’s assertion that “consumer cooperatives were a leap into the unknown,” but he accepted his emphasis on the need to focus attention on agricultural cooperatives. Stalin argued that kulaks should be allowed to become members: “This would have a gigantic significance, because it would act as a stimulus for whole villages to join the cooperatives.” At the same time, he disagreed with the suggestion of Alexander Smirnov, the RSFSR agriculture commissar, to allow kulaks not only to join but also to run them. “In the management of society even one kulak would be dangerous,” Stalin stated. “The kulak is a smart person, experienced. In a management capacity, he can win over ten non-kulaks.” He recalled Lenin’s instruction about how after the end of the civil war kulaks could be allowed to stand for elections to soviets, but, five years after the Whites had been defeated on the battlefield, Stalin stated that “We have a long way to go to full liquidation of the civil war, and we shall not get there soon.” Vatlin, Stenogrammy zasedanii Politburo, I: 305–7, 314–5; Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 1925, no. 20, 21, 23, 24. See also Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 91 (citing Nashe otechestvo [Moscow: Terra, 1991], II: 197).

248. Male, Russian Peasant Organization.

249. Bol’shevik, 1924, no. 3–4: 23, 25 (Slepkov).

250. Gladkov, Sovetskoe narodnoe khoziaistvo, 73, 343.

251. Pravda, December 19, 1924; Carr, Socialism in One Country, 208–11.

252. Sochineniia, VI: 135, 243–4.

253. Pravda, June 4, 1930, in Sochineniia, VI: 321.

254. Pravda, January 30, 1925, in Sochineniia, VII: 25–33 (at 28).

255. XIV konferentsiia VKP (b).

256. See Stalin’s glowing remarks on NEP’s success, delivered in a report on the 14th party conference at the Moscow party organization: Pravda, May 12 and May 13, 1925, reprinted in Sochineniia, VII: 90–132 (at 128–9). See also Graziosi, “‘Building the First System.’”

257. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 23, l. 45. As it happened, when the commissariats were united (in 1926), Stalin would name Mikoyan as trade commissar.

258. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 4–5; Pittaluga, “The Genoa Conference.” It has been argued that the gold standard, and its effect of requiring price deflation, furnished an additional impetus to ideological proclivities for authoritarian interventionism in the economy to administer prices. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 233–4.

259. Vatlin, Stenogrammy zasedanii Politbiuro, I: 379 (November 2, 1925), I: 533 (December 12, 1925), II: 507 (January 3, 1927). Thanks to Professor Paul Gregory for pointing me toward Stalin’s demonstrations of insight on political economy at party forums.

260. Bukharin, “O novoi ekonomichheskoi politike i nashikh zadachakh,” 3–15.

261. Bukharin, to reinforce the message, wrote a pamphlet, Can We Build Socialism in One Country in the Absence of the Victory of the West-European Proletariat? (April 1925). In connection with the 14th party conference (April 27–29, 1925), Stalin edited Zinoviev’s draft theses, crossing out some passages, inserting others, and producing the following: “Leninism teaches that the final victory of socialism in the sense of a full guarantee against the restoration of bourgeois relations is possible only on a world scale (or in several decisive countries).” Further, Stalin added: “In general, the victory of socialism (not in the sense of final victory) is absolutely possible in one country.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 3359, l. 11, 6, 15. Zinoviev would launch a critique of the Stalin view in September 1925, with his book on Leninism, but his criticisms were incoherent (at one point he wrote that “if one asks us whether we can and must establish socialism in one country, we will reply that we can and must”). Van Ree, “Socialism in One Country,” 107. In September 1925, Jonava Vareikis, head of the press section in the party secretariat, published a pamphlet, Vozmozhna li pobeda sotsializma v odnoi strane? (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1925), praising Stalin’s December 1924 article as the only serious contribution to Leninism since the leader’s death!

262. Lih, “Zinoviev.” Lih is right that Carr was wrong when he wrote that after January 1924 (the 13th party conference) “it could be clearly seen that personalities rather than principles were at stake.” Carr, Interregnum, 340.

263. Black, “Zinoviev Re-Examined.”

264. Brovkin, Russia After Lenin, 160 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 16, d. 766, l. 253).

265. Sochineniia, VII: 153. The episode is handled in Carr, Socialism in One Country, I: 260, 284.

266. PSS, XLIII: 330, 333, 357, XLIV: 325, XLV: 372.

267. Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 79.

268. Pravda, May 13, 1925; Sochineniia, VII: 132.

269. Sochineniia, VII: 111, 123–4.

270. “So much anger and frustration can be felt in these letters that one is truly overwhelmed,” the editor of the journal New Village reported. “Never before have we had letters with so much resentment, hatred, and envy of the growing new agricultural households as now. A hungry and poor peasant is beginning to hate the prosperous toiling agriculturalists so much that he wants to bring ruin upon them.” Brovkin, Russia After Lenin, 159 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 87, svodka 45), 160.

271. Ehrenburg, Memoirs, 68.

272. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, I: 256 (citing U.S. State Department Decimal File, 316-164-205).

273. One American journalist, who called the NEP “an armed truce, at best,” wrote of the NEPmen as “a class existing by sufferance, despised, and insulted by the population and oppressed by the government. It became a curious burlesque on capitalism, self-conscious, shifty, intimidated, and ludicrous.” Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 84–5. In 1925, just the official taxes on NEPmen exceeded those on prewar traders. But officals levied additional “punitive” taxation for “luxury goods,” whose definition was conveniently inflatable. Trifonov, Ocherki istorii klassovoi bor’by, 84.

274. Bribe taking and other forms of corruption began early and persisted: Epikhin and Mozokhin, VChK-OGPU v borb’e s korruptsiei, 312 (TsA FSB, f. 66, op. 1, por. 36, l. 324), 315–17 (TSA FSB, f. 66, op. 1, po. 106, l. 64–64ob.), 334–35 (TSA FSB, f. 66, op. 1, d. 108, l. 83), 339 (APRF, f. 3, op. 58, op. 187, l. 16), 482–4 (TsA FSB, 2, op. 4, por. 32, l. 5–6); Plekhanov and Plekhanov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 442–3 (TsA FSB, f. 66, op. 1-T.D. 100v., l. 6).

275. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 202, n1.

276. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 69–84; Kosheleva, Pis’ma I. V. Stalina V. M. Molotovu, 13–26.

277. Bol’shevik, 1925, no. 16 [September]: 67–70. See also Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 74–7; Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 169–70, 247–8; Eastman, Love and Revolution, 442–55, 510–16.

278. Stalin would quote Trotsky: “all talk about [Lenin’s] ‘testament,’ allegedly suppressed or violated, is a malicious invention and is directed wholly against Lenin’s real will and the interests of the party he founded.” Sochineniia, X: 175.

279. Bol’shevik, 1925, no. 16 [September]: 67–70. Bolshevik claimed a print run of 40,000. Kamenev, Bukharin, and Yaroslavsky were three of the five members of the editorial board.

280. Valentinov, Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika [1991], 295.

281. Later, Trotsky would claim that his statement had been “forced on me by a majority of the politburo.” Biulleten’ oppozitsii, March 19, 1931 (letter of September 11, 1928).

282. Her repudiation raised the question of whether she had been involved in the Eastman incident, and was perhaps linked to Trotsky. Shvetsov, “Lev Trotskii i Maks Istmen,” 141–63.

283. Bol’shevik, 1925, no. 16: 71–3 (Krupskaya letter dated July 7, 1925).

284. Some have speculated that Rakovski had been the intermediary, while others have fingered Krupskaya, who is said to have given it to a member of the opposition who was going abroad in connection with a conference on international debts, and who handed it to the French leftist Boris Souvarine in Paris. McNeal, Bride of the Revolution, 258; Trotsky, The Real Situation in Russia, 320–3.

285. Frunze also exempted numerous categories of people from conscription, and blessed the Great War experience of national units. Berkhin, Voennaia reforma, 116–45; Erickson, Soviet High Command [2001], 164–213; Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship; Von Hagen, “The levee en masse,” 159–88. Much of the debate behind the reforms had been launched at a closed session at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. Sergei Gusev and Mikhail Frunze had called for reorganizing the Red Army in line with a new strategy of “a national defensive war,” while Trotsky had argued for a Red Army in line with a strategy of “exporting revolution.” Simonov, Voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks SSSR, 22.

286. Sokolov, Ot voenproma k VPK, 39–42 (citing RGAE, f. 2097, op. 1, d. 64, l. 8–24: report of March 2, 1924).

287. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 174. As of January 1, 1921, tsarist officers had made up 34 percent of the Red Army commanders at all levels, some 12,000 officers overall. In 1921, the Special Department initiated a Red Army census, gathering some 400,000 responses to a fifteen-question form, looking for those who had served in any of the White or national armies during the civil war. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 337 (citing TsA FSB, f. 1, op. 6, d. 670, 216–216ob.)

288. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 174; Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 342 (citing Arkhiv UFSB po Omskoi oblasti, f. 39, op. 3, d. 4, l. 77); Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 269 (citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 3, d. 674, l. 5); Antonov-Ovseenko, Stroitel’stvo Krasnoi armii, 31.

289. Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, II: 92–3.

290. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 102, citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 3, d. 773, l. 2 (A. Snesarev). Soviet foreign intelligence managed to recruit agents or representatives in twenty-seven countries. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 283; Kapchinskii, Gosbezopasnosti iznutri, 115 (citing GARF, f. 130, op. 5, d. 89, l. 565–6), 117 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 227, l. 57). Up to 2 million people had left Russia during the revolution and civil war, and perhaps 1.2 million were still abroad. A very large number of people who did not leave acquired relatives “abroad,” often in former pieces of the empire, with whom they corresponded, becoming a target of systematic perlustration. V zhernovakh revoliutsii; RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 331, l. 1–2: March 30, 1924).

291. There are two stories on the origins of the Trust that are not incompatible. By some accounts, the formation of an underground brotherhood of anti-Soviets was originally the work of Polish intelligence: in the spring of 1920, Wiktor Kijakowski-Steckiewicz (b. 1889), a secret member of the underground Polish Military Organization, was supposedly tasked with crossing over into the Soviet Union to organize an intelligence network in Petrograd, but he was arrested and, by some accounts, agreed to collaborate. (Later, after his wife left him, in despair he attempted suicide and ceased to work in counterintelligence. In 1932 he was transferred to foreign intelligence and posted to Mongolia, where he died during an uprising.) The other story centers on Alexander Yakushev, a transport commissariat official and staunch monarchist, whose name evidently emerged in intercepted mail. Instead of rolling up his handful of associates, the GPU persuaded him to cooperate and created the Monarchist Organization of Central Russia, code named “the Trust” (as in the corporation). See Voitsekhovskii, Trest.

292. Fleishman, V tiskakh provokatsii; Gilensen, “V poednike s pol’skoi ‘dvuikoi’ pobedili sovetskie ‘monarkhisty,’” 75; Gaspar’ian, Operatsiia Trest; Seregin, “Vyshii monarkhicheskii sovet i operatsiia ‘Trest,’” 67–72; and Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 595.

293. Minakov, Sovetskaia voennaia elita, 58 (citing GARF, f. 5853, op. 1, d. 1–24: a secret analysis from the Berlin emigration, February 15, 1922). A “revolutionary Bonaparte,” Wrangel’s representative in Berlin, General von Lampe, noted in his private diary of Tukhachevsky. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 280–1 (citing GARF, f. 5853, op. 1, d. 2, l. 422)”.

294. “Glavkoverkh Tukhachevskii,” Rul’, October 1922 (written by Prince F. Kasatkin-Rostovsky, under the pseudonym Antar); Minakov, Sovetskaia voennaia elita, 60–2.

295. Behind the journal stood B. Bortnovsky and G. Teodori, although the editor was M. I. Tmonov (then A. K. Kelchevsky, then V. Kolossovsky). Teodori worked to explain away Tukhachevsky’s defeat at Warsaw by pointing out that his flank had been exposed by the failure of the other Soviet army force to show (an implicit criticism of Stalin); Teodori made the same points in the Soviet press. See also the note by the pundit N. Korzhenevsky in the former Prague archive: Ioffe, “‘Trest’: legendy i fakty.”

296. During maneuvers in the Western Military District, the Special Department became suspicious that Tukhachevsky so desired revenge against Poland he might launch his own war: all his orders and actions were suddenly subject to meticulous investigation in the summer of 1923. After maneuvers had finished, on September 29, 1923, Dzierzynski, who was obsessed with any matters relating to Poland, had ordered that the central OGPU Special Department conduct a still more thorough investigation of Tukhachevsky. After familiarizing himself with the results, Dzierzynski in January 1924 wrote to Wiaczesław Mezynski ordering immediate action. “It is impossible to wait passively while ‘Smolensk [Western headquarters] dictates its will to the Kremlin.’” Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 285–7 (citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 1, d. 882, l. 829; op. 2, d. 27, l. 1; d. R-9000, t. 24, l. 165). At the 7th Belorussia Congress of Soviets in Minsk in 1925, Tukhachevsky stated that the Belorussian government “place the issue of war [with Poland] on the agenda.” VII Vsebelorusskii s”ezd sovetov, 231.

297. On October 8 (Thursday), the doctors decided he had to undergo an operation; the internal bleeding frightened Frunze, but he held back. Stalin sent Mikoyan to urge Frunze to undergo the operation, then went to Frunze himself. Frunze wrote to his wife Sofia in Yalta that “I remain in the hospital still. On Saturday [October 10, 1925] there will be a new consultation. I’m afraid surgery might somehow be refused [kak by ne otkazali v operatsii].” Kanonenko, “Kto ubil Mikhail Frunze” (citing RGVA, f. 32392, d. 142, l. 3–5).

298. Volkogonov garbled this letter: Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 127–8. The full text appears in Kanonenko, “Kto ubil Mikhaila Frunze.”

299. Pravda, October 29 and October 31, 1925; Pravda, November 1, 1925 (for the autopsy, conducted by A. I. Abrikosov, and signed by the entire medical team).

300. Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 100–2; Bazhanov, Vospominaniia [1990], 141; Gamburg, Tak eto bylo, 181–2.

301. Pravda, November 3, 1925.

302. A version of Frunze’s murder told by a Trotsky supporter to the writer Boris Pilnyak was soon fixed in a novella, “Tale of the Unextinguished Moon,” published in the journal Novyi mir; censors would confiscate the entire run. Ulam, Stalin, 260–1; Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 123–4. Frunze’s comrades demanded a special investigation, under the auspices of the Society of Old Bolsheviks. Health commissar Nikolai Semashko testified that the Central Committee medical commission had had no experts in ulcers and that before the commission had ruled Professor Rozanov had spoken with Stalin and Zinoviev. That may have been as far as the investigation went. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 156–8. Later, Stalin would also be accused of organizing the murder of Yefraim Sklyansky, Trotsky’s former first deputy at the war commissariat, who died in August 1925 in a boating accident on a lake in upstate New York, 350 miles north of Manhattan, on a visit to Isaiah Hoorgin, head of the Soviet-American Trading Co. (Amtorg). The two were waiting for their train to return to New York City and killing time in a canoe when a sudden strong wind overturned their small vessel. Neither was a champion rower and accompanying staff, in rowboats, proved too far off (or perhaps too inebriated) to rescue the pair. Hoorgin was thirty-eight, Sklyansky thirty-three. L. Trotskii, “Sklianskii pogib,” Pravda, August 29, 1925; New York Times, August 30, 1925; Time, September 14, 1925; Pravda, Sepetember 22, 1925. Bazhanov leveled the accusations of murder; the death took place after he had left Stalin’s employ: Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 65–6. The loss of Hoorgin was significant. Litvinov wrote to Stalin in late 1925, urging the appointment of “an authoritative comrade, who could immediately take up leadership of the political work, meet with official representatives of the American government for unofficial negotiations, make overtures, respond to similar overtures from the other side, and so on.” Gaiduk, “Sovetsko-Amerikanskie otnosheniia” (citing RGAE, f. 413, op. 2. d. 2040, l. 144–5). Pyotr Ziv, Hoorgin’s deputy, took over temporarily. Amtorg was soon given to Saul Bron.

303. Zal’kind, “O zabolevaniiakh partaktiva.” In November 1925, Leonid Krasin fell deathly ill; blood tests revealed acute anemia. Alexander Bogdanov, who had been experimenting with blood transfusions, recommended one and Krasin looked over the research himself, agreed, and seemed rejuvenated—word spread of a miracle cure, and Stalin supposedly summoned Bogdanov. Bogdanov’s visit to Stalin (late December 1925) was recorded in Bogdanov’s diary but not in Stalin’s office logbook; what they discussed remains unknown. Bogdanov would die in 1928 in an experiment gone awry: for yet another transfusion, he used the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis; it may have been an incompatible type. Krementsov, A Martian Stranded, 61 (citing GARF, f. A-482, op. 42, d. 590). Zalkind would die of a heart attack on the way home in 1936 at the age of forty-eight.

304. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 704, l. 27.

305. See Adibekov, Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b): povestki dnia zasedanii, I: 421; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 533, l. 10; Krementsov, A Martian Stranded, 66 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 701, l. 73–95); Izvestiia, February 28, 1926: 5. The Germans were Friedrich Krause and Otfried Forster.

306. Teplianikov, “Vnikaia vo vse,” 169–70. Orjonikidze was made a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic.

307. Voennye arkhivy Rossii, vyp. 1: 406.

308. Pravda, November 7, 1925.

309. Tukhachevsky wrote (January 31, 1926), “I already reported to you orally that the Red Army general staff works in abnormal conditions, which make productive work impossible, and prevents the staff from bearing the responsibility laid upon it.” Minakov, Stalin i ego marshal, 356–7.

310. Samuelson, Soviet Defense Industry Planning, 41.

311. Merridale, Moscow Politics, 260. Kamenev was making proposals for a 20 percent increase in worker pay, even though, as head of the Council of Labor and Defense (the executive body parallel to the government), he knew no such funds were available. He also proposed that workers share in factory profits (almost all factories were unprofitable). Moskovskie bol’sheviki, 128–9 (citing MPA, f. 3, op. 6, d. 28, l. 45; XIV Moskovskaia gubpartkonferentsiia: biulleten’ no. 1, 133).

312. Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 66. The intrigues escalated into several “private sessions” of the members: Dmitrenko, Bor’ba KPSS za edinstvo svoikh riadov, 211.

313. Politicheskii dnevnik, 238–41; Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 309–12 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 2, d. 28, l. 1–8); Kun, Bukharin, 159–61.

314. Blobaum, Feliks Dzierzynski, 231. On Dzierzynski’s defense of the OGPU, especially against Bukharin, see Koenker, Revelations, 18–9 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 345, l. 1–1ob, 2–2ob); and Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 297–98, 302–6. Economic functionaries viewed Dzierzynski as a “rightist” Bolshevik. Valentinov, Novaia ekonomicheskaia partiia, 23, 102–6; Izmozik, Glaza1, 131.

315. Khelemskii, “Soveshchanie v Sovnarkome o gosapparate [1923 g.],” 113–4, 118: RGAE, f. 3429, op. 6, d. 86, l. 12–31: 1923.

316. There were at least 1.85 million white-collar functionaries as of 1925. Gimpel’son, NEP, 386 (citing GARF, f. 374, op. 171, delo omitted, l. 14–15). If before the revolution there had been 600 specific titles for positions in the state, there were now more than 2,000. Tekhnika upravleniia, 1925, no. 1: 23–4.

317. “Even on Sundays, at the dacha outside the city,” recalled his wife Zofia Muszkat, “instead of relaxing he would sit with his papers, verify what was presented to him by the departments of the Supreme Council of the Economy, all the tables of data, go through whole mountains of figures.” Mozokhin and Gladkov, Menzhinskii, 174.

318. On January 9, 1924, Dzierzynski wrote to Stalin: “Personally. To comrade Stalin. The party discussion established that the situation, in terms of the party-political aspect, in the agencies entrusted to me by the Central Committee is unhealthy to the highest degree—in the GPU and in the commissariat of railways. That worries me, especially because I am so busy with Soviet work, that personally cannot devote sufficient time to party work to overcome the evil and even to expose it in timely manner.” Dzierzynski requested two secretaries (a line Stalin underscored in his text), one for the GPU and one for the railways, who would look after party affairs there, as well as other helpmates. Stalin agreed to these requests: he could implant his own people. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 726, l. 28–9.

319. RGASPI, f. 3, op. 1, d. 527, l. 1.

320. Khromov, Po stranitsam, 92 (no citation); Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 277.

321. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 35, l. 43, in Liubianka, Stalin i VChK, 108.

322. Pravda, December 10, 1925 (Bukharin’s speech); Rabochaia Moskva, December 13, 1925 (Kamenev’s speech); Pravda, December 20, 1925 (Moscow party committee answer to the Leningraders); Novaia oppozitsiia (Leningrad, 1926) (Leningraders’ pamphlet refuting the charges point by point). The Moscow party committee published an answer to the Leningraders, defending the NEP and socialism in one country, in Pravda on December 20, 1925. Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 133–43; Merridale, Moscow Politics. Carr was wrongly dismissive of the New opposition as being merely personal and careerist.

323. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 1926, no. 17–18: 5.

324. Brovkin, Russia After Lenin, 156 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 16, d. 533, l. 199).

325. Kommunist, 1989, no. 8: 82–4. He had written an earlier note for Stalin, dated December 6, 1925, about the initiative-crushing state apparatus, which he did not send. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 278.

326. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 278. In the immediate aftermath of Lenin’s death there had been rumors that Dzierzynski would take over the government (rumors generated, it seems, by fear: he was thought to be a heartless type). Velikanova, “Lenina v massovom soznanii,” 182.

327. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 99–130.

328. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 130–53. Like Bukharin, Stalin employed the now cliched dismissal of Zinoviev: “Hysteria, not a policy.” Sochineniia, VII: 378. “When there is a majority for Zinoviev, he is for iron discipline, for subordination,” Mikoyan observed. “When he has no majority . . . he is against [iron discipline].” XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 186.

329. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 158–66. Stalin rejected Krupskaya’s characterization of NEP as capitalism, adding, politely, “and may she pardon me.” At a later moment, however, he became more barbed: “and what precisely distinguishes comrade Krupskaya from any other responsible comrade?” Sochineniia, VII: 364–5, 383–4. Krupskaya did not officially quit the opposition until the 15th Congress in December 1927. She was never forced to recant publicly, and was not arrested. In 1927 she just delivered a speech to the effect that in 1925 it had been necessary to “verify there was enough socialism in our structure,” which she now said had proved to be the case, so she was no longer in the opposition. In fact she had ceased to identify with the opposition a year earlier. Pravda, November 5, 1927.

330. Molotov, at the congress, remarked upon Kamenev’s penchant for addressing issues always “by way of discussion,” as if he were getting ready to back away even as he was just beginning. XIV s”zed VKP (b), 484–5. On impressions of Kamenev’s “soft” character, see also Sukhanov, Zapiski, II: 243–5.

331. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 96, 246. Leninskii sbornik, V: 8–11.

332. XIV s”zed VKP (b), 18-31 dekabria 1925 g., 273–5; Daniels, Documentary History of Communism [1984], I: 183–6.

333. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 289–92.

334. Genis, “G. Ia. Sokolnikov,” 80 (citing the then-unpublished autobiography of G. I. Serebriakova); Galina Serebriakova, “Iz vospominanii,” in Anfert’ev, Smerch, 230–49 (at 241).

335. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 327–35.

336. Chigir, “Grigorii Iakovlevich Sokol’nikov,” 119–32 (citing RGASPI, f. 54, op. 1, d. 13, l. 76–117, esp. 111–2, 114–5). The official stenogram removed all sentences perceived to undermine Stalin’s authority and edited Sokolnikov’s text to enlarge the distance between him and Stalin; words and sometimes whole phrases were inserted in Sokolnikov’s mouth. Rykov taunted the opposition over its divisions: Krupskaya supported Zinoviev from the vantage point of the poor, while Sokolnikov supported them “from the Right” (advocacy for deeper market relations). Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 156.

337. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 397.

338. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 455–6.

339. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 508.

340. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 601.

341. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 570, 600–1.

342. Sochineniia, VII: 262; Carr, Socialism in One Country, III: 491; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, III/i: 3–5.

343. David Woodruff, “The Politburo on Gold, Industrialization, and the International Economy, 1925–1926,” in Gregory and Naimark, Lost Politburo Transcripts, 214–5.

344. Kuz’min, Istoricheskii opyt sovestkoi industrializatsii, 28–9. Stalin dismissed Sokolnikov’s designation of “state capitalism,” pointing to the state-owned railroads, foreign trade, and banking system. “Perhaps our Soviet apparatus also represents capitalism and not a proletarian type of state as Lenin constituted?” Stalin said mockingly. RGASPI, f. 54, op. 1, d. 13, l. 82; f. 558, op. 3, d. 33; XIV s”ezd, 14.

345. Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party, II: 258–60.

346. Pravda, December 29, 1925; XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 504–5. Much of Stalin’s speech was rendered far sharper in the published stenogram: RGASPI, f. 54, op. 1, d. 13, l. 60; f. 558, op. 3, d. 33; XIV s”ezd, 8. The passage on Bukharin’s blood was excised when the speech was reprinted. Sochineniia, VII: 363–91 (at 379–80).

347. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 710–1.

348. Harris, “Stalin as General Secretary: The Appointment Process and the Nature of Stalin’s Power.”

349. Mawdsley and White, Soviet Elite, 36–9.

350. Trotsky, My Life, 521–2. Serebryakov told the 14th Congress that “Zinoviev proposed an alliance with comrade Trotsky,” who “categorically rejected a bloc, however.” Trotsky—who was present—made no effort to repudiate this statement. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 455–6.

351. Stalin is said to have personally approached Leonid Serebryakov. When Serebryakov replied that they had no faction—factions being illegal—Stalin is said to have remarked, “Leonid, I summoned you for a serious conversation. Pass on my proposal to your ‘old man’ [starik]” (meaning Trotsky). Tsakunov, V labirinte, 169 (citing a conversation with I. Vrachev, who lived in the same building as Leonid Serebryakov).

352. Dewey, The Case of Leon Trotsky, 322–3; Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, II: 273; Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 248–9.

353. V. L. Genis, “Upriamyi narkom s Il’inki,” in Sokol’nikov, Novaia finansovaia politika, 5–38 (at 23); Genis, “G. Ia. Sokolnikov,” 80 (citing the then-unpublished autobiography of G. I. Serebriakova); Galina Serebriakova, “Iz vospominanii,” in Anfert’ev, Smerch, 230–49 (at 241).

354. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 680. See also XIV s”ezd, 323–36 (esp. 335–6).

355. Stalin may have also contemplated naming Kamenev agriculture commissar. During the politburo meeting, Zinoviev passed Kamenev a note: “You need to state (among everything else) that if Sokolnikov cannot be the finance commissar, that I [Kamenev] cannot be the agriculture commissar.” Zinoviev’s note also contained a hint about their need to bring Trotsky onto their side. But Zinoviev remained pessimistic based on the fact that Trotsky had remained silent over Moscow’s forced replacement of the editor of Leningrad pravda. Nazarov, Stalin i bor’ba za liderstvo, 138 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 210, l. 101–229; f. 323, op. 2, d. 29, l. 59–60, 73).

356. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistkoe rukovodstvo, 318 (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 25, d. 118, l. 2–3).

357. Nazarov, Stalin i bor’ba za liderstvo, 143–4 (citing RGASPI, f. 324, op. 1, d. 540, l. 37–38ob). On Molotov at these meetings, see also Grigorov, Povoroty sud’by i proizvol, 413–9; and Leningradskaia pravda, January 22, 1926.

358. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistkoe rukovodstvo, 319 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 2756, l. 1), 323–4. (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 25, d. 120, l. 1–2).

359. Grigorov, Povoroty sud’by i proizvol, 420. Kirov was officially confirmed as the new party boss at a Leningrad province conference, also attended by Dzierzynski, in February 1926. Leningradskaia pravda, February 12, 1926. The Leningrad second secretary, Nikolai Shvernik (b. 1888), a former telephone-factory worker, lacked comparable abilities. Stalin soon returned Shvernik to the central party apparatus.

360. Nazarov, Stalin i bor’ba za liderstvo, 150 (no citation).

361. Leonid Serebryakov wrote to Stalin on March 27, 1926, indicating a desire to cooperate with his proposal to afford more normal working conditions in the Central Committee, but wondering why the smearing of the 1923 opposition continued unabated in the press. “No one can believe that this is done without the authorization of the secretariat,” Serebryakov wrote. “I spoke with Trotsky, Pyatakov, and Radek. They expressed complete readiness to continue the conversations that Trotsky had both with Bukharin and with you and that you and I had.” Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistkoe rukovodstvo, 324–5 (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 1/s, d. 171, l. 1). Trotsky wrote to Serebryakov (April 2, 1926 ) that he found it odd that Stalin would use “a circuitous path” (through Serebryakov) to further discussions after having spoken directly to Trotsky already. Fel’shtinskii, Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia v SSSR, I: 188.

362. Trotsky, Stalin, 417; Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, II: 265–6. See also Fischer, Stalin and German Communism, 547–8 (citing a conversation with Zinoviev).

363. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 212; Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 267.

364. Trotsky’s ailments remain unclear, but on the advice of one doctor, his tonsils were extracted. Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, II: 266–8. Trotsky stayed at a private clinic, until the German police passed word of a possible assassination attempt by White emigres, and Trotsky relocated to the Soviet embassy (his supporter Krestinsky was in exile as ambassador). Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 265–6.

365. Biulleten’ oppozitsii, March 1937, no. 54–5: 11 (quoting Sergei Mrachkovsky).

366. Although Chagin is our only source for this anecdote, it has plausibility. Chagin added: “The unexpectedness of this declaration surprised me so that I have preserved it almost literally in my memory.” APRF, f. 3, op. 24, d. 493, l. 1–2 (Chagin letter to Khrushchev, March 14, 1956), Hoover Institution Archives, Volkogonov papers, container 23. Also there in Kirov’s apartment: N. P. Komarov, N. K. Antipov, and I. P. Zhukov. Chagin (1898–1967) had served as second secretary to Kirov in Azerbaijan.

367. Zakharov, Voennye aspekty (RGVA, f. 33988, op. 3, d. 78, l. 67–76); Akhtamzian, “Soviet-German Military Cooperation,” 100.

368. Akhtamzian, “Voennoe sotrudnichestvo,” 12.

369. Quoted in Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, 76.

370. Korbel, Poland Between East and West; Dyck, “German-Soviet Relations,” 81 (citing Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, K281/K097454–60: memorandum by Dirksen, Sept. 19, 1927).

371. Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, 13, 68–72; Kennan, Russia and the West, 208–23; Carr, Socialism in One Country, III: 438–9.

372. “I have continually striven since taking up my post here to create, through a close relationship with Soviet Russia, a counterweight against the West, in order not to be at the mercy—the very expression is repugnant to me—of the favor or disfavor of the Entente Powers,” German ambassador von Brockdorff-Rantzau wrote to President von Hindenburg after the April treaty. “Our relation to Soviet Russia . . . will always rest to a certain extent on bluff, i.e. it will be useful to create vis-à-vis our so-called former enemies the impression of greater intimacy with Russia than in fact exists.” Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, III/i: 36 (citing Brockdorff-Rantzau Nachlass, 9101/24038-224046).

373. Moggridge, The Return to Gold, 45–6.

374. McIlroy, Industrial Politics; Robertson, “A Narrative of the General Strike of 1926.”

375. That same day, Stalin passed word of the British coal miners’ strike to Rykov and Bukharin, requesting their views. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 34, l. 68.

376. Adibekov, Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 117–20, 123–7.

377. G. Zinov’ev, “Velikie sobytiia v Anglii,” Pravda, May 5, 1926; Carr, Socialism in One Country, III: 494. Zinoviev had already publicly elevated Britain in place of Germany as top candidate for proletarian revolution in advanced Europe.

378. Rothschild, Piłsudski’s Coup d’Etat, 20–1; Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the World Wars, 46, 54–5.

379. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistkoe rukovodstvo, 329–30 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 390, l. 3–4). Dzierzynski had written to Yagoda that Poland was likely to launch a war to seize Ukraine and Belorussia. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 364, l. 55.

380. Rothschild, Piłsudski’s Coup d’Etat, 47–64, 360–1 (citing Kurjer Poranny, May 27, 1926).

381. Wandycz, Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 48. At the same time, British officials encouraged Germany to recover Danzig and the Polish Corridor, proposing that Poland be compensated with part, or even all, of independent Lithuania. Von Riekhoff, German-Polish Relations, 248–55.

382. Karl Radek published close analyses in Pravda of the divisions in Poland’s army and society, mocking Piłsudski (“the last Mohican of Polish nationalism”), but proved unable to deny his triumph. Pravda, May 15, May 18, May 22, and June 2, 1926.

383. Pravda, May 16, 1926; Korbel, Poland Between East and West, 205.

384. Wandycz, August Zaleski, 35.

385. Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania.

386. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, VIII: 72–6; Lensen, Japanese Recognition of the USSR.

387. Anosov, Koreitsy v ussuriiskom krae, 7–8; Brianskii, Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1926 goda, VII: 8.

388. Gelb, “The Far-Eastern Koreans”; Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” 835 (citing GARF, f. 1235, op. 140, d. 141, l. 144).

389. Iazhborovskaia and Papsadanova, Rossiia i Pol’sha, 83.

390. “The most potent source of the dominant ethnic suspicion of the mobilized diaspora is the existence of its ‘homeland’ outside the dominant elite’s territorial control,” one scholar has noted, adding that “the dominant ethnic elite’s suspicions tend to be self-fulfilling.” Armstrong, “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas,” 400–2.

391. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 111–2.

392. Trotsky, Stalin, 215; Trotskii, Predannaia revoliutsiia [1937], 25–7.

393. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 90–1 (Igor Sats, Lunacharsky’s top aide).

394. One scholar put it, “one of the factors in Stalin’s eventual success was his ability to evoke an image of his relationship with Lenin that was more appealing to the rank-and-file members than were those of his opponents.” Gill, “Political Myth and Stalin’s Quest for Authority in the Party,” 99.

395. “Dve besedy s L. M. Kaganovichem,” 114. See also Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 114–7, 122.

CHAPTER 13: TRIUMPHANT DEBACLE

1. Cherniavskii, “Samootvod,” 68–69 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 335, l. 4–8: Rykov’s copy of the stenogram for correction). See also Murin, “Eshche raz ob otstavkakh I. Stalina,” 72–3.

2. This is where she would kill herself, in 1932. The structure still stands: Nadya’s former room is visible, from the theater ticket booth of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, looking right.

3. On Stalin’s early Kremlin apartments: Mikoian, Tak bylo, 351.

4. Lenin wrote to Kremlin officials three times between November 1921 and February 1922 to force the issue of a new apartment for Stalin. PSS, LIV: 44; Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, V: 622–3; Shturman, Mertvye khvataiut zhivykh, 23; Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 108. Belenky had been arrested along with Dzierzynski by left SRs in 1918. From 1919 to 1924, he was chief of Lenin’s bodyguard detail, and from 1921 until January 1928, also in charge of all bodyguards for leadership. Stalin had Belenky arrested in 1938 and shot in 1940.

5. “Comrade Stalin is a living person, not a museum rarity and himself does not want to live in a museum, refusing the residence suggested to him, just as last year Zinoviev declined that same residence,” Sedova wrote to Lenin. “Comrade Stalin would like to take over the apartment where Flakserman and Malkov currently reside.” Sakharov, Politicheskoe zaveshchanie, 150 (citing RGASPI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 1417, l. 1–1ob.); PSS, XLIV: 162. Trotsky imagined that Leonid Serebryakov, an apparatchik in the party secretariat (who was close to Trotsky), had ended the row by offering Stalin his own apartment. Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov [1991], 54–5. The outbuilding where Stalin had originally lived was eventually demolished for the post-WWII Palace of Congresses.

6. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 753, l. 3 (June 12, 1925).

7. Iosif Stalin v ob”iatiakh sem’i, 14 (letter written sometime after September 9, 1927). Artyom would return to live with his mother, Elizaveta, who had a room at Moscow’s National Hotel.

8. Shatunovskaia, Zhizn’ v Kremle, 188; Bazhanov, Vospominaniia [1983], 154.

9. Iosif Stalin v ob”iatiakh sem’i, 154 (APRF, f. 44, op. 1, d. 1, l. 417–9).

10. Allilueva, Dvadtsat’ pisem, 98; Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 103.

11. Iosif Stalin v ob”iatiiakh sem’i, 177.

12. Sergeev and Glushik, Besedy o Staline, 19–20.

13. Iosif Stalin v ob”iatiakh sem’i, 22 (APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 155, l. 5, now RGASPI f. 558, op. 11: Stalin to Nadya, April 9, 1928). See also Alliluev, Khronika odnoi sem’i, 179; and Allilueva, Dvadtsat’ pisem, 124.

14. The baby (Galina) was born February 7, 1929. After the baby’s death at eight months of age, the couple broke up; Zoya, still technically married to Yakov, moved in with Timon Kozyrev, an employee of the regular police (militsia). Yakov took some technical training and got an assembly job as an electrician. Komsomol’skaia Pravda, December 20, 2005.

15. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 34, l. 21.

16. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 103; Pis’ma Stalina Molotovu, 55. In 1926, Sochi-Matsesta became a special “state resort.” At that time it had six general state sanitoriums with 465 beds, but another twenty-one with 1,175 beds owned by individual state agencies exclusively for their personnel.

17. Mikoian, Tak bylo, 351–2.

18. Khromov, Po stranitsam, 10 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 69, l. 23–24ob.).

19. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 69, l. 5 (M. Gorbachev).

20. “Neopublikovannye materialy iz biografii tov. Stalina,” Antireligioznik.

21. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 590–1 (citing unpublished memoirs of K. K. Orjonikidze).

22. Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going?

23. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 108 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 3266, l. 1–2).

24. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, III/i: 18 (citing DBRFP, series I A, ii [1968], 724–9).

25. Gorodetsky, “The Soviet Union and Britain’s General Strike of May 1926.”

26. Vatlin, Stenogrammy zasedanii Politburo, I: 743–827 (at 743, 780: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 686, l. 146–51, 152–6); Nazarov, Stalin i bor’ba za liderstvo, 152 (citing RGASPI, f. 323, op. 2, d. 22, l. 47). See also Stalin’s instructions: Pis’ma Stalina Molotovu, 55–69.

27. Zaria vostoka, June 10, 1926; Sochineniia, VIII: 173–5.

28. Sochineniia, VIII: 168–72.

29. Vatlin, Stenogrammy zasedanii Politburo, II: 109.

30. Adibekova and Latsis, “V predchuv-stvii pereloma,” 85–6; Plekhanov and Plekhanov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 654–5 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 2, d. 257, l. 46–8); Gimpel’son, NEP, 382, 384.

31. RGASPI, f. 76, op. 2, d. 270. Back when Dzierzynski had written him on April 5, 1926, asking for a replacement first deputy to help him run the economy, complaining of his ever-widening differences with Pyatakov, Rykov responded that Pyatakov and Trotsky were conspiring with Kamenev and Zinoviev, and that if Pyatakov were freed of the burdens of administration he would have more time to conspire politically. It is unclear if Rykov was trying to avoid finding a replacement or if he was driven by precisely these calculations. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 326 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 2, d. 168, l. 11).

32. Dzierzynski concluded: “I too am exhausted from these contradictions.” Kommunist, 1989, no. 8: 87–8; Plekhanov and Plekhanov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 659–60 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 2, d. 270, l. 29–30: July 3, 1926). A red-brown transformation was an old song for him: on July 9, 1924, Dzierzynski had written to Stalin and other politburo members warning that if the situation did not improve, a dictator would appear who would bury the revolution “no matter what red feathers were affixed to his clothing.” Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 277 (citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 2, d. 746, l. 14, 17).

33. http://kremlin-9.rosvesty.ru/news/111/.

34. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1289, l. 6, 6ob.

35. Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn’, 113.

36. Valedinskii, “Organizm Stalina vpolne zdorovyi,” 68.

37. Merridale, Moscow Politics, 38. The meeting in question occurred on June 6, 1926, although there may have been more than one.

38. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 220.

39. Moskovskie bol’sheviki, 189–90 (citing MPA, f. 69, op. 1, d. 374, l. 107).

40. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 316–7 (citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 4, d. 145, l. 15: V. Vasilev).

41. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 100 (citing RGASPI, f. 613, op. 1, d. 46, l. 21–2).

42. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 115–7; Pis’ma Stalina Molotovu, 72–5. Stalin also predicted that “Trotsky will once again become loyal,” and advised he be treated leniently. Trotsky joined a written protest to the July 1926 plenum with Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya, and others (thirteen in all), but the statement was not included in the record. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 116, n1.

43. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, Khromov, po stranitsam, 1—1 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 69, l. 53).

44. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, III/i: 76–80.

45. F. E. Dzerzhinskii—predsedatel’, 663–4 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 364, l. 57–8, 70); Khromov, Po stranitsam, 326 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, delo unspecified, l. 56–56ob). On July 18, Dzierzynski wrote to Yagoda asking what had been done to strengthen counterintelligence against Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine, and Romania: F. E. Dzerzhinskii—predsedatel’, 668 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 364, l. 62).

46. Plekhanov and Plekhanov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 665 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 88, l. 37).

47. Shishkin, Vlast´, politika, ekonomika, 296.

48. F. E. Dzerzhinskii—predsedatel’, 670 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 4, d. 30, l. 50–1); Pravda, August 1, 1926; Dzerzhinskii, Izbrannye proizvedennia, II: 381–92; Dzerzhinskaia, V gody velikikh boev, 400–3.

49. Pravda, July 22, 1926, in Sochineniia, VIII: 192–3. See also Torgovo-promyshlennaia gazeta, August 1, 1926.

50. Trotskii, Stalin, II: 184. According to Trotsky, Stalin conveyed the impression that it was the letter of an ill person—the illness was speaking—and that Lenin was unduly influenced by women (baby), meaning Krupskaya and perhaps Fotiyeva and Volodicheva. Trotskii, Stalin, II: 253.

51. RGASPI, f. 17, op.2, d. 246, IV vyp., s. 62, 66–7 (Steongraficheskii otchet Ob”edinennogo plenuma TsK i TsKK VKP (b), 14–23 iuinia 1926 g.).

52. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 246, IV vyp., s. 105.

53. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 85–6.

54. RGASPI, f. 17, op.2, d. 246, IV vyp., s. 66.

55. Sakharov, Politicheskoe zaveshchanie, 599–601.

56. RGASPI, f. 17, op.2, d. 246, IV vyp., s. 66.

57. Pravda, July 25, 1926; KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh [1970], III: 332–54.

58. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 69, l. 89, 102, 105.

59. Orjonikidze refused: “I am no good for that kind of work, for I’m improbably explosive and rude, illiterate—in a word, I cannot write. . . . Don’t forget that I was given a reprimand that was published in the press for a physical altercation [mordoba],” the infamous slap back in early 1923. He recommended instead Rudzutaks, Kaganovich, or Andreyev. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 39, 323–4 (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 25, d. 120, l. 1–2: March 17, 1926); Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow, 23–4; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 34, l. 84, 87; Pis’ma Stalina Molotovu, 82–6.

60. Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow, 23–4. Stalin wrote to Molotov on August 30, 1926, instructing that the decree be reworded post facto; Molotov took responsibility, in a letter to “Dear Sergo” of September 9, 1926, and observed, “From my side, I hope that you will not remain in the North Caucasus for long and that you’ll transfer to Moscow in the not distant future.” Pis’ma Stalina Molotovu, 82–6; Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 336–7 (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 25, d. 151, l. 1–3: Sept. 9, 1926).

61. Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization, 128 (no citation); Polikarenko, O Felikse Edmundoviche Dzerzhinskom; “Nad grobom Dzerzhinskogo,” Pravda, July 23, 1926: 1. See also Pavlov, Chekisty, 12. The archives got a boost from Dzierzynski’s death, which induced the regime to compile his “personal files,” on the example of the Lenin archives. Dzierzynski’s personal file in the party archives (RGASPI, f. 76) contains more than 5,000 folders. Newly minted foreign intelligence operatives would swear their duty oaths on his birthday (September 11). Later, all Chekist salaries would be paid on the eleventh of every month. Leonov, Likholet’e, 354; Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, 30.

62. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, 42 (citing interview with defector Peter Deriabin, former member of the guards). On the religious aspects to the Dzierzynski cult, see Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization, 125–34.

63. Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security, 11–29; Hingley, The Russian Secret Police, 130. See also Mikoian, Feliks Dzerzhinskii.

64. Mozokhin and Gladkov, Menzhinskii, 353 (no citation). Sobol became a writer under the pen name Irina Guro. There was about Mezynski an interesting secret fact. Back in June–July 1915, behind a pseudonym, he had savaged Lenin in a Russian-language newspaper based in Paris (Our Echo). “Lenin considers himself not only the sole successor to the Russian throne, once it opens up, but the sole successor of the International,” Mezynski perspicaciously wrote, adding that “Lenin . . . is a political Jesuit, twisting Marxism over many years to his aims of the moment, ending up irredeemably confused. . . . The Leninists are not even a faction, but a clan of party gypsies, with stentorian voices and love of brandishing whips, they imagined an unchallengeable right to be the drivers of the working class.” Quite possibly Stalin, through denunciations, learned Mezynski had written this pseudonymous tirade, and kept a copy, to hold over Mezynski. S. D., “Lenin,” Nashe ekho, June 19, 1915: 6–7, July 15: 6–7. Our Echo was published from April to August 1915. Scholars have often misquoted and misdated the article: see, for example, Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, 110. Mezynski would become a member of the Central Committee in December 1927; he was never elevated to the politburo.

65. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 246, IV vyp., s. 32.

66. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 246, IV vyp., s. 105.

67. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 12: 194–6. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 4: 78. For Trotsky’s letter and notebook on her, whom he labeled “an old spinster,” see Trotskii, Dnevniki i pis’ma [1990], 76–7.

68. Ul’ianova, “Ob otnoshenii V. I. Lenina k I. V. Stalinu,” 198–9 (RGASPI, f. 14, op. 1, d. 398, l. 1–8).

69. Trotsky has Krupskaya privately remarking among friends in 1926, “If Volodya were alive today, he would now be in prison.” Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, II: 219; Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov [1984], 56.

70. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 246, IV vyp., s. 64. The Testament would be published in a special bulletin of the 15th Party Congress and, after Stalin’s death, in a new edition of the regular proceedings. XV s”ezd VKP (b), II; 1477–8. Thousands would be arrested for trying to spread the Testament, including, in 1929, twenty-two-year-old Moscow student Varlam Shalamov.

71. Moskovskie bol’sheviki, 174–5.

72. Kuusinen, Rings of Destiny, 78. Stalin, however, could be an impatient taskmaster. Upon receiving Kuusinen’s draft of Comintern text on the autonomy of Alsace-Lorraine, a territory France had seized back from Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, Stalin wrote sternly on August 14, 1926, “You need to insert a paragraph . . . about how the struggle for autonomy does not signify the weakening of ties of the Alsace-Lorraine proletariat with the proletariat of France but, on the contrary, significantly strengthens those ties.” Stalin also objected to the tone of the text, which he found condescending, and suggested it be pared down to eliminate repetitions. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 755, l. 114, 118–20.

73. Pogerelskin, “Kamenev in Rome,” 102 (citing ACDS, Busta, 15 Fasciola: Kameneff, Mussolini: colloquio con Kameneff, February 3, 1927), 103.

74. Na prieme, 765. Davis carried letters of introduction from the U.S. Senate foreign affairs committee chairman William Borah. He also had Osinsky, who had visited the United States in 1924–25, write a letter to Stalin indicating that Davis would publish a report of the American delegation’s trip to the USSR, to be used in gaining U.S. recognition for the Soviet state. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 726, l. 95–95ob, 96. Davis prepared written questions in advance (l. 89–90).

75. Davis, “Stalin, New Leader.” Russian translation: RGASPI, f., 558, op. 11, d. 726, l. 119–32. Davis claimed he understood Stalin’s Russian; the session was translated by Tivel. The conversation was transcribed by the Soviet side. Stalin forbid publication of the Russian translation, claiming nine tenths of it departed from what he had said, disingenuously adding that it had not been recorded by anyone. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 726, l. 139. Davis does not appear in Stalin’s Kremlin logbook; the interview took place at Old Square office. Davis tried to see Stalin again the next year in Moscow but was rebuffed. See also Harper and Harper, The Russia I Believe In, 234–5; Hollander, Political Pilgrims, 162, 165.

76. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 726, l. 148.

77. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 726, l. 97–105; Khromov, Po stranitsam, 249–57.

78. On peasants: “We hope that the peasant will ultimately join with us. . . . We are creating such material conditions as will push them over to our side. The peasant is a practical man. What does he need? He must be supplied with manufactured goods at reasonable prices, he needs credits, he wants to feel that the Government considers his interests, helps him in time of famine, and is anxious to work with him and for him. . . . The peasants realize that we have protected them from the former landlords who would take back their land. We are giving them a cultural life they never had before.” Davis also claimed to have met Stalin’s mother in Tiflis in 1927.

79. Nolan, Visions of Modernity.

80. Henry Ford, “Mass Production,” Encyclopedia Britannica (13th ed.), XV: 38–41.

81. Na prieme, 759–66. Ivan Ksenofontov, the former head of the party business affairs department, died of stomach cancer, age forty-two, on March 23, 1926.

82. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 119–20; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 34, l. 98–101.

83. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 70, l. 20.

84. “Ob edeintsve partii,” in Fel’shtinskii, Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia v SSSR, II: 77–82 (at 79–80).

85. Trotsky, Stalin School of Falsification, 89–90 (a letter of Trotsky’s to the Central Committee, dated November 22, 1927).

86. On October 9, 1926, thirteen members of the joint opposition “active” gathered at the apartment of one of them, Ivan Bakayev, in Moscow’s Sokolniki ward, to hammer out a Trotsky-Zinoviev text about desisting from opposition activity. Moskovskie bol’sheviki, 205 (citing MPA, f. 85, op. 1, d. 318, l. 228).

87. Pravda, October 17, 1926.

88. Eastman wrote to Isaac Deutscher in 1956 that he had obtained the full Testament in a copy from Krupskaya via an emissary who had brought it to Boris Souvarine in Paris. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, II: 16, n2.

89. Murin, “Eshche raz ob otstavkakh I. Stalina,” 72–3 (APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 126, l. 69–9: misdated as 1924).

90. Sochineniia, VII: 233.

91. Pravda, October 24, 1926; KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, III: 360–1.

92. XV konferentsiia VKP (b), 531–3. See also Trotskii, Kommunistichekii internatsional posle Lenina, 109–10.

93. XV konferentsiia VKP (b), 564, 566.

94. “O sotsial-demokraticheskom uklone v nashei partii,” Pravda, November 5–6, 1926, in Sochineniia, VIII: 234–97 (at 276).

95. Serge, La vie et la mort, 180–1 (citing the recollections of Trotsky’s wife Natalya Sedova, who misdates the incident to 1927); Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 296–7; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, II: 16–17. See also RGASPI, f. 323, op. 2, d. 98, l. 304.

96. XV konferentsiia VKP (b), 535.

97. XV konferentsiia VKP (b), 578.

98. XV konferentsiia vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b), 599, 601. See also Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 305; and Cohen, Bukharin, 240.

99. Pravda, November 12, 1926, in Sochineniia, VIII: 298–356.

100. Simonov, “‘Strengthen the Defense of the Land of Soviets,’” 1357.

101. Golubev, Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku, 98–104; Samuelson, Soviet Defence Industry Planning, 40–4.

102. O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution, 131–2.

103. Golubev, Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku, 98–104.

104. Ken and Rupasov, Politbiuro TsK VKP (b), 484–5, 491, 497.

105. Wandycz, Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 50.

106. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 305: Zakovsky to Mezynski, January 31, 1927.

107. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 318 (citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 5, d. 32, l. 16. 19).

108. Neilson, Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse, 52–3.

109. Melville, Russian Face of Germany.

110. Pravda, December 16, 1926, in Eudin and Fisher, Soviet Union and the West, 208–9; Fischer, Stalin and German Communism, 529–36.

111. Neilson, Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse, 53 (citing FO 371/11787/N5670/387/38: J. D. Gregory memo-randum).

112. Samuelson, Plans for Stalin’s War Machine, 36 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 128, l. 24: January 29, 1927).

113. D’iakov and Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR, 80 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 128, l. 26: Jan Berzin to Voroshilov, January 29, 1927); Duraczynski and Sakharov, Sovetsko-Pol’skie otnosheniia, 63.

114. Davies, review of David Stone (citing Vestnik finansov, 1927, no. 8: 140–1).

115. Erickson, Soviet High Command [2001], 301–4.

116. Stone, Hammer and Rifle, 22.

117. Erickson, Soviet High Command [2001], 288.

118. Kudriashov, Krasnaia armiia, 139–41 (APRF, f. 3, op. 50, d. 257, l. 30–31); Sokolov, Ot voenproma k VPK, 62–3 (citing GARF, f. 8418, op. 16, d. 3, l. 355); Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie, 21.

119. Murin, “Eshche raz ob otstavkakh I. Stalina,” 73 (APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 131, l. 64–5).

120. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 131–2.

121. Pravda, January 9, 1927.

122. Pravda, January 9, January 13, January 14, and January 20, 1927.

123. The myth-manipulation interpretation takes a superficial view: L. N. Nezhinskii, “Byla li voennaia ugroza SSSR v kontse 20-x—nachale 30-x godov?” Istoriia SSSR, 1990, no. 6: 14–30; Velikanova, “The Myth of the Besieged Fortress.”

124. Samuelson, Plans for Stalin’s War Machine, 35 (citing PRO, Foreign Office, N530/190/38: January 26, 1927). Some scholars properly surmised that the war scare was genuine: Schapiro, Communist Party, 303–4.

125. Prokofiev, Soviet Diary 1927, 43–4, 59, 66, 106, 156. In the early 1930s Prokofiev would return for good to Stalin’s USSR, and work alongside Shostakovich, who had never left.

126. Loginov, Teni Stalina, 95.

127. Na prieme, 766–73.

128. Von Riekhoff, German-Polish Relations, 248–55.

129. D’iakov and Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR, 71–6 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 151, l. 18–23).

130. Akhtamzian, “Voennoe sotrudnichestvo,” 14–5; Akhtamzian, “Soviet-German Military Cooperation,” 105. See also Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, 96–7; and Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 227–9.

131. Samuelson, Plan’s for Stalin’s War Machine, 32–3 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 611, l. 18: January 13, 1927).

132. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 53–4 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 6, d. 110, l. 114–5).

133. APRF, f. 3, op. 63, d. 137, l. 23–47 (courtesy of Sergei Kudryashov). The informant’s report might have been written and/or supplied by Mieczysław Loganowski (b. 1895), a functionary in the foreign affairs commissariat—someone using red pencil wrote his name in block letters on the typescript. Loganowski was a veteran of Red Army intelligence and had previously served under diplomatic cover as concurrent civilian (GPU) and military intelligence (GRU) station chief in Warsaw, where he organized armed sabotage brigades and plotted an assassination of Piłsudski. A protégé of Dzierzynski and especially Unszlicht, fellow Poles, Loganowski then played a similar role in Austria, before being posted to the foreign affairs commissariat in Moscow. One Soviet diplomat in Warsaw recalled him as “a person of strong will, iron stamina, and animal savagery.” Besedovskii, Na putiakh k terimodoru, 92–3; Sever and Kolpakidi, Spetsnaz GRU. Stalin knew Loganowski as a result of his own close involvement in the Unszlicht-coordinated sabotage-coup squads in multiple countries. Loganowski’s name on the document could refer to his authorship, or it could have been a reminder to contact him for follow-up.

134. Samuelson, Plans for Stalin’s War Machine, 39 (citing RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 39, l. 6).

135. Anglo-Sovetskie otnosheniia, 100–4; DVP SSSR, X: 6–62.

136. Chernykh, Stanovlenie Rossii sovetskoi, 13. Word got to Moscow in 1927 of a group of a few dozen people in Yakutia agitating against Soviet power and predicting its downfall. The spring rains and mud prohibited sending in a police team until September to apprehend the conspirators before they could launch their “uprising.” Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 386 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 4, d. 204, l. 19).

137. Pravda, March 3, 1927, in Sochineniia, IX: 170.

138. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 8: 199–201 (A. G. Gorbunov: April 16, 1927). Some reports from the countryside deemed the political allegiance of peasants firm. “We don’t want war—we haven’t recovered from the last one yet—but we won’t give up Soviet power for anything,” one report from Ulyanovsk summarized. In the event of a war, these peasants pledged “every last one of us will fight.” Penner, “Stalin and the Ital’ianka,” 53 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 32, d. 110, l. 10: July 20, 1927).

139. Lenin, Collected Works, 30: 93–104 (September–October 1919).

140. Van Ree, Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, 222 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 598, l. 5–8).

141. Smith, A Road Is Made.

142. Smith, A Road Is Made, 28.

143. Wilbur and How, Documents on Communism, 733.

144. Smith, A Road Is Made, 168.

145. Smith, A Road Is Made, 171.

146. Stalin put great store in the Guomindang army. In November 1926, he likened the Chinese revolutionary movement to that of Russia’s in 1905, but added that “In China it is not an unarmed people that faces the troops of an old government but an armed people in the person of its revolutionary army. In China an armed revolution is fighting against an armed counterrevolution.” Sochineniia, VII: 357–8, 363.

147. VKP (b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae, I: 64.

148. VKP (b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae, I: 494.

149. Michael Weiner, “Comintern in East Asia, 1919–39,” in McDermott and Agnew, Comintern, 158–190 (at 164, no citation).

150. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 248–50. CU East Asian DS740.5.S65 W55 1989.

151. Liu, Military History of Modern China, ch. 2.

152. Karl, Staging the World, 195 (quoting Chen Duxiu, writing in 1904).

153. Evans and Block, Leon Trotsky on China, 113–5.

154. Pravda, May 22, 1925; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 2714, l. 17, reprinted in Sochineniia, VII: 133–52 (but without the clause “after the model of the Guomindang”). Stalin, in China, was leftist even when he appeared not to be. Pantsov, Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 86–9, 129; Kara-Murz, Strategiia i taktika Kominterna v natsional’no-kolonial’noi revoliutsii, 112.

155. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 44–5.

156. Kartunova, “Kitaiskii vopros,” Kartunova, “Novyi vzgliad na razryv s Chan Kaishi . . .”; Peskova, “Stanovleniie diplomaticheskikh otnoshenii mezhdu Sovetskoi Rossiiei i Kitaem”; Peskova, “Diplomaticheskie otnosheniia mezhdu SSSR.”

157. VKP (b), Komintern, i natsional’no-revolutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae, I: 549–53; Pantsov, Tainaia istoriia, 126; Pantsov, Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 84–5.

158. Slavinskii, Sovetskii soiuz i Kitai, 101, citing Tszian Chzhun-chzhen [Chiang Kai-shek], Sovetskii Soiuz v Kitae, 26 (March 14, 1924).

159. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 561, l. 1.

160. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 3, l. 55 (April 29, 1926).

161. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 155–60; Pantsov, Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 101–23.

162. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 73 (citing Trotsky archives: “Voprosy nashei politiki v otnoshenii Kitaia i Iaponii”). Voroshilov was on the same committee.

163. VKP (b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionoe dvizhenie v Kitae, II: 36–40; Pantsov, Tainaia istoriia, 163 (citing RGASPI, f. 495, op. 1, d. 73, l. 15: Zinoviev to Hu, February 8, 1926, and f. 514, op. 1, d. 233, l. 33); Pantsov, Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 111–2.

164. Isaacs, Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 162, 351–2, n12.

165. Izvestiia, April 8, 1927; Wilbur and How, Documents on Communism, 8–9.

166. Slavinskii, Sovetskii soiuz i Kitai, 131–3; Kapitsa, Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniia, 177–81; Schwartz, Chinese Communism, 42–60.

167. Wilbur, Nationalist Revolution in China, 108.

168. Paul R. Gregory, Hsiao-ting Lin, Lisa Nguyen, “Chiang Chooses His Enemies,” Hoover Digest, 2010, no. 2; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 279, l. 1–7, 10, 12, d. 280, l. 2–17, d.281, l. 1–17, d. 282, l. 94–154 (Zinoviev’s theses), d. 283, l. 259–60, d. 284 (the edited, shortened published plenum, with April 15 cut), l. 22–30 (protocols with Zinoviev’s theses appended); Golubev, ‘Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku,’ 49 (citing TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 5, d. 448, l. 20).

169. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 115 (citing Trotsky archives, letter of April 18, 1927).

170. Slavinskii, Sovetskii soiuz i Kitai, 155–6.

171. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 327. “Our first disagreements with the leading core of the present politburo in regard to the Chinese question already refer to the beginning of 1926,” Zinoviev and Trotsky would write in late May 1927. The Trotsky-Zinoviev proposal that the Chinese Communists break with the Guomindang was confirmed by Bukharin and Stalin at the July 1926 plenum. Pantsov, Tainaia istoriia, 162 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 166, d. 189, l. 2; Ob”edeninennyi plenum TsK i TsKK VKP (b), 14–23 iiulia 1926 g. Vyp. 1, l. 15, 75).

172. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 90.

173. Vygodskii, Vneshniaia politika SSSR, 292, 145 (citing Izvestiia, December 4, 1962).

174. Lubianka: Stalin i VChk-OGPU-NKVD, 133–4 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 5, l. 35). Gorodetsky, Precarious Truce, 221–31; Fischer, Soviets in World Affairs, 500–10; Fischer, Russia’s Road from Peace to War, 169.

175. Khinchuk, K istorii anglo-sovietskikh otnoshenii, 46; Izvestiia, May 18, 1927 (Mikoian).

176. Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 131.

177. It would do so again in March 1928. Slavinsky, Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact.

178. Fel’shtinskii, Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia v SSSR, III: 57–9; Volkogonov, Trotsky, 287.

179. VKP (b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae, II/ii: 763–4.

180. Bol’shevik, May 31, 1927, in Sochineniia, IX: 311–2.

181. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 336–7.

182. Trotsky and Zinoviev, along with more than four score supporters, sent a long document known as the Declaration of the 84 for the initial signatories (a number that would grow above 300) to the Central Committee requesting a confidential Central Committee session to discuss the blowup of the revolutionary movement in China. It also enumerated Stalin’s domestic failures in peasant policy and industrialization, employment, wages, housing—in short, it was a full-throated anti-NEP, pro-revolution leftist manifesto. “Declaration of the 84,” in Trotsky, Challenge of the Left Opposition, II: 224–39.

183. Gorodetsky, Precarious Truce; Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 222. Henderson and Dovgalevsky, “Anglo-Soviet Relations.” Relations would not be restored until 1929.

184. Since trade relations had resumed in 1921, Moscow had sold London goods worth £70 million, while purchasing £24.3 million—cotton, wools, machinery, rubber, and tools. Velikanova, Popular Perceptions, 54 (citing Foreign Office 371, 1927, vol. 12595: 191, 193; vol. 12593: 161).

185. Werth, “Rumeurs defaitistes et apocalyptiques”; Viola, “The Peasant Nightmare.” See also Simonov, “‘Strengthen the Defense of the Land of Soviets,’” 1355–6; Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 117. Leonard Schapiro speculated that the Soviet leadership may have been genuinely worried—which was true. Schapiro, Communist Party, 303–4. See also Sontag, “Soviet War Scare”; Meyer, “The Soviet War Scare of 1927”; and Romano, “Permanent War Scare,” 103–20.

186. Rykov, Angliia i SSSR, 4–5, 21–31, 36.

187. Von Riekhoff, German-Polish Relations, 248–55.

188. Eudin and North, Soviet Russia and the East, 303–4; Sochineniia, X: 31–3; Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 133.

189. Wu, “A Review of the Wuhan Debâcle.”

190. Valedinskii, “Organizm Stalina vpolne zdorovyi,” 69.

191. Criminal codes were issued at republic level, not all-Union, and in the 1926 RSFSR criminal code a person could be sentenced as “dangerous” even without having committed a crime, merely for “connection to a criminal environment” or “past activity” (article 7). The criminal code also contained a special section (article 58) devoted to crimes against the Soviet political order, which were deemed “the most dangerous” and carried the death penalty. Goliakov, Sbornik dokumentov po istorii ugolovnogo zakonodatel’stva SSSR, 220–3, 267–9, 293–7; Berman, Soviet Criminal Law, 23–4; Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 796–8, n61. “There is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn would write, “which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58.” Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, I: 60.

192. “Sovetskii Azef,” Segodnya [Riga], May 9, 1927. The OGPU had decided to unwind its grand operation targeting Russian emigres known as the Trust. Polish intelligence had already figured it out: the information from the Trust did not match what the Poles were getting from other intelligence channels. The Trust also kept putting off the planned uprising against the Soviet regime, saying the time was not ripe, furthering suspicions. The game had essentially been played. Many people had been caught in the web, but the secret police had failed to lure back General Kutepov, who headed the All-Russia Military Union, the main emigre organization for officers and the principal target of Soviet foreign intelligence. But the double agent Alexander Upeninysh (Upelints), a Latvian, who used the names Alexander Opperput and Eduard Staunitz, among others, crossed from the USSR into Finland without permission on the night of April 12–13, 1927, and gave himself up, exposing the Trust in a Russian-language emigre publication. His expose conveyed the impression that the GPU was ubiquitous, omniscient, had penetrated everything and everyone. But for the GPU, the exposure was stinging. Kutepov went to Finland and insisted that Opperput-Staunitz, as well as Maria Zakharchenko-Shultz, Kutepov’s niece, prove the sincerity of their break with the GPU by sneaking back into the USSR and carrying out a terrorist act. The operatives felt they had no choice but to implement Kutepov’s directives, to demonstrate their bona fides, but in their attempt in flight, near Smolensk, Opperput-Staunitz would be killed; Zakharchenko-Shultz would die later on, either in a shootout or by her own hand. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, 150.

193. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 323–4. On January 26, 1930, OGPU agents would manage to kidnap Kutepov in Paris. He had a heart attack and died, either while still in Paris or on the Soviet ship Spartak sailing from Marseilles to Novorossiyka. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 91; Nedelia, 1989, no. 49.

194. Arsen’ev, Podzhigateli voiny, 21–2; Dokumenty i materialy po istorii sovetsko-pol’skikh otnoshenii, V: 151–2; Zhukovskii, Polnomochnyi predstavitel’ SSSR, 202–5; Shishkin, Stanovlenie vneshnei politiki postrevliutsionnoi Rossii i kapitalisticheskii mir, 283–91; Blackstock, Secret Road to World War Two, 136–61; Korbel, Poland Between East and West, 217–20. The Polish courts sentenced the assassin Boris Koverda to life imprisonment, but on June 15, 1937, the Polish government amnestied him.

195. Shishkin, Stanovlenie vneshnei politiki postrevliutsionnoi Rossii i kapitalisticheskii mir, 289–90. Soviet protest: Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, II: 220–1, 228–31.