CHAPTER 1 TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
We reject the concept of rule-of-law state. If a person seeking to claim the title of Marxist speaks seriously about a rule-of-law state and moreover uses the term “rule-of-law state” in connection with the Soviet state, this means he is led by bourgeois jurists. This means he departs from Marxist-Leninist teaching on the state.
LAZAR KAGANOVICH, Institute of Soviet Construction, November 4, 19291
There, in Europe, let them meow, in full voice . . . about the USSR’s “collapse.” They will not alter one iota either our plans or our cause. The USSR will be a first-class country with the largest, technologically best-equipped industrial and agricultural production. Socialism is invincible. No longer will we have “miserable” Russia. An end to that! We’ll have a powerful and prosperous modern Russia.
Stalin to Maxim Gorky, in Sorrento, December 1930 2
MAURICE HINDUS, an émigré who returned to his native village in southern Ukraine to bear witness, grasped that Stalin’s forced wholesale collectivization and breakneck industrialization were “a stupendous gamble.”3 Twelve years earlier, a separate peasant revolution, parallel to the urban Bolshevik one, had expropriated most of Russia’s gentry, as well as many peasant landholders, and resulted in the creation of a smallholding population of 25 million peasant households. Undoing this new socioeconomic landscape of de facto land ownership seemed a nearly unimaginable proposition. Lenin’s quasimarket New Economic Policy had been a grudging concession to this peasant revolution, and although the mass of Communists had little love for farmers, as the NEP’s benefits were available to be appropriated, many Communists in the countryside had come to accept peacefully growing into socialism. Ironically, this vision was never stronger than at the height of central party actions—price regulation, creeping statization, industrialization ambitions—that fatally undermined NEP’s already faltering viability. Stalin repudiated pro-NEP Communists in the same way he lacerated European Social Democrats and their so-called parliamentary road to socialism. “Can we imagine that?” he wrote in the margins of an essay by Engels, republished in 1930, on the peaceful attainment of socialism in France and the United States. “No, that is incorrect!” 4
Stalin insisted that small farms had to be consolidated to enable the mechanization and application of agronomy needed to achieve higher levels of output. All that was possible without collectivization, of course—it had happened in the United States, as Stalin himself pointed out, but there it had entailed large-scale, mechanized private farms, and for Marxist-Leninists, class and property relations ultimately determined political systems. Some politburo members did think or hope they could collectivize agriculture voluntarily, but as of 1928, voluntary collectivization had occurred on just 1 percent of the country’s arable land. Coercion was the only way to attain wholesale collectivization. The extreme violence and dislocation would appall many Communists. But Stalin and his loyalists replied that critics wanted to make an omelet without breaking eggs. The only real alternative to forced collectivization was Communist acceptance of capitalist social relations and the long-term political consequences that entailed. Either the peasant revolution would be overcome or the regime would be under permanent threat. To these weighty considerations was added a do-or-die imperative to industrialize, which had to be financed somehow. Getting more grain, including for export, by squeezing the peasants seemed to be the answer and was dubbed primitive socialist accumulation. Russia had experienced centuries of cruelty toward peasants, but the inhumanity was now given supposed scientific and moral authority.5
Stalin was not head of the government (the Council of People’s Commissars). He was general secretary of the Communist party, which controlled all regime communications, personnel appointments, the secret police, and the army, and supervised the government. (For elucidation of the workings of the Soviet party-state system, see the explanatory note on page 907.) From his office (Room 521) at party headquarters on Moscow’s Old Square, he propelled the building of socialism in a furious storm of mass mobilization.6 His actions in 1929–30 were improvised, but they sprang from deep Marxist premises.7 Stalin, like Lenin, accepted the historical obsolescence of the “petit bourgeois” peasantry, the irredeemability of capitalism, the vileness of class enemies, the inevitability of violence in revolution, and the value of tactical flexibility amid firmness of will. He was Leninist to the core.8 Stalin sharpened the sense of urgency to force-build socialism by banging on about the dangers of “capitalist encirclement.” Millions of urbanites and some of the rural populace became entranced by the combination of real class warfare and modern machines. The mass appeal of taking part in the creation of a new and better world recruited a new generation of party activists, and captured imaginations worldwide.
The savage upheaval of building socialism would also further reveal, and further shape, the darkness within Stalin’s mind. “Right deviationists,” “social fascists,” “liquidation of the kulaks,” “wreckers,” “right-left bloc,” “terrorist acts,” “military coup plots,” “Trotskyites”—all these tropes, rooted in the Bolshevik repertoire, now took on an even more sinister edge. Stalin emerges in the documents as self-assured yet on a knife’s edge, a supreme bully with a keen eye for others’ weak spots yet roiling with resentment. Even his moments of satisfaction come across as laced with venom. No matter how much he crushed rivals, he was under siege. No matter how many enemies were deported, imprisoned, or executed, new ones emerged—and they were coming after him. No matter how much power he accumulated, he needed more. All the while, regime violence seemed to beget the very foes within and threat of war from without that secret police reports incessantly warned about. Stalin’s chip-on-the-shoulder, suspect-the-worst persona fed into, and was fed by, the drive to build socialism in the overheated atmosphere he fostered. The revolution’s destiny and Stalin’s personality became increasingly difficult to distinguish.
THE VICTIM
For a man possessed by raison d’état, Stalin’s actions were often highly personal. Nikolai Bukharin, unlike Trotsky, was close to the Soviet dictator. The two had met in Vienna in 1913, and from the mid-1920s Stalin had shown genuine affection for him. Alexei Balashov, who as a young man worked loyally in Stalin’s inner secretariat, would recall, late in life, that “when they brought him the forms with the results of politburo member voting by telephone poll, frequently, without looking up from the document, Stalin would ask, ‘How did Bukharin vote?—For?’ Stalin, for a time, held Bukharin’s views in high regard, and they informed the positions he himself would take.”9 Also unlike Trotsky, Bukharin had been careful not to come out in open opposition to Stalin. But in 1929, while forcing through his radical shift to coercive wholesale collectivization, Stalin charged Bukharin and his allies with “deviation” from the party line. Thus did the dictator fashion for himself and the regime a new high-profile internal foe.10
Bukharin, who had been instrumental in enabling Stalin to smash Trotsky, inadvertently facilitated his own demonization by Stalin. The stepped-up attacks were set in motion by the sudden appearance of a pamphlet published by a shadowy Trotskyite underground on January 23, 1929, which carried Lev Kamenev’s “notes,” nominally for Zinoviev, of a clandestine meeting Bukharin had initiated with Kamenev back on July 11, 1928.11 Bukharin was caught out: he had met on the sly with a former oppositionist and divulged to him internal party matters while privately voicing the opposite position to the July 1928 plenum resolutions that he himself had drafted. The incident went to the party’s Central Control Commission, chaired by the Stalin loyalist Sergo Orjonikidze, who generally disliked Stalin’s political vendettas and, till now, had tried to reconcile Bukharin and his patron. But Kamenev’s “notes” had Bukharin asserting that Orjonikidze had bad-mouthed Stalin behind his back. Kamenev, for his part, submitted written testimony, which, like the “notes” themselves, proved damning of Bukharin, a further act of ingratiation with Stalin. Bukharin belatedly surmised that he had fallen into a trap, while Stalin gave the appearance of being pained to have to take action. (“Sad as it is, I must report the fact of . . .”) At the first of two joint sessions of the politburo with the presidium of the Central Control Commission, on January 30, 1929, Stalin condemned Bukharin, as well as his associates Mikhail Tomsky and Alexei Rykov, as “a right deviationist, capitulationist group advocating not for the liquidation of capitalist elements of the city and countryside, but for their free development.”12
Thus did opposition to forced collectivization and coercive grain collection become advocacy for capitalism. Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky wrote an appeal invoking Lenin’s Testament—“since these words were written, this ‘unbounded power’ has become even more ‘unbounded’”—but on February 9, 1929, with Orjonikidze in charge, the party censured Bukharin, for having met Kamenev, and Rykov and Tomsky, for having failed to report it.13
Stalin, in parallel, had been reading summaries by the secret police (OGPU) of the intercepted correspondence between Trotsky and his adherents exiled at the far ends of the USSR who were gloating that Stalin’s radical turn had vindicated their long-standing leftist advocacy for class war against kulaks and NEPmen. Stalin read out excerpts at the politburo, which acceded to his pique and voted to deport Trotsky.14 Turkey granted a visa, and on January 20, the OGPU appeared in Alma-Ata and loaded up the Trotsky family and their belongings. On February 10 in Odessa, an OGPU convoy smuggled him, his wife, Natalya Sedova, and their elder son, Lev Sedov, aboard the steamship Ilich. Troops lined the harbor. There were no other passengers. The order for deportation was silent about Trotsky’s personal archives—and if not expressly told to confiscate, the secret police did not confiscate. Trotsky managed to carry out crates of documents and books.15 It took fewer than two weeks for two of his essays to appear in the “bourgeois” press. In “How Could This Happen?” Trotsky explained his defeat by allowing that Stalin was “gifted in a practical sense, endurance, and perseverance in the pursuit of outlined goals,” but added that “his political horizon is inordinately narrow. His theoretical level is just as primitive. His pastiche booklet Foundations of Leninism, in which he tries to pay tribute to the party’s theoretical traditions, teems with schoolboy errors. . . . What is Stalin?” Trotsky concluded. “The outstanding mediocrity in our party.”16
Trotsky was evicted from his temporary residence at the Soviet consulate in Istanbul, and for safety he relocated to Prinkipo (Prince’s Isle), twelve miles away, or an hour and a half by boat, in the Sea of Marmara. It had been used to exile rivals to the Byzantine emperors and now was mostly deserted except for summer holidaymakers.17 He arrived at the “red-cliffed island set in deep blue” (in the words of Max Eastman) on March 8, 1929, and took up residence at a spacious, run-down villa in the outskirts of the main village. Turkish policemen stood guard outside the gates to the rented quarters, where there was little in the way of furniture. But, as in Soviet Sukhum, where Trotsky used to convalesce, a veranda faced the sea. Lev Sedov set up shop on the ground floor to keep track of the voluminous correspondence, and Trotsky began outfitting an office on the second floor. He tried to move on to Europe, but governments refused him a visa, beginning with Germany’s Social Democrats, whom Trotsky had incessantly ridiculed.18 From remote Prinkipo, his exposure of the Soviet regime’s lies reverberated around the world—and inside Stalin’s office.19
While still in the Soviet Union, Trotsky had lost any public voice, but abroad he not only wrote for periodicals in several European languages but also established a Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition (Leninist-Bolsheviks). His inaugural publisher’s note set out the party opposition’s right to exist and promised facts and documents; in that vein, he wrote an open letter to the workers of the USSR denying that he had left the Soviet Union voluntarily.20 The OGPU spread a rumor that Trotsky had been deported to enliven the revolutionary movement in the West, an invitation for émigré White Guards to assassinate him.21 The Bulletin, printed in Paris in small print runs, was not legally available inside the USSR, though for a time some Soviet officials who traveled abroad would smuggle the exotic broadsheets home and pass them around.22 It carried an astonishingly well-informed account of the party sessions behind closed doors in Moscow involving Bukharin, who complained that “in the twelfth year of the revolution [there is] not a single elected provincial party chief; the party does not participate in decision making. Everything is done from above.” Bukharin was shouted down: “Where did you pick that up—from whom? From Trotsky!”23
Trotsky, in fact, refused common cause with Bukharin and those he deemed expressions of petit bourgeois class interests. “The rightists think that if one affords greater space to individual peasant economy, then the current difficulties can be overcome,” he wrote in a March 1929 essay, also in the Bulletin’s inaugural issue. “A wager on the capitalist farmer (the European or Americanized kulak) would doubtless yield fruits, but they would be capitalist fruits that at some near-term stage would lead to the political downfall of Soviet power. . . . The course toward the capitalist farmer is absolutely incompatible with the dictatorship of the proletariat.”24 For Stalin, however, the “right deviation,” which wanted to continue the existing party policy of the NEP, was in cahoots with the smashed left opposition, which had wanted to overturn the NEP. Both, in criticizing the party line, exposed disunity and therefore weakness, an invitation for the capitalist powers to intervene and overthrow socialism. And because Stalin incarnated party unity and the resolve to build socialism, he was, logically, their prime target of assassination. Thus did opposition to Stalin’s policies become equated with terrorism, thanks also to a big hand from Wiaczesław Mężyński, chairman of the OGPU.25
All the while, Stalin’s inner circle craved his favor. On March 10, 1929, Pravda had published a report by Klim Voroshilov to a Leningrad provincial party conference analyzing the international situation, socialist construction, and the party opposition to collectivization, and four days later Voroshilov wrote to the dictator asking whether he had “screwed up 100 percent or just 75 percent.” Stalin responded by praising his account as “a good, principled report,” and, in reference to the U.S. president and the British foreign secretary, added, “All the Hoovers and Chamberlains and Bukharins got it in the ass.”26
Bukharin had grimly foreseen that Stalin would twist his words and label him a schismatic to extract political advantage, but Stalin’s cruelty was something his friend would puzzle over for a long time. And no matter how underhandedly the dictator undercut Bukharin, Stalin was the victim. “Don’t try to compel me to be quiet, or hide my opinion by your shouts that I ‘want to teach everyone,’” Stalin wrote to Bukharin on April 16, 1929, the day of a politburo confrontation. “Will you at some point desist from the attacks against me?”27
NO PITY
Following the politburo session, on that same day, Stalin convened a punitive joint Central Committee–Central Control Commission plenum, lasting a week, at which his loyalists spewed venom at Bukharin.28 On April 18, amid intense heckling, Bukharin launched a counterattack against Stalin’s peasant policy for coercing poor and middle peasants, too, insisting that “the number of kulak households is few,” and that “we can allow individual farming to develop without fear of rich peasants.” Stalin did not formally respond until the evening session on April 22. “Friendship is friendship, but state service is service,” he noted. “We all serve the interests of the working class, and if the interests of the working class diverge from the interests of personal friendship, then down with personal friendship.”29
Stalin wielded a compelling strategic vision—accelerated, noncapitalist modernity—but he was at pains to deny that he was abrogating Lenin’s NEP. (Otherwise, he would be the deviationist.) The NEP, he explained, had always had two sides—a retreat, to be followed by a renewed offensive—and “Bukharin’s mistake is that he does not see the two-sided nature of NEP; he sees only the first side.”30 Stalin cited Lenin to the Manichaean effect that everything came down to “‘who defeats whom,’ us or the capitalists. . . . Every advance of capitalist elements is a loss for us,” and that the peasantry was “the last capitalist class.” He reminded attendees that Rykov and Bukharin had been the first to repudiate his offer to resign (back in December 1927), and he threw Lenin’s Testament back in Bukharin’s face, reading aloud the parts about Bukharin and commenting, “A theoretician without dialectics. A theoretician of our party about whom it can scarcely be said—with great doubts can it be said—that his outlook is fully Marxist.” After all that, Stalin posed as conciliator, coming out “against the expulsion of Bukharin and Tomsky from the politburo.”31
Stalin might not have had the votes for expulsion. All the same, Bukharin was sacked as editor of Pravda, and Tomsky quit as head of trade unions. Rykov remained head of the government, which coordinated the economy.32 Stalin managed to have the plenum repudiate Rykov and Bukharin’s policy alternatives, such as importing grain (“It is better to squeeze the kulak and extract from him surplus grain, which he has in no small quantity”), but plenum resolutions summarizing the right’s position (even in condemnation) were not published.33
Developments in the countryside supported Stalin’s critics. The 1928–29 harvest had come in at only 62–63 million tons (well below the official figure of 70–71 million), and total state grain collections amounted to only around 8 million tons—2 million less than the previous year.34 Leningrad had already introduced food rationing in November 1928. Moscow soon followed, as did other industrial cities, going beyond bread to sugar and tea, then meat, dairy, and potatoes. But Stalin argued that the problems caused by his antimarket coercion required more coercion. In spring 1929, he dispatched Kaganovich as a plenipotentiary to the Urals and Western Siberia, some of the same districts the dictator himself had visited the year before. By summer 1929, however, food shortages loomed. The regime would need to spend scarce hard currency (the equivalent of 30 million convertible or gold rubles, or almost $15 million) to import a quarter million tons of grain.35 Those were just facts. Stalin anticipated that the ramped-up coercion would serve as a device of political recruitment, cleaving off the poor and middle peasant from the kulak. This was a complement to his invention of a schismatic “right deviation,” which forced his faction to redeclare its loyalty and held the party mass in check.36
Stalin’s political opportunism was at the service of implanting socialism (noncapitalism) in the countryside and collecting grain to feed and finance noncapitalist industrialization in the cities. He had seized the gift of Bukharin’s political amateurism, but in a larger way he had created his own moment, taking advantage of a crisis that his emergency measures had helped create to force through permanent emergency-ism. Mikoyan would admit, in June 1929, that “had it not been for the grain difficulties, the question of strong collective farms and of machine-tractor stations would not have been posed precisely at this moment with such vigor, scope, and breadth.”37 He had been appointed by Stalin a candidate member of the politburo already in 1926, at age thirty, as well as head of trade, making him the youngest people’s commissar. In that capacity he worked directly under Rykov and, for a time, was close to Bukharin (like Stalin), but now Mikoyan emerged as one of Stalin’s key minions who enacted the new hard line. And yet, Mikoyan remained the recipient of Stalin’s relentless pressure. “No concessions in grain procurements,” Stalin would soon write to him. “Hold the line and be maximally unyielding! If you now pity them and vacillate even one iota from our plan, . . . no one will pity either the Central Committee or the trade commissariat.”38
GEOPOLITICAL DILEMMA
Upon the close of the plenum, the regime convened the 16th party conference (April 23–29, 1929), which once more ratified the “optimal” (maximalist) variant of the Five-Year Plan.39 This wild-eyed scheme, which had officially commenced in October 1928, reversed the NEP-era loss of revolutionary élan and envisioned a nearly fourfold increase in investment in the state sector of the economy, to achieve a GDP leap of around 20 percent per annum.40 The phantasmagorical document also foresaw an absolute increase in household consumption. Still, the emphasis fell upon machine building, or, in Marxist terms, expansion of the means of production, in order to emancipate the USSR from dependence on foreign capitalists.41 That age-old dream, which predated the Bolshevik regime, always went unrealized, because the West possessed critical advanced technology that Russia needed in order to compete against the West. Stalin’s gamble on collectivization and socialist industrialization to emancipate Russia depended on eliciting foreign capitalist cooperation as well.42 But the Soviets broadcast an intention to overthrow capitalism globally.43
The young Soviet state had been unable to reclaim tsarist Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania, which had become independent states; Bessarabia, which had been seized by Romania; or Kars and Ardahan, which were claimed by Turkey. Communist revolutions in Hungary and parts of Iran had been overturned or aborted; Communist coups had failed abjectly in Germany, Bulgaria, and Estonia. Attempts to forge a loyal ally out of Nationalist-governed China had blown up in Stalin’s face. Traditional Russian influence had emerged enhanced in Mongolia, a Soviet satellite, but diminished in Korea and Manchuria (Japan had annexed the first and coveted the second). And so, even as the Soviets laid claim to being the antidote to the existing world order of imperialism, they found themselves pursuing a policy of coexistence, meaning trying to win recognition and trade from the capitalists.44 Lenin had once boasted that the capitalists would sell the rope that the Communists would use to hang them, but because of his repudiation of tsarist and Provisional Government debts, the Soviets had not been able to secure long-term credits for foreign purchases.45 Stalin’s extreme violence and accompanying desecration of churches added to the reputational costs for capitalists if they sold to the Communists. It remained a mystery how Stalin was going to obtain blueprints, machines, and know-how from the advanced capitalist countries.
POPULISM
Soviet industry, construction, and transport employed, at most, 6 million workers in 1929—of whom 4.5 million performed manual labor—out of a working population of well more than 60 million.46 Alongside familiar output norms, piece rates, and labor discipline, Soviet factories were supposed to be crucibles for new forms of socialist labor. “Shock work,” connoting overfulfillment of work norms via all-out exertion and rationalization, spread during the Five-Year Plan in conjunction with so-called socialist competitions among brigades for honors and better rations.47 In early 1929, Pravda had published “How to Organize Competition?” This previously unpublished article by Lenin, about unleashing workers’ creative energies, was part of a campaign in which workers took vows, often in writing, not to slack off or show up drunk or go AWOL, and to fulfill the plan. Some work collectives were afforded Union-wide publicity.48 Stalin had never really been a worker himself, had clashed bitterly with the one genuine worker in the politburo (Tomsky), and rarely visited factories. But he nurtured a deep populist streak.
A journalist for the newspaper Female Peasant, Yelena Mikulina (b. 1906), was having difficulty publishing her pamphlet, “Socialist Competition of the Masses,” on textile workers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. In early May 1929, she boldly dropped the manuscript off for Stalin at the party secretariat, imploring his aides for an audience. Stalin, surprising his functionaries, had his top aide, Ivan Tovstukha, summon her to Old Square on May 10. “You wanted to tell me something?” he was said to have asked Mikulina, who recalled answering, “‘I have nothing to say, because I am frightfully afraid, and completely stunned.’ . . . ‘Ha, ha ha,’ Stalin laughed. And in his laugh he showed his teeth. And his entire face, sown with large pockmarks, also laughed.” They talked about where else Mikulina might venture to write firsthand about socialist construction—perhaps Kazakhstan, where the Turkestan–Siberian Railway was being built.49 She asked Stalin to write a preface to her essays, which he did the next day, sending it by courier to her dormitory. The preface, which touted how “the powerful production rise of the toiling masses has begun,” was published in Pravda (May 22, 1929). The state publishing house immediately issued Mikulina’s pamphlet in a print run of 100,000. She sent Stalin an autographed copy, with the dedication “I cannot tell you how powerfully I love you.”50
Stalin, in his preface, warned anyone who dared to impede “the creative initiative of the masses.”51 Then the reviews arrived. One, from a newspaper editor in Yaroslavl, told Stalin that “workers greet the pamphlet with mocking laughter,” but nonetheless inquired whether his own censorious draft review (which he enclosed) merited publication.52 Another, forwarded to Stalin by the party boss of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, provoked a response. “It is not so easy to take in comrade Stalin,” the dictator wrote. “I am decisively against writing prefaces only for pamphlets and books of literary ‘big-shots,’ literary ‘names.’ . . . We have hundreds and thousands of young capable people, who are striving with all their might to rise up from below.”53
“SOCIAL FASCISTS”
Bolshevism, like Italian fascism, was an insurrection against both a liberal constitutional order and European Social Democracy. In Stalin’s formulation, codified at the Sixth Comintern Congress (1928), a bourgeoisie desperate to retain its hold on power sought to establish extreme fascist regimes by co-opting Social Democrats. Therefore, Social Democracy—which reconciled workers to capitalism, and thus lured them away from their supposed true home in the Communist party—constituted a handmaiden of fascism (“social fascism”).54 Social Democrats returned and often instigated the enmity, expelling Communists from trade unions and agitating against the Soviet regime. During clashes on May Day 1929, the German Social Democrat Party supported the police against banned worker street rallies encouraged by German Communists; 30 people were killed, nearly 200 injured, and more than 1,000 arrested.55 The Comintern condemned the Berlin events as Social Democratic “terror.” A German Communist party congress the next month resolved that “Social Democracy is preparing . . . the establishment of the fascist dictatorship.”56
In Moscow, the Comintern opened its tenth expanded plenum on July 3, 1929, with seventy-two delegates, half of whom had voting rights. Otto Kuusinen, the Finnish-born Comintern secretary general, noted that “factories would determine the outcome of the next war and the next civil war,” a summons to close ranks behind Soviet industrialization.57 Stalin had inserted the following into the theses: “The Comintern executive committee plenum suggests paying special attention to strengthening the fight against the ‘left’ wing of Social Democracy, which is retarding the disintegration of Social Democracy by sowing illusions about this wing’s opposition to the policies of Social Democracy’s leadership, but in fact strongly supports social fascism.”58 Bukharin, formally chairman of the Comintern executive committee, had not even been showing up at headquarters, and on the plenum’s final day (July 19) he was replaced by Molotov.59 Privately, Clara Zetkin, the high-profile German Communist, had confided to a Swiss comrade that “the Comintern has turned from a living political body into a dead mechanism, which, on the one hand, is capable only of swallowing orders in Russian and, on the other, of regurgitating them in different languages.” Publicly, she continued to lend her prestige to the cause by keeping her mouth shut.60
Other foreign Communists exulted in the Soviet party’s militant turn under Stalin. Klement Gottwald, responding to allegations that the Czechoslovak Communist party was under Moscow’s thumb, boasted to his country’s National Assembly, “We go to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to wring your necks. (Outcry). And you know the Russian Bolsheviks are masters at it! (Uproar).”61
ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY, ARRESTS
Voroshilov, as he wrote privately (June 8, 1929) to Orjonikidze, who was away convalescing, had gotten into a row with Bukharin at a politburo session. “I lost my self-control and blurted out in Little Nikolai’s face, ‘You liar, bastard, I’ll punch you in the face,’ and other such nonsense and all in front of a large number of people,” he lamented. “Bukharin is trash and is capable of telling the vilest fabrications straight to your face. . . . Still, I did not behave properly. . . . After this scene Bukharin left the politburo meeting and did not return.” Voroshilov had just voted to accommodate Bukharin’s wishes in the matter of his next appointment, forming part of a rare politburo majority in that vote against Stalin.62 Soon thereafter, Stalin had the politburo revisit the military aspect of industrialization, just months after formal approval of the maximalist variant of the Five-Year Plan. On July 15, two secret decrees were issued that, to a considerable degree, belatedly sided with Voroshilov and the Red Army against Rykov’s fiscal prudence.63
The first decree underscored the long-standing view that all the states neighboring the USSR to the west needed to be viewed as a “likely enemy,” which required attaining military parity with them. It also called for acceleration of the components of the Five-Year Plan that served defense (nonferrous metals, chemicals, machine building) by means of “foreign technical assistance and aid, and acquisition of the most vital prototype models.”64 Red Army growth was set to reach 643,700 active troops by the end of the Five-Year Plan. Improvements were mandated in soldiers’ housing and vigilance against “kulak moods, anti-Semitism, [and] distorted disciplinary practices” (hazing). The second decree, on military factories proper, complained that they were overseen by “the caste of old tsarist-era specialists,” many of whom stood accused of “wrecking.” Voroshilov tasked the army staff—headed by Boris M. Shaposhnikov, a tsarist-era officer descended from Orenburg Cossacks—with redoing its economic plans and administration to facilitate mass production of advanced aircraft, artillery, and tanks.65 “Everyone has a magnificent impression,” the commissariat’s business manager wrote to Voroshilov of the secret decrees. “Boris Mikhailovich even declared that he got more effect from this document than from his medical treatment in Germany.”66
Secret military cooperation with Germany, in violation of the Versailles Treaty, had been under way for years. More than 100 Soviet officers had attended German general staff academy courses on state-of-the-art military science. (Some German officers, such as Friedrich von Paulus, presented guest lectures in Moscow.)67 Most of the Soviet brass, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, made brief trips to Germany, but a few, such as Jeronimas Uborevičius, known as Uborevich, studied there for long stretches (in his case, from late 1927 through early 1929).68 A peasant from Lithuania (a land of free peasants) who had graduated from imperial Russia’s artillery school, then joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, Uborevičius spoke fluent German, resembled a German general staff type—precise, punctual, professional—and admired that country’s technology and organization. He became a favorite of the Reichswehr while enjoying Stalin’s favor, who assigned him to the new armaments directorate.69 The entire Red Army tank park numbered perhaps ninety units, mostly of Great War vintage, such as French-made tanks captured from the Whites. Artillery had been an area of rapid technological change since the Great War, but in August 1929 Stalin received yet another damning report deeming Red Army artillery “on the same technical level as in 1917, if not 1914,” despite considerable expenditure.70 In late summer and fall 1929, almost the entire artillery directorate and inspectorate were arrested for wrecking. Ten people were executed; others “testified” against tsarist-era military specialists beyond those in artillery, foreshadowing more arrests to come.71
TIGHT LEASH
All dictators risk overthrow when, for their own power, they empower a secret police. Kamenev’s “notes” of his conversation with Bukharin included the latter’s assertions about the OGPU’s supposed sympathies (“Yagoda and Trilisser are with us”). Genrikh Yagoda and Meyer Trilisser, aka Mikhail Moskvin, the longtime head of OGPU foreign intelligence and, like Yagoda, an OGPU deputy chairman, had been compelled to submit explanations to Stalin, with a copy to Orjonikidze at the party Control Commission.72 Yagoda had to admit that he met regularly with Rykov, who, after all, was the head of the government, including in Rykov’s private apartment (in the same building as Stalin’s). Yagoda and Rykov both hailed from the Volga region.73
Complicating the situation, the OGPU chairman, Mężyński, suffered numerous ailments, from severe asthma to a spinal injury as a result of a car accident in Paris. (He often received subordinates while half lying on a couch.) People whispered that he had never fully recovered his spirits after his young wife had died during surgery.74 Stalin ignored his requests to resign. On April 21, 1929—precisely the moment of Stalin’s machinations against the right deviation—Mężyński had a massive heart attack. He was ordered to curtail his smoking and sugar intake and to rest. After several months, on August 1, the doctors allowed him to return to work, but only if he went to the office every other day and for no more than five hours each time; Mężyński rejected these conditions and returned to Lubyanka anyway.75 But his absences and continued illness heightened the already sharp jockeying in the secret police. With Yagoda down south on holiday, Trilisser, at a meeting of the Sokolniki ward of the Moscow party organization where OGPU officials were registered, demanded self-criticism to rid the secret police of unworthy people, and accused Yagoda of “retreating from the general line of the party with the right deviation.”76
Police operatives had recently been instructed to omit the name and location of their branch even when signing their secret internal correspondence, so as to reduce any outsider’s ability to decipher the organization’s structure in case of a leak.77 Now, Stalin wrote to Mężyński (September 16, 1929), “it turns out you (the Chekists) have taken a course toward full-bore self-criticism inside the GPU. In other words, the Chekists are committing the same mistakes that were committed not long ago in the military body. . . . Do not forget that the GPU is no less a militarized agency than the military body. . . . Would it be impossible to undertake decisive measures against this evil?”78 Trilisser lost out, replaced by Stanisław Messing, who was close to his fellow Pole Mężyński. At the same time, the Stalin favorite, Yefim Yevdokimov, was brought from the North Caucasus to run the central OGPU secret-political directorate, which oversaw the secret, counterintelligence, special (army), informational (intelligence analysis), Eastern, and operative departments—a counterweight to Yagoda.79
Among the 2,000-odd operatives in the central OGPU at this time, Yevdokimov stood out. His North Caucasus bailiwick had become the most medal-bedecked in the Union, thanks to the protracted counterinsurgency against a well-armed populace (“bandit formations”), a civil war after the civil war.80 What is more, the place where Stalin took his holidays fell within his jurisdiction. In conspiring with the dictator to manufacture the 1928 Shakhty trial, Yevdokimov had become an all-Union star (and in 1930 would receive his fourth Order of the Red Banner).81 He looked after his subordinates’ families and gathered them at his house for banquets and singing—Ukrainian choral songs, Cossack songs, Russian folk ditties—with one Chekist playing the piano and another the accordion. “Yevdokimov had formed a powerful group that would implement his any command,” recalled one member. “By giving out awards, taking care of their daily life concerns, and corrupting their behavior, Yevdokimov had succeeded in forging a strong nucleus of Chekists loyal to him to the end. In turn, these people forged groups of operatives loyal to one another and, by extension, to Yevdokimov.”82
There was no assignment from which Yevdokimov would shrink on behalf of his patron. Innocently, Stalin, in the letter to Mężyński on September 16, 1929, had written: “I got wind that Yevdokimov is being transferred to Moscow to secret-operative work (it seems in place of Deribas). Would it not follow to simultaneously make him a member of the OGPU collegium? It seems to me it would follow.” Yevdokimov was named to the collegium even before his relocation to Moscow took effect.83
Stalin did not instigate this anti-Yagoda revolt. But he had again extracted advantage from others’ actions. Yagoda was promoted to first deputy chairman of the OGPU, from merely “deputy,” while Messing became a new second deputy chairman. But Stalin allowed Yevdokimov to implant his North Caucasus minions into the many departments in the capital that he now oversaw.84 Yevdokimov’s top deputy was now Jan Kulikowski, known as Olsky (b. 1898), another Pole of noble descent, who remained the head of the powerful counterintelligence department while becoming concurrently head of the special department for the army. Artur Artuzov, deputy chief of foreign intelligence and a long-standing Yagoda nemesis, became Yevdokimov’s other top deputy.85 Yagoda would have to overexert himself to demonstrate separation from the “right deviation” and loyalty to Stalin.
THE GENERAL SECRETARY’S WIFE—A RIGHTIST
All during the OGPU machinations, Stalin was on holiday down south, from the third week of July 1929, staying mostly at the Puzanovka dacha in Sochi. He had caught severe flu. He promoted “Bolshevik self-criticism” when it suited him, but in a letter of July 29 to Molotov, whom he had left in charge, he denounced some articles he had seen in Communist Youth League Pravda and the journal Young Guard as tantamount to “a call for a review of the general line of the party, for the undermining of the iron discipline of the party, for the turning of the party into a discussion club.”86 Stalin drafted politburo resolutions and instructions on foreign affairs, ordered that close attention be paid to the new iron- and steelworks under construction, and directed that the internal exile Cristian Rakovski, whose damning essay Stalin had read in the first issue of Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition (July 1929), be deported to an even more remote locale (which turned out to be Barnaul, Siberia). Stalin complained about low grain procurements and demanded surveillance over collective farm directors and arrests of urban “speculators.” He congratulated Molotov (August 29) for savage attacks against Bukharin in Pravda, and reported, “I’m beginning to recuperate in Sochi.”87
Stalin directed talks to restore diplomatic relations with Britain (severed in mid-1927). The negotiations, supported by British industrialists, were launched after the Labour party won elections and the Labourite Ramsay MacDonald was returned as prime minister (in June 1929). “No haste should be displayed on the British question,” he instructed Molotov, denigrating deputy foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov. “Remember we are waging a struggle (negotiations with enemies is struggle) not with England alone, but with the whole capitalist world, for the MacDonald government is the vanguard of the capitalist governments in the work of ‘humiliating’ and ‘bridling’ the Soviet government with ‘new,’ more ‘diplomatic,’ more ‘masked,’ in a word, more ‘valid’ methods. The MacDonald government wants to show the whole capitalist world that it can take more from us (with the help of ‘soft’ methods) than Mussolini, Poincaré, and Baldwin, that it can be a greater Shylock than the capitalist Shylock himself. And it wants this because only in this way can it win over the trust of its own bourgeoisie (and not only its bourgeoisie). We would be the bottom of the barrel if we could not manage to reply to these arrogant bastards briefly and to the point: ‘You won’t get a friggin’ thing from us.’”88
Stalin was assiduously courting Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer, to return permanently from Italy, and in 1929, for the second year in a row, he visited the USSR. “I heard Gorky evidently went to Sochi,”—Stalin’s wife, Nadya, wrote to him on August 28.89 “He will probably visit you, a pity, without me.” After traveling down the Volga, Gorky made it to Tiflis and, apparently, Sochi, but soon began spitting blood and cut his trip short.90 Nadya was in Moscow to sit entrance exams for the Industrial Academy. “I send you a big kiss, like the kiss you gave me when we parted,” she wrote to her husband in the August 28 letter, delivered by airplane. He wrote the next day about how “I have already managed to take two medicinal baths. I think I’ll take ten.” On September 1, he wrote that he had evidently “been close to pneumonia,” and still suffered from a persistent cough. “As soon as you get 6–7 free days, get down here to Sochi. How are things with the exam? I kiss you, my Tatka.”91
Nadya wrote the next day of daily life in the capital, “I must say that the mood about food supplies, among students and teachers, is only so-so; everyone is worn out by the queues.” She added knowingly, “Do not be angry at such details.”92 She had the further audacity to intervene on behalf of a member of Pravda’s editorial collegium, the secretary of its party cell, Kovalev, who had fallen afoul for publishing a critical article about the need for criticism, without seeking prior authorization from the Central Committee. But Kovalev had received authorization from higher-ups at Pravda. “I cannot be indifferent about the fate of such a good worker and comrade of mine,” Nadya wrote to Stalin, revealing that she knew a politburo meeting had been scheduled to adjudicate the matter. (Nadya also wrote, “And, if you can, send 50 rubles, I do not have a kopeck left.” Stalin sent her 120 rubles.) He accepted her account of Kovalev’s scapegoating (“I think you are right”) and sent a telegram to Molotov that same evening asking to delay any decision. The next day, Stalin instructed Orjonikidze and Molotov to establish firmer control over Pravda. Orjonikidze wrote to Stalin that “Kovalev has so far not been touched even though he committed a mass of idiocies. I agree with you that the leaders of Pravda are more at fault.” (Kovalev would be fired from Pravda all the same.) Orjonikidze pointedly added, “I must say, the sooner you return, the better.”93
Molotov and Orjonikidze had just written a joint letter to Stalin (September 13, 1929), pleading for newspaper criticism of leading officials to be reined in, but that same day, Stalin wrote back, “I consider your proposal risky in that it could objectively lead to curbing of self-criticism, which is unacceptable.” The next day, he added that “full-on self-criticism activates the mass and creates a state of siege for all and all kinds of bureaucrats. This is a great achievement.”94
Stalin read newspapers assiduously on holiday. After finding an account in Pravda of a mid-September Rykov speech, he erupted in a telegram he sent to Molotov, Voroshilov, and Orjonikidze, making known that at a minimum, he wanted Rykov removed from chairing politburo sessions. (“Can you not put an end to this comedy?”)95 Meanwhile, Nadya wrote to him from Moscow (September 27) that “without you it is very, very boring,” and pleaded, “In a word, come back. It will be nice together. . . . I kiss you firmly, firmly.” She detailed the infighting at the Industrial Academy, where she was studying chemical dyes and synthetic fibers for clothing applications. “Students here are graded as follows: kulak, middle peasant, poor peasant. There is such enormous laughter and argument every day. In a word, they have already put me down as a rightist.”96
Stalin did not react to her naïve “joke” on the touchiest (for him) of subjects in his next letter (September 30), noting only that he would be back in Moscow in a week. On October 3, Britain and the USSR signed a one-page protocol restoring relations, without settling their outstanding disputes, just as Stalin had insisted.97 With his return imminent, he wrote to Molotov (October 6), “It is necessary to think Bukharin will be kicked out of the politburo.”98 Stalin also revealed his prickliness yet again. “For some reason, recently, you have started praising me,” he wrote to Nadya (October 8). “What does this mean? Good, or bad?”99
TREMORS
Stalin had not been abroad since 1913. “How good would it be if you, comrade Stalin, changing appearance, traveled for a certain time abroad with a genuine translator, not a tendentious one,” foreign affairs commissar Georgy Chicherin had recently written. “You would see reality.”100 (Stalin would not set foot outside the USSR until 1943.) The dictator continued to direct intelligence officials to focus on threats posed by Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, as well as the “limitrophes,” the immediate borderland states (Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania). They were reporting what he solicited.101 “The Turkish general staff has received testimony from Germany, Poland, and England that war between the USSR and Poland will happen in early 1930,” one report stated (October 11, 1929), in passages Stalin underlined. “Poland is seriously preparing for war. . . . Rumors are circulating as well among the [military] attachés in Moscow about a war coming soon.”102
Gorky had returned to Sorrento already, and Stalin, back in Moscow, resumed his side of their correspondence via diplomatic pouch. “Things are not going badly here,” he noted (October 24). “We’re moving the cart along; of course, with creaking, but we’re moving forward. . . . They say that you are writing a play about wrecking and that you would not be against receiving related materials. I gathered materials on wrecking and I’ll send them to you presently. . . . How’s your health?”103 Other pressing business included dispatching central functionaries to oversee grain collections in the North Caucasus, Bashkiria, the Central and Lower Volga, and Ukraine.104 Stalin was using the heavy-handed procurements to force peasants into collective farms. He and other regime officials either ignored the disposition of animals altogether or publicly insisted on immediate full socialization. Rather than hand their animals over to the collectives, peasants had been trying to sell them since summer, but markets were flooded and prices had cratered, so the peasants had begun slaughtering animals en masse in protest. The livestock that had been socialized were often up to their knees in dung, and dying.105 A catastrophe was unfolding.
Also on October 24, the United States stock market lost 11 percent of its value at the opening bell. Trading on that “Black Thursday” was heavy, and the ticker tape could not keep up—people had no idea what stocks were worth. Bankers tried to arrest the slide with bulk purchases of blue chips above trading prices. But when the market opened on Monday, it fell 13 percent. “Black Tuesday” (October 29) saw a 12 percent drop amid record trading (a record not broken for four decades), which brought the Dow Jones to 40 percent below the peak it had reached in September. The Wall Street crash came after a speculative boom in which stocks were being purchased at an average price-to-earnings ratio of 32, far above historic levels, thanks partly to the invention of margin buying. When prices dropped, investors could not pay back the loans they had assumed to purchase the stocks. Just one in six U.S. households owned stocks, but the shock provoked business bankruptcies, credit contraction, worker layoffs, and psychological uncertainty. Most remarkable, the weeklong drop in share prices occurred almost instantaneously on all financial markets in the world except Japan—and the Soviet Union, which, of course, did not have a stock market.106
On November 5, 1929, following protracted negotiations between Britain and the Soviet Union, the House of Commons ratified restoration of diplomatic relations by a wide margin (324 to 199).107 Each government continued to accuse the other of treachery, but for Stalin, diplomatic recognition by the world’s “leading imperialist power” denoted acknowledgment of the Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization.108 That same day, a politburo decree ordered the execution of the OGPU espionage operative Yakov Blyumkin. His fatal act had been to meet on Prinkipo with Trotsky, his former patron, who revealed that he had managed to carry out secret documents, which he intended to publish to expose Stalin, and predicted the regime’s downfall, averring that the underground “Bolshevik-Leninists” needed to strengthen their opposition. Blyumkin evidently sensed that Trotsky was fantasizing, yet he had agreed to carry messages to Moscow from Trotsky, written inside books in invisible ink.109 He became one of the first Communist party members executed by the Soviet regime for a political crime.
A GREAT BREAK
The permanency, or not, of ad hoc regime violence in the countryside was set to be clarified at the year’s second Central Committee plenum, scheduled to open November 10, 1929, and Stalin went on the offensive, with a newspaper article, “The Year of the Great Break,” in Pravda on the revolution’s anniversary (November 7). “We are going full speed ahead by means of industrialization to socialism, leaving behind our traditional ‘Russian’ backwardness,” he declared. “We are becoming a country of metal, a country of the automobile, a country of the tractor.” In the run-up to the plenum, regime officials had begun to boast of fulfilling the Five-Year Plan in just four years, and, at the plenum itself, this would become a “vow” attributed to “the proletariat” and, soon, a ubiquitous slogan—“ 5 in 4.”110 His article predicted giant new farms of 125,000 to 250,000 acres, larger than even the biggest U.S. farms of the time, and insisted that “the peasants are joining collective farms . . . as whole villages, whole counties, whole districts, even sub-provinces”—a supposed movement from below, refuting the rightists. He further boasted that “the country in something like three years will become one of the most grain-rich, if not the most grain-rich, in the world.”111 That would allow for vast grain exports, to pay for imported machinery.112
Local party committees, under intense central pressure, claimed to have doubled the number of collectivized households since June 1929—the basis of Stalin’s plenum’s assertions—but even so collectivization still amounted to only 7.6 percent of households.113 And it was eyewash anyway. “We had wholesale collectivization on the territory of dozens of villages,” the Ukraine party boss Stanisław Kosior admitted to the plenum, “and then it turned out that all of it was inflated, artificially created, and that the population did not take part and knew nothing.” Critical comments were also uttered by Sergei Syrtsov, who had hosted Stalin in Siberia the year before and been brought back to Moscow by him in 1929, becoming a candidate member of the politburo and head of the Russian republic’s Council of People’s Commissars (Rykov’s lesser position, taken away from him).114 When Syrtsov bemoaned the lack of thought given to policy implementation, Stalin interrupted, “You think everything can be ‘prepared beforehand’?”115
Stalin had the plenum compel a new capitulation from the rightists, which Pravda would publish (“We consider it our duty to declare that . . . the party and its Central Committee have proved right”), and on the final day (November 17) he prompted them to expel Bukharin from the politburo.116 But the dictator, passing a handwritten note to Orjonikidze acknowledging the hall’s sentiment, proved unable to finish off Rykov.117 Still, plenum resolutions warned of “the sharpening of the class struggle and the stubborn resistance by capitalist elements to socialism on the offensive.”118 In fact, before the year was out, the secret police would record at least 1,300 spontaneous, uncoordinated peasant protests against party policy.119 But Stalin forced through a decree that transformed his theretofore ad hoc pronouncements into an official mandate for wholesale Union-wide collectivization.120
SHOW OF FORCE
Also on November 17, 1929, the Soviet Union launched the second part of a major military operation in Manchuria. Stalin’s China policy, a “united front” that forced the Chinese Communists into a junior partnership with the Soviet-supported “bourgeois” Nationalists (or Guomindang) to prioritize resistance to imperialism, had been in disarray. The Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had massacred Chinese Communists, and had gone on to unify much of north and south China. The main exception was Manchuria, ruled by a warlord based in Mukden, Zhang Xueliang, known as the Young Marshal, who had taken over for his Japanese-assassinated father. In a conspiracy coordinated with Chiang, Zhang raided the Soviet consulate in Harbin, produced documents of Soviet subversion, and occupied the jointly managed Chinese Eastern Railway, a tsarist-built shortcut for the Trans-Siberian that afforded a sphere of influence.121 Aiming to evict the Soviets, Zhang’s troops violated the extraterritoriality granted by treaty and detained Soviet rail officials, charging them with spreading Communist propaganda and instigating rebellion. The USSR arrested Chinese merchants on Soviet soil and, in August 1929, broke off diplomatic relations.122
Stalin suspected that the Mukden warlord, no less than the Nationalist government in Nanking, was in the pay of the British, the Japanese, or the Americans (or all three), so that the railroad seizure might be a diversionary action. He authorized formation of a Special Far Eastern Army consisting of local conscripts (as well as some ethnic Germans from the Volga region, a separate ethnic Buryat cavalry division, and one battalion of Soviet Koreans). They were commanded by Vasily Blyukher, the former top military adviser to Chiang.123
Zhang’s Mukden regulars and irregulars numbered up to a quarter million, aided by thousands of former émigré White Guards. Japanese troops were stationed just 125 miles south of Harbin, guarding a rail spur, the South Manchurian Railway, from Harbin down to Port Arthur, which tsarist Russia had also built, but ceded the lease to Japan as war spoils in 1905. (This area was known in its Chinese characters as Guāndōng or Kwantung, meaning “east of the mountain pass,” beyond which lay Manchuria.)124 Given these realities, Stalin had hesitated to punish the Chinese by force, despite Voroshilov’s urgings, but after the Soviet consul general in Tokyo obtained assurances from a well-connected Japanese industrialist that Japan would not interfere in a Soviet showdown with China as long as Red Army forces did not move too deep into Manchuria, Stalin agreed to the strike.125 More than 300,000 soldiers, sailors, and aviators were mobilized on the two sides, including Soviet reserves and border guards—approximately 20 percent of the entire Red Army ended up being sent to or near the front. Blyukher drew up the war plan (availing himself of pre-1917 archives); Voroshilov took up field headquarters in Chita, Siberia. Both Chiang and the Young Marshal had underestimated Soviet resolve and capabilities, such as their superior air power and battlefield command.
Blyukher’s offensive was cleverly designed to annihilate the enemy before its full force could be mustered. Employing fast maneuvering in a combined sea-air-land operation, he encircled Chinese troops in just forty-eight hours, despite Soviet shortages of artillery. The Far Eastern Army had managed to operate on two salients separated by 600 miles and to synchronize three major operations: naval and amphibious assaults down the Sungari River (October 1929), a western thrust from Manzhouli, and an eastern one from Suifenhe (both in November 1929). The Soviets claimed to have had just 812 killed in action (though the toll was likely higher).126 The Far Eastern Army was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.127 Some foreign newspapers in the Far East lauded Blyukher as a “Red Napoleon.”128 China’s government sued for peace, agreeing to restore Soviet co-control over the railroad and “disarm the White Guard detachments and expel their organizers and instigators from [China’s] Three Eastern Provinces.”129 The Soviet military action beyond its borders reinforced deep anxieties among Polish and French diplomats. Japan’s Kwantung Army command, for its part, was in no mind to accept Soviet successes in Manchuria. High officials in Tokyo—who had allowed the Soviets to weaken Chinese forces—now concluded that Chinese troops could be easily vanquished, an inference that, if acted upon, could bring Japan and the USSR into collision.130
Stalin was ecstatic. “Obviously our fellows from the Far East Army gave [the Chinese] a good scare,” he crowed on December 5, 1929, to Molotov (now the one on holiday). “We rebuffed America and England and France rather rudely for their attempt to intervene. We could not have done otherwise. Let them know what Bolsheviks are like! I think the Chinese landowners will not forget the object lessons taught them by the Far East Army.” Stalin added: “Grain procurements are progressing. We are raising the supply allocations for industrial cities like Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kharkov, and so on. The collective farm movement is growing by leaps and bounds. Of course, there are not enough machines and tractors—how could it be otherwise?—but simply pooling peasant tools results in a colossal increase in sown acreage.”131
EVERYWHERE, VICTORY
From December 5 through 10, 1929, the regime staged the First All-Union Congress of Shock Brigades. “Workers took to the podium and spoke not only about their factory, their plant—they spoke about planning in general, about standardization, about control figures, and so on,” Valerian Kuibyshev, the head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, boasted from the dais. “That is how people can speak who feel themselves the masters of their country.”132
On December 15, seven weeks after Black Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange, a Pravda editorial declared that a general economic crisis had engulfed the United States. As other customers for large capital orders became scarcer, Stalin shopped the great capitalist department store. Starting with the American companies Freyn Engineering and Arthur McKee, Moscow signed “technical assistance” contracts to import the new American wide-strip steel mills and heavy blooming mills with which to build brand-new integrated steel plants at Magnitogorsk (Urals), equivalent in size to the flagship U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, as well as others in Kuznetsk (Siberia) and Zaporozhe (Ukraine). Additionally, the Soviets contracted with the Ford Motor Company to build an integrated mass-production facility in Nizhny Novgorod for cars and trucks, on the basis of recent Ford patents and its famed River Rouge plant. Caterpillar was engaged to re-equip factories in Kharkov and Leningrad to mass-produce tractors and harvesters, while giant tractor plants were contracted for Stalingrad and, very soon, Chelyabinsk, intended to be the largest in the world. Contracts would be signed with DuPont and Nitrogen Engineering to manufacture ammonia, nitric acid, and synthetic nitrogen, and Westvaco for chlorine. There would be ball-bearings technology from Sweden and Italy, advanced plastics and aircraft from France, turbines and electrical technology from Britain.133 Virtually every contract would contain at least one turnkey installation—an entire plant from scratch to operation.134 The Soviets had to pay with foreign-currency-earning exports (grain, timber, oil) or gold reserves.135 But now Stalin’s regime even managed to obtain foreign credits, which, although short term, were frequently on favorable terms with foreign government guarantees and did not even necessitate that they redeem the pre-Communist state debts.136
On December 21, 1929, Stalin officially turned fifty. Pravda had begun printing congratulations three days earlier, and on the actual day, the paeans occupied six and a half of the issue’s eight pages, with some of the approximately 1,000 congratulatory telegrams coming from factories and organizations, but not from collective farmers.137 Molotov sent a private note. “I know that you are diabolically busy,” he wrote. “But I shake your fifty-year-old hand.” 138 The state publishing house issued a collection of the tributes in an edition of 300,000 copies. “Wherever Stalin is,” it stated, “there is success, victory.”139 The Pravda birthday issue carried the iconic photograph of Stalin with Lenin at the latter’s dacha and hailed the dictator as “the best pupil, heir, and successor of Lenin.” But that made him a target: “Stalin stands at the head of the Leninist Central Committee. Therefore he is invariably the object of savage abuse on the part of the world bourgeoisie and the Social Democrats.”140
Stalin struck a modest pose in a published response (December 22), crediting the Leninist party and the working class, “which bore me and reared me in its own image and likeness,” and making a solemn vow: “You need have no doubt, comrades, I am prepared to devote to the cause of the working class, the cause of the proletarian revolution and world Communism, all my strength, all my ability, and, if need be, all my blood, drop by drop.”141
The newsreel agency produced a six-part silent amalgamation of Stalin moments caught on film: smiling, waving, graciously accepting accolades, wise, benevolent.142 It conveyed his revolutionary bona fides with tsarist-police photographs and fingerprints and images of the shacks he inhabited during exile in Solvychegodsk and Kureika. Viewers also saw his birth hovel and hometown of Gori, with its medieval-fortress ruins on the hill, a pantheon of childhood photos, and a long interlude at the current Tiflis home of his bespectacled mother, Keke Geladze, as she assembled a care package with his beloved homemade walnut jam. Now Stalin also became the organizer of the Red Army, an innovation canonized in Voroshilov’s birthday pamphlet, “Stalin and the Red Army.” Trotsky was provoked to consider writing a history of the Red Army and the civil war in rebuttal, but that would not get done: a suspicious fire at his residence destroyed many of his papers and books on the subject.143 Voroshilov’s draft, meanwhile, had been sent to Stalin for prior approval. The defense commissar had written that Stalin made fewer mistakes than the others. Stalin wrote back, “Klim! There were no mistakes—cut that paragraph.”144
CLOSE TO THE MASSES (METAPHYSICALLY)
Those who wanted to be part of the world-historical building of socialism would have to fall in line. “It is now completely clear that one cannot be for the party and against the present leadership,” the Trotsky apostate and state bank head Georgy “Yuri” Pyatakov wrote in Pravda (December 23, 1929). “One cannot be for the Central Committee and against Stalin.”145 Unlike Italian fascism, however, Marxism had trouble admitting a cult of the leader. This delicate question was directly addressed—for perhaps the last time under Stalin—in the lead article of the journal Party Construction, published in connection with Stalin’s jubilee. The author, K. Popov, characterized leadership as necessary and Stalin’s as “armed with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, forged by multiyear experience of the struggle for Leninism, hand in hand with Lenin.” Popov referred to a “leading group” within the party and to Stalin as “the genuine ‘first among equals,’” because, in his struggle for Leninism, he “invariably expresses the will of hundreds of thousands and millions.” Stalin’s illiberal regime, in other words, was democratic. Popov quoted Lenin to the effect that “one person can represent the will of hundreds and tens of thousands of people,” and underscored the “democracy” of party congresses, whereby “the will of the collective party leadership and the will of the leaders merge with the will of the masses.”146
Soviet newspapers had taken to berating actual Soviet workers as shirkers, absentees, and drunks, ruining the regime’s industrial plan with indiscipline. The Menshevik émigré press speculated that “capitalist” types had regained control of the factories. Gorky, also abroad, was taken aback. “Negative reports must be balanced by positive reporting,” he urged in a letter to Stalin in late 1929. “Progress in carrying out the Five-Year Plan must be reported on a week-to-week and month-to-month basis . . . : the construction of housing, factories, plants, bakeries, community centers, canteens, and schools. . . . The press should keep reminding itself and its readers . . . that socialism is being built in the USSR not by sloppy individuals, hooligans, and raving morons, but by a genuinely new and mighty force—the working class.” Soon enough, updates on “socialist construction” and worker heroes—alongside the encomiums to Stalin and lurid tales of sabotage—would saturate the public sphere.147
LIQUIDATION OF THE KULAKS AS A CLASS
Already by early December 1929, the Soviet state had procured 13.5 million tons of grain—more than twice as much as in any preceding year of the regime.148 But the state had to feed many more rural folk (who had previously purchased or traded for food on the market), set aside grain for ambitious surges in export, and meet the rationing norms for the industrial cities and construction sites, as well as the Red Army.149 In that connection, the November 1929 plenum had created a new USSR land commissariat. Stalin appointed Yakov Epstein, known as Yakovlev, the editor of Peasant Newspaper and a member of the disciplinary Central Control Commission, as commissar.150 He presided over a commission on the tempos of collectivization and forms of collectives, which decided not on the kommuna—full socialization of everything—but on an intermediate form, the artel, with socialization of land, labor, draft animals, and fundamental implements, but private ownership of cows, other livestock, and some everyday tools. Collectivized peasants were also to be allowed to retain household plots. The commission’s thorniest question was whether the “class enemy” kulak would be permitted to join the new socialist agriculture. Disposition of kulaks had largely been left to locals, and many collective farms were admitting them. The Yakovlev commission warned against any blanket approach.151
Suddenly, however, in a speech on the last day (December 27, 1929) of a weeklong Congress of Agrarians-Marxists, Stalin preempted the commission, thundering in words Pravda carried two days later that “we have gone over from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulak to a policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.” Liquidating an entire class? “Is it possible to accelerate tempos of our socialized industry more while having such an agricultural base as small peasant farms, incapable of expanding production and yet predominating in our economy?” he asked rhetorically. “No, not possible. Is it possible to continue for a more or less long period to base Soviet power and socialist construction on two different foundations—on the foundation of the largest and most consolidated socialist industry and on the foundation of the most subdivided and backward small-scale peasant economy? No, not possible.” He continued: “What’s the solution? The solution is to make agriculture large-scale, make it capable of accumulation, of expanding production, and in this way transform the agricultural base of our economy.”152 Stalin had a famously soft voice, but one audience member called his ultra-class-war speech “electrifying.”153
Once again, the dictator had enacted a conspiracy within the regime: at Old Square, more than a month before, he had received the OGPU hierarchs—Yagoda, Messing, Yevdokimov, and others—as well as Georgy Blagonravov, the former head of the secret police transport department and now first deputy commissar of railroads.154 This would be the kulak liquidation team.
Stalin also used his pencil to hand victory to the more rabid members of the Yakovlev commission: the partially socialized artels were no longer to be allowed as the main form of collectives indefinitely, but would be superseded by a leap to the “higher-form” kommunas. Stalin also crossed out mention of farmers retaining minor implements, chickens, or a milk cow and wrote in that collectivization was to be completed in just one to two years (depending on region), using dekulakization. All this became a politburo resolution approved on January 5, 1930.155 Six days later, Yagoda asked his top subordinates how many people could be interned in existing labor camps and where new camps might be quickly established, encouraging them to “think creatively.”156 The upshot was that each territory would have a deportation quota.157 “Not everyone has the nerves, strength, character, and understanding to appreciate the scenario of a tremendous breakup of the old and a feverish construction of the new,” Stalin exulted in a letter to Gorky in Sorrento (January 17). “Naturally, with such a ‘baffling turmoil,’ we are bound to have those who are exhausted, distraught, worn out, despondent, and lagging—and those who go over to the enemy camp. These are the inevitable ‘costs’ of revolution.”158
Stalin issued secret circulars to local party machines on the dekulakization of more than 2 million peasants, using every available instrument: the procuracy, courts, regular police (militia), secret police, party activists, urban workers, and, if necessary, soldiers.159 Orjonikidze let slip the recklessness at the Central Control Commission on January 18: “Do not forget that in our conditions, what yesterday was considered correct today might already be incorrect.”160
BUILDERS OF THE NEW WORLD
There were more than 500,000 settlements in just the European part of the Soviet Union. Newspaper articles and decrees made their way to the county level and even below, but the party-state lacked rural cadres that could see through consistent implementation.161 Stalin, however, had an ace in his deck: a decision to recruit urban workers to build socialism in the countryside had been announced at the November 1929 plenum. Trade unions (“Time does not wait!”) were recruiting “politically literate” workers who were to inject their superior “consciousness” into the vast “spontaneity” of the petit bourgeois countryside.162 Worker volunteers were backed by considerable force. Red Army men would be used sparingly—the OGPU was warning of “kulak” moods even among poor peasant soldiers—but thousands of OGPU internal troops were deployed.163 “Those who are joining the collective farm, sign up with me,” one activist announced. “Those who do not want to join, sign up with the police chief.”164
Of Stalin’s many instruments, however, none was greater than the enchanted vision of building a new world. The regime had planned to mobilize up to 25,000 urban workers; more than 70,000 were said to have volunteered, and around 27,000 were accepted. More than two thirds were party members, and more than four fifths were from industrial regions. The vast majority had between five and twelve years’ factory experience, but nearly half belonged to the 23–29 age cohort.165 Only one in fourteen were female. “Your role is the role of the proletarian leader,” Kaganovich told a group of Moscow and Leningrad “25,000ers” about to depart for villages. “There will be difficulties, there will be kulak resistance and sometimes even collective farmer resistance, but history is moving in our favor. . . . Either we destroy the kulaks as a class, or the kulaks will grow as a class of capitalists and liquidate the dictatorship of the proletariat.”166 Semyon Budyonny, the civil war cavalry hero, and Voroshilov had appeared at Moscow train stations to conduct send-offs to “the grain front.”167 One worker recruit was quoted as saying, “It has been necessary for a long time to carry out such a firm policy, the sooner to catch up to capitalist countries.”168
The 25,000ers descended on the countryside in late January/early February 1930, in advance of the spring sowing drive.* They discovered that the regime-instigated class war was eliciting both social solidarity—poor peasants hiding or aiding kulaks—and peasant eagerness to benefit from expropriating those betteroff.169 Peasant property, seized in the name of the state without compensation, was supposed to be turned over to the new collectives after settlement of outstanding debts of the household in question, and its value counted toward the joining fees for poor peasant members.170 But activists (or onlookers) who evicted “kulaks” could take their possessions. One OGPU report stated that members “of lower echelons of the party-soviet apparatus deprived members of kulak and middle peasant households of their clothing and warm underwear (directly from their body), ‘confiscated’ headwear from children’s heads, and removed shoes from people’s feet.”171 A favored trick was the “auction”: one new village party secretary managed to obtain a four-room house, valued at 700 rubles, for 25.172
The OGPU secretly reported that some of the volunteers tried to rape village women and lusted for power. (“If I command it, you must do it, whether to jump into water or fire, otherwise it’s a bullet to the forehead.”)173 Administrative chaos ensued in many places. Even conscientious 25,000ers were not well versed in management or agronomy, and most faced material hardships on-site, as well as armed resistance. “Remember, you sons of bitches, we’ll get even with you,” read notes delivered to 25,000ers in their names.174 Ambushes by peasants with axes and sawed-off shotguns spread fear, concretizing the Manichaean propaganda.175 But the orgy of confiscation occurred alongside rampant idealism.176 Some 25,000ers reported indignantly that kommuna—not artel—collective farms had been imposed; others wrote earnest letters about “violations of socialist legality” (to the very authorities who committed them), risking charges of playing into the “kulak’s hands.” Many of the 25,000ers had escaped villages not long before and imagined that they were helping to overcome darkness and bring modern life to the countryside.
WRATHFUL SPRING
Early OGPU reports had been channeling Stalin’s delusion that “middle” and “poor” peasants were “turning toward the collective farm,” but soon enough the secret police reported mass resistance. (“Down with collectivization!” “No one is taking an ounce of grain from here!”) In March 1930 alone, the OGPU would register more than 6,500 spontaneous “anti-Soviet group protests.”177 Peasants could not coordinate their opposition across regions, had no transregional leaders or access to the press, and were armed, if at all, only with hunting rifles. This was by no means a “civil war.” Of the 2.5 million peasants who joined protests, according to the secret police count for the year, most did so nonviolently, refusing to join the collectives. Still, peasants would assassinate more than 1,100 rural officials and activists in 1930. Another weapon was arson, “the Red Rooster,” set loose on administrative buildings.178 Most frequently, protesters destroyed their own livestock: already one quarter of the country’s farm animals had been lost, a higher proportion than during the cataclysmic civil war. Almost half the mass peasant actions in 1930 would occur in Ukraine, where, in strategic regions bordering Poland, revolt overtook every inhabited settlement. Many villages elected their own leaders, ringing church bells to signal mobilization. Hundreds of leaflets were printed, in thousands of copies: “Down with Soviet power!” “Long live a free Ukraine!”179
Stalin had been warning of how “liquidation of the kulaks” and the “sharpening of the class struggle” would encourage “imperialist intervention” in the USSR.180 Had the “imperialists” been anywhere near as aggressive as he and Soviet propaganda painted them, they would have taken full advantage of his reckless destabilization.
Almost no one had foreseen Stalin’s stunning turn to complete liquidation of the kulaks, but now came another bolt from the blue: on March 2, 1930, Pravda published his article “Dizzy with Success,” castigating local functionaries as “blockheads” caught up in “communist vainglory” who “feared acknowledging their errors.” Stalin took no responsibility himself for the dislocation. “The collective farm must not be imposed by force,” he admonished. “That would be stupid and reactionary.”181
Despite his apparent retreat, intended to ease the pressure, the OGPU reports on domestic rebellion kept coming: uprisings in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Central Black Earth region, Siberia’s Barabinsk steppe.182 Enraged especially about the overthrow of Soviet governing bodies along the frontier with Poland, Stalin privately ripped into the OGPU “to stop making speeches and act more decisively” (March 19, 1930). An offended Vsevolod Balytsky, Ukraine OGPU chief, claimed to the republic party boss, Kosior, that he was already doing just that, from a command post in the field. Orjonikidze, dispatched to the scene, wrote that peasant rebellions in border regions were being smashed “using machine guns and, in some places, cannons.”183
Trotsky, of all people, published an open letter to the Communist party (dated March 23) condemning the “adventurism” of violent collectivization and breakneck industrialization. Very few Soviet Communists could read the exile’s text, but they did not have to.184 The Pravda issue with Stalin’s article was reselling for 3, 4, or 5 rubles in the countryside, and peasants were gathering to listen to it being read.185 One peasant in the Lower Volga observed, “We have two governments—one in the center that writes to take back everything and the other local one that does not want this.”186 In fact, some local officials did reject Stalin’s retreat. “If they saw someone with a newspaper, they beat them harder and condemned: ‘So, you’re reading comrade Stalin’s article,’” M. Kvasov wrote, in a letter published in Peasant Newspaper, apropos of a village assembly on March 27. “When the peasants showed the party cell secretary, Petrov, Stalin’s article, they declared, ‘You are concealing the party line.’ But Petrov answered coldly: ‘You, comrades, are non-party, and this does not concern you. Don’t believe everything in the newspapers.’187 Local officials began to accuse Stalin of “right deviationism.”188
In the regime’s urban strongholds, money was giving way to barter amid galloping inflation, coins (which contained silver) were being hoarded, and even cigarettes could not be had. “At Moscow Tricotage no. 3,” a trade union functionary wrote in his diary (March 14), “one worker gave a speech stating, ‘Stalin wrote a correct article, only late. Bukharin wrote about this half a year ago and now it is being done Bukharin’s way. Ilich was right, saying, “Don’t trust Stalin, he will ruin you.” ’”189 Moscow provincial party boss Kārlis Baumanis—who had been ahead of Stalin in publicly promoting wholesale collectivization—was now made a sacrificial lamb, accused of extreme leftism. Kaganovich replaced him as party boss for Moscow in April 1930, while remaining a Central Committee secretary. Dispatched to Western Siberia that month (Roberts Eihe, the party boss there, was said to have appendicitis), Kaganovich got an earful, but he forced the local party bureau to adopt a secret resolution condemning as “leftist” their complaints against Stalin’s scapegoating of them.190
Nikolai Kin, a worker in the southern Ukraine city of Kherson, sent Stalin a blistering rebuttal to “Dizzy with Success,” detailing how the Central Committee was at fault, the party’s authority was damaged, and regime policies were self-defeating: “We are liquidating the kulak, and developing orphans and the indigent, throwing the children of kulaks, who are guilty of nothing, on the street.” Stalin responded privately. “Time will pass, the fury will subside, and you will understand that you are incorrect from beginning to end,” he wrote (April 22), admonishing Kin not to take pride in being a worker. “Among workers all kinds of people are found, good ones, bad ones. I know old workers with long experience in production who are still following the Mensheviks and even now cannot emancipate themselves from nostalgia for the old capitalist masters. Yes, comrade Kin, all kinds of workers are found on the earth.”191
PROPAGANDA AND HUNGER
To immense fanfare, on April 25, 1930, the separate constructions of the northern and southern sections of the Turkestan–Siberian Railway, known as Turksib, were joined at Aina-Bulak, some eight months ahead of schedule, using excavators purchased abroad and gargantuan amounts of manual labor, amid climate extremes and self-generated chaos. The Soviets engaged and persecuted “bourgeois” specialists and Kazakh jataki (horsemen without herds); unemployed Slavic workers had flocked in for the ration cards. The upshot would be Siberian grain imported to Central Asia to allow further expansion of cotton crops, and, in the short term, a propaganda coup.192 To the ceremony/banquet for thousands in the steppes (“Long Live Turksib! Long Live Stalin!”), a special train from Moscow carried officials and foreign guests, “a microcosm of the Soviet world . . . and its capitalist encirclement,” quipped an American journalist.193 A single Turksib could occlude many fiascoes, especially for people who wanted to believe. Not every person would be ideologized to the same depth, but life outside Communism was becoming unthinkable.194
The Rostov Agricultural Engineering Works followed, the largest of its kind in Europe, pronounced complete on June 1, 1930, after three years of construction.195 An iconic power station, Dneprostroi, at the cataracts of the Dnieper in Soviet Ukraine, was under fevered construction. Never mind that, for a time, half the derricks were occupied picking up the other half: the symbolism of harnessing nature in order to power a new industrial complex of projected aluminum plants and an integrated steel plant at Zaporozhe was linked in saturation coverage to individual transformation. “We build the dam, and the dam builds us” became the oft-repeated slogan.196 Epic constructions of the state-of-the-art steel blast furnaces—and of new people—at far-off Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk were bathed in bright spotlights, too, attracting hordes of foreign correspondents, many of whom were moved to renounce their skepticism.
The sites also drew peasant laborers seeking to transform themselves, escape from dekulakization, or find food. Reports of spot food shortages and starvation-induced disease were most extensive already in summer 1930 and emerged from the Central Black Earth region, the North Caucasus, Ukraine, the Soviet Far East, and Western Siberia.197 The authorities in Kiev implored Mikoyan to send emergency supplies (“All local resources have been used”). The OGPU noted that collective farmers in Ukraine were refusing to work because they were not being fed, threatening a vicious food-shortage circle.198 But it was in the Kazakh autonomous republic that hunger and mass flight were most extensive in the summer of 1930. More than 150,000 Kazakhs, and their nearly 1 million head of livestock, were said to be heading for Siberia, Uzbekistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and China.199 Propaganda notwithstanding, the collectivization that was supposed to finance industrialization was instead threatening to starve it.200
LUCK BEYOND BELIEF
Stalin kept up the pressure to suppress resistance; the OGPU had made 140,724 arrests between January 1 and April 15, 1930, and from the latter date through September 30 it would make another 142,993. But he was powerless to reverse an anticollectivization wave unintentionally incited by his “Dizzy with Success” article.201 The proportion of collectivized households, on paper, would collapse, from 56 percent as of March 1, 1930, to 24 percent by the summer.202 In the Tatar autonomous republic, collectivized households fell from 83 to 13 percent. Altogether, perhaps 8 million households quit, taking 7 million draft animals. At the same time, at least 5 million households remained in collectives, and more than 4 million of them had joined only recently, meaning that this was their first agricultural season in the new way.203 The regime’s violence and the peasants’ resistance had put the spring sowing and thus the fall harvest under threat, with consequences for industrialization. Stalin—and the country—needed a miracle.
Getting collective farms up and running was not for the squeamish. A few 25,000ers were able to pry loose scarce tools, scrap metal, construction materials for barns and silos, spare parts for machines, generators, books, tobacco, and workers from their home factories for their collective farms, and many put their skills to use as mechanics to repair inventory. Peasants went from threatening 25,000ers to protesting their transfers.204 Tellingly, the vast majority of the volunteers would end up staying in the countryside as new rural officials. (On average, a 25,000er ended up in one of every three collective farms in the principal grain-growing regions, and in one of every five collective farms overall.) By and large, despite minimal regime support and their own ignorance, it seems they helped salvage the spring 1930 sowing season. One key contribution was their introduction of the brigade system into the fields.205
Regime concessions were even more consequential for the spring sowing. Peasants who quit collective farms were given back their seed grain if they promised to sow crops. Belatedly, the regime made clear that although the main fields, draft horses, and plows would be collectivized, some livestock could remain in households’ possession. For those who stayed in the collectives, gigantomania, whereby entire counties were combined into a single collective farm, was abandoned.206 Those who remained were also permitted to cultivate their own household plots of fruit and vegetables. Perhaps 33 percent of what these farmers grew in 1930 would come from these plots. The regime was keen to demonstrate the collectives’ superiority to individual household farming and allowed the collective farms to retain a sizable 3.5 tons of grain per household. Stalin would never again countenance such a generous retention. What the farmers did not consume, they could sell. Stalin assumed that the collectively worked fields would soon render small household plots and the maintenance of animals uneconomical, but for now his regime sent out a decree to “forbid the closing of markets, reopen bazaars, and not hinder the sale of their products on the market by peasants, including collective farmers.”207
Beyond 25,000er mobilization and grudging regime flexibility, local solutions to the chaos emerged. The central authorities had proved unable to settle on how collective farmers would be compensated, but the farmers sowed crops anyway as locales came up with their own compensation formulas.208 Sheer luck made an incalculable contribution in the form of spectacularly favorable weather. “Nature gave us an extra month of spring,” one official rejoiced, and, given how late the sowing campaign had begun, that month was crucial for the harvest.209 With harvest projections suddenly going from doubtful to promising, grain exports to earn hard currency for machinery imports would be increased far beyond what the Five-Year Plan had anticipated for 1930, to more than 5 million tons. Mikoyan crowed at a Moscow regional party conference in early June that “one more year, and we shall not only secure ourselves enough grain, but become one of the largest grain producers in the whole world.”210
LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE
In the early summer of 1930, Stalin had sent Nadya to German doctors in Karlsbad for a stomach ailment. “Tatka! . . . What was the journey like, what did you see, have you been to the doctors, what do they say about your health, write to me,” he wrote on June 21. “We open the [party] congress on the 26th. Things are not too bad. I miss you very much. Tatochka, I am at home alone, like an owl. . . . Come home soon. I kiss you.”211 The 16th Party Congress opened as scheduled, the first since December 1927 and a massive affair, attended by 2,159 delegates, 1,268 of them with voting rights. Yet another purge had expelled more than 170,000 party members, especially in the countryside, for “passivity,” drunkenness, “defects in personal life,” “alien” social origins, or being “concealed” Trotskyites, and intimidated those who sympathized with the rightists.212 But because of new recruitment of worker members, sometimes of entire factory shops, membership in 1930 would rise by more than 500,000, to 2.2 million. Still, that was 1.4 percent of a total population of perhaps 160 million. Only one quarter of state functionaries belonged to the party, and in industrial management it was significantly less.213
Stalin’s lengthy political report, over both the morning and the afternoon of June 27, proceeded in his now familiar catechism fashion of rhetorical questions, enumerated points, and key-phrase repetition, in a self-congratulatory tone. “Today there is an economic crisis in nearly all the industrial countries of capitalism,” he gloated. “The illusions about the omnipotence of capitalism in general, and about the omnipotence of North American capitalism in particular, are collapsing.” He deemed the crisis one of overproduction, and asserted that capitalism’s contradictions were sharpening, which goaded the bourgeoisie to foreign adventurism. “Capitalist encirclement is not simply a geographical conception,” he warned. “It means that around the USSR there are hostile class forces, ready to support our class enemies within the USSR morally, materially, by means of financial blockade, and, when the opportunity arises, by means of military intervention.” Stalin bragged, however, that the party’s industrialization tempos were making the Trotskyite super-industrialists of the 1920s seem “the most extreme minimalists and the most wretched capitulators. (Laughter. Applause.)”214
Stalin remonstrated that “people who chatter about the necessity of reducing the rate of development of industry are enemies of socialism, agents of our class enemies (applause).” “Dizzy with Success” rural caution was abandoned: “Either we vanquish and crush them, the exploiters, or they will vanquish and crush the workers and peasants of the USSR.”215 Because the “socialist sector” had come to dominate the economy, he declared, the USSR had entered “the period of socialism.” Congress delegates enjoyed the right to purchase scarce goods at the restricted OGPU store, including fabric for a suit (3 meters for just 54 rubles), a coat, a shirt, a pair of shoes, two pairs of underwear, two knitting needles, two chunks of regular soap, and one of bath soap. They also received, gratis, 800 grams of meat, 800 grams of cheese, 1 kilo of smoked sausage, 80 grams of sugar, 100 grams of tea, and 125 cigarettes. “This is, of course, a blatant buy-off,” observed Ivan Shitts, a Russified Baltic German (Shutz) and an editor at the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in his diary, noting that despite propaganda trumpeting the “heady growth of production,” the opportunity to buy mundane goods was treated as a perquisite.216
Budyonny, the country’s most famous horseman, joked at the congress that “we will destroy the horse as a class.” He had in mind not the peasants’ destruction of livestock, which the regime had provoked, but the introduction of tractors. Just in time for the congress, the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, whose construction had been rushed through the brutal winter, produced its first tractor. Stalin had sent a congratulatory telegram, printed in Pravda on June 18, thanking “our teachers in technology, the American specialists and technicians,” and lauding the plant’s prospective annual tractor output as “50,000 missiles exploding the old bourgeois world, and laying the road to a new socialist order in the countryside.”217 This was the USSR’s first conveyor belt plant, but only 60 percent of the machine tools had been installed. Instead of a planned 2,000 tractors in the July–September 1930 quarter, the factory would produce 43, and an American engineer on-site noted that “after 70 hours of work they begin to go to pieces.” Soviet steel was awful, copper ribbon for radiators arrived scratched beyond use, thousands of the assembly-line workers were touching nuts and bolts for the first time. Two of the high-priced American engineers died from typhoid; others begged to go home.218 Mastering Fordist assembly lines would take time. But a twenty-five-year-old Pravda correspondent, before he died of tuberculosis, gushed about the “uninterrupted flow of life, if you wish, the conveyor belt of History, the laws of its development in socialist conditions with all its breakdowns, terrible disruptions, savagery, filth, outrages.”219
At pre-congress meetings in educational academies, factories, and major party organizations, sharp attacks had been leveled at party policy.220 But rather than attempt to lead this widespread sentiment—that is, behave like an opposition—Rykov and Tomsky had traveled to party gatherings and warned of attempts by “petit bourgeois elements” in the village and the “bourgeoisie” abroad to take advantage of divisions inside the party. Their reward was to be rebuked at the congress for insufficient zeal in repudiating their potential followers.221
Bukharin, ill with pneumonia—what Trotsky contracted while under political assault—had gone to Crimea, where he hooked up with Anna Larina; she was sixteen, he was forty-one.222 Rykov was left to shoulder the burden and, through vicious heckling, once again admitted his errors (“of tremendous political significance”) but denied that he was part of any opposition.223 During the proceedings, Stalin wrote to Nadya (July 2) in Germany, “Tatka! I got all three letters. I could not reply immediately, as I was very busy. Now at last I am free. The congress will end the 10–12th. I shall be expecting you, do not be too long coming home. But stay longer, if your health makes it necessary. . . . I kiss you.”224 The congress dragged on to the 13th. Tomsky, Bukharin, and Rykov were reelected to the Central Committee, which returned Rykov to the politburo. But Tomsky was left out of the politburo, and his people were systematically purged from trade union positions. “It could be said that this is a violation of proletarian democracy,” Kaganovich told the congress delegates, apropos of the firings, “but comrades, it has long been known that for us Bolsheviks democracy is no fetish.”225
Kaganovich was “elected” to full membership in the politburo. Voroshilov and Orjonikidze departed the capital immediately for holidays of around two months. On July 17, the Stalin loyalist Sergei Kirov reported on the party congress to the Leningrad party organization he oversaw. “In a word, do not be in a hurry,” he said, mocking the rightists. “If the question arises that it is necessary to press the kulak, why do it? We are building socialism anyway, and sooner or later the kulak himself will disappear. . . . If we need to conduct grain collections, if the kulak must hand over his surplus, why squeeze him when the price paid could be raised and he will then give it over himself. . . . In a word, the rightists are for socialism, but without particular fuss, without struggle, without difficulties.”226
Two days later, state bank chairman Pyatakov, the recanted Trotskyite, who had been talking heart to heart to Orjonikidze, wrote to Stalin detailing a fiscal crisis and runaway inflation from lack of attention to costs and promiscuous printing of money. He proposed radically streamlining imports, curbing exports of animal products, raising prices on many goods, and tightening expenditures at the wasteful iconic construction projects.227 It was, effectively, a belated post-congress brief for a course correction. Stalin did not immediately respond.
AN ANTICAPITALIST SYSTEM IN EMBRYO
Stalin’s personal dictatorship—known as the party’s “secret department”—got a new director on July 22, 1930: Alexander Poskryobyshev (b. 1891), whose father, like Stalin’s, had been a cobbler and who had trained as a nurse before the revolution. “One day,” the shaven-headed Poskryobyshev would recall, “Stalin summoned me and said, ‘Poskryobyshev, you have a frightful look about you. You’ll terrify people.’ And he engaged me.”228 On July 23, Stalin departed for his annual southern holiday, taking Poskryobyshev with him. Molotov was left to mind the store in Moscow. Nadya, after visiting her brother Pavel Alliluyev, the Soviet trade representative in Berlin, had returned from Germany and joined her husband. On July 26, Stalin’s Rolls-Royce, exiting the territory of the Puzanovka dacha, crashed into a car from the nearby resort Red Storm. Nadya, Budyonny, and Stalin’s main bodyguard, Ivan Jūsis, were also in the vehicle. A piece of flying glass cut Stalin’s left eyebrow.229
Stalin had been suffering occasional dizziness and a flaring of nerves, and doctors confirmed a diagnosis of neurasthenia.230, 231 His medical record for 1930, signed by Usher Leib “Lev” Levin, a top Kremlin physician who had taken care of Lenin, characterized the ruler’s living conditions (“good”), diet (“good”), work conditions (“intellectual, significant, interesting, indeterminate number of hours in the day”), drinking (“rare”), and smoking (“a lot”). It listed his appendectomy, which had left a scar, and illnesses over the years (chest pains, flu, polyarthritis, chronic tonsillitis, coughing). Stalin’s outward appearance was noted as “fatigued”; his liver and spleen as not enlarged. He was said to have frequent pain in his left shoulder muscles, which were atrophying, a result of a childhood contusion. Down south, he had his usual joint and muscle aches and undertook sulfur baths at Matsesta, near Sochi, which worked wonders. “After the course of baths, K. E. Voroshilov came over for a walk, and they drank cold, naturally carbonated water,” Stalin’s physician, Ivan Valedinsky, recalled. “After the walk Stalin’s throat hurt, [and he developed] so-called follicular sore throat with attacks and flaring.” Stalin’s temperature reached 102. It took four days to drop. After that, he complained of pains in his left leg. Valedinsky saw his patient every day for three weeks, and the dictator appreciated his company, speaking to him on a wide variety of topics: labor discipline, collective farms, the intelligentsia. When it was time for Valedinsky to depart, Stalin inquired how he could recompense him. “I asked for help in changing my apartment, which was a former merchant’s horse stable,” the doctor recalled. “Stalin smiled after this conversation. When I returned to Moscow, I was called by the Central Committee and told they would show me an ‘object,’ which turned out to be a five-room apartment.”232
Stalin cherished his recuperative time on the Black Sea. On August 13, 1930, he notified Molotov, back in Moscow, “P.S. Bit by bit I’m getting better.” Exactly one month later, he would write, “I’m now completely recovered.”233 But, as always, this was a working holiday, and he received ciphered telegrams every day, and fat packets of longer documents eight to twelve times a month. Many of the far-reaching changes to the country and the regime he set in motion the previous winter and spring were now consolidated.234 The secret police enjoyed a further ballooning in personnel.235 Strangely, there had been a reversal of fortunes between agriculture and industry. Meat and dairy production had fallen off a cliff, but the grain harvest—ultimately fixed at 77.2 million tons—turned out to be the best in Soviet history to date.236 With the agricultural cooperatives that had been marketing peasant products transformed into collectors of grain, and machine tractor stations also facilitating collections, the regime would procure a whopping 22 million tons at state-set prices. (The peasants ate or sold the rest on the market.)237 All the while, however, from July through September 1930, critical metal-producing and fuel industries declined, undermining industry as a whole. Labor supply became tight, railways devolved into bottlenecks, and inflation proceeded unabated. Glaring underproduction of tractors compared with plan targets and mass loss of livestock cast doubt on agriculture’s future, too.
Already in the summer and fall of 1930, while luminaries such as H. G. Wells, the British science fiction writer, were lauding the Five-Year Plan as “the most important thing in the world today,” the “planlessness” of Soviet planning was exposed in an incisive analysis by the Menshevik émigré newspaper Socialist Herald, which pointed out that setting maximal quantitative targets and goading each factory to meet them, where some would succeed and others not, and where even successes would be at varied levels, rendered coherence impossible. Overfulfilling the output target of nuts only led to waste if they exceeded the production of bolts; an increased supply of bricks provided no extra utility with insufficient mortar.238 Hoarding and wheeling and dealing via illegal markets—a shadow economy—became indispensable to the working of the “planned” economy but rendered shortages and corruption endemic. “We buy up materials we do not need,” noted the head of supply at Moscow’s electrical engineering plant, “so that we can barter them for what we do need.”239 With no legal market mechanisms to control quality, defective goods proliferated. Even priority industrial customers suffered anywhere from 8 to 80 percent defective inputs, with no alternative suppliers, and one factory’s poor inputs became another factory’s low-quality output.240
Stalin was well informed about the problems.241 But he understood next to nothing of the structural pathologies he had embedded by eliminating private property and legal market mechanisms. Unaccountable regional party machines, meanwhile, were consumed by skirmishing. After a collective denunciation had arrived from Western Siberia against Roberts Eihe, Stalin wrote to Molotov (August 13, 1930) that Siberia had just been divided into two regions, west and east, and that no one had complained about Eihe when he had run all of Siberia. “Suddenly Eihe turns out to be ‘unable to cope’ with his assignments? I have no doubt this is a crudely masked attempt to deceive the Central Committee and create ‘their own’ artel-like regional committee based on mutual protection. I advise you to kick out all the intriguers and . . . put full trust in Eihe.”242 Convoluted infighting near his holiday dacha, in the South Caucasus federation, involving Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan party bosses, was giving Stalin fits.243
The dictator also kept a close eye on Mikhail Kalinin, who enjoyed a high profile because of his peasant origins and his role as ceremonial head of state (chairman of the Soviet central executive committee).244 At the politburo, Kalinin occasionally allowed himself to vote against Stalin (as in the case of closing the cafeteria for the Society of Old Political Prisoners). Orjonikidze, at the party Control Commission, had received materials from the tsarist police archives to the effect that Kalinin, as well as Jānis Rudzutaks, had squealed while under arrest, leading to incarceration of other comrades in the underground.245 Then, individuals accused of belonging to a fabricated “Laboring Peasant Party” testified in prison about their plans to include Kalinin in a replacement government. Molotov hesitated to circulate the extracted testimony. “That Kalinin has sinned cannot be doubted,” Stalin insisted (August 23), intent on narrowing Kalinin’s scope to act independently. “The Central Committee must definitely be informed about this in order to teach Kalinin never to get mixed up with such rascals again.”246
Even as he attended to his personal power, Stalin drove the financing of industrialization. “We have one and a half months left to export grain: starting in late October (perhaps even earlier), American grain will come onto the market in massive quantities, and we will not be able to withstand that,” he warned Molotov (August 23). “Once again: we must force through grain exports with all our might.”247 Stalin insisted on sales even though world grain prices had fallen 6 percent in 1929 and would fall another 49 percent in 1930. (The equivalent of a year’s grain exports were being stockpiled across countries.) Prices for industrial machinery remained more or less stable, meaning that in 1930, twice as much Soviet grain had to be exported per unit of machinery imported than had been the case in 1928.248 “Some clever people will come along and propose holding off on the shipments until the price of grain on the world markets rises ‘to its ceiling,’” he cautioned Molotov in the August 23 letter. “There are quite a few of these clever people in trade. They ought to be horsewhipped, because they are dragging us into a trap. In order to hold out, we must have hard currency reserves. But we don’t have them. . . . In short, we must push grain exports furiously.”249
The Soviets would export just over 5 million tons of grain at an average price of only 30 rubles per ton (half that of 1926); they would earn 157.8 million foreign-currency rubles, equivalent to a bit more than $80 million.250 But whereas Soviet cereals had effectively accounted for zero percent of world market share in 1928, before 1930 was over the USSR would capture fully 15 percent.251
Stalin continued to insist that the economic troubles in the capitalist world had only reinforced the dependence of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states on the imperialist powers, which eyed these states as platforms for attacking the Soviet Union. In fact, the Polish government had secretly rebuffed the urgent entreaties of the Ukrainian national movement in Poland to invade the Soviet Union, evidently deterred by Soviet military measures on the frontier.252 Still, Stalin warned Molotov about likely provocations by Poland or Romania and about Polish diplomacy. “The Poles are certain to be putting together (if they have not already done so) a bloc of Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Finland) in anticipation of a war against the USSR,” he wrote (September 1, 1930). “To repulse both the Polish-Romanians and the Balts we should prepare to deploy (in the event of war) no fewer than 150 to 160 infantry divisions, that is, (at least) 40 to 50 divisions more than are provided for under our current guidelines. This means that we will have to bring our current army reserves up from 640,000 to 700,000 men.” Otherwise, Stalin asserted, “we are not going to be able to defend Leningrad and the right bank of Ukraine.”253
CONSPIRACY OF LOGIC
The bulkiest papers in Stalin’s holiday mailbag had become OGPU reports of plots and accompanying protocols of interrogation. Thousands of specialists had been sentenced.254 From Sochi, Stalin had instructed Molotov to circulate to Central Committee members new “testimony” extracted from specialists in two agencies (food supply and the statistical administration). That same day, in a belated and indirect response to Pyatakov’s devastating memo on state finances, Stalin wrote to Mężyński demanding a report on “the struggle” against speculators.255 He had also written to Molotov “that two or three dozen wreckers from the [finance commissariat] must be executed.” He wanted them linked to the rightists, adding that “a whole group of wreckers in the meat industry must definitely be shot and their names published in the press.”256 Pravda (September 3) duly publicized arrests of prominent specialists. Executions would follow.
Privately, Stalin acknowledged his didactic purposes. “By the way,” he wrote to Molotov, apropos of a “Menshevik Party” trial, “how about Misters Defendants admitting their mistakes and disgracing themselves politically, while simultaneously acknowledging the strength of the Soviet government and the correctness of the method of collectivization? It would not be a bad thing if they did.”257 A scapegoat dimension was also manifest: on September 13, he wrote that supply commissariat “wreckers” had plotted to “cause hunger in the country and provoke unrest among the broad masses and thus facilitate the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”258 Pravda announced the executions of forty-eight “food wreckers,” and the OGPU reported worker approval and intelligentsia disapproval of the sentences. (“In tsarist times there were also executions, but they were rare; now they look at people as if they are dogs.”)259 Stalin issued instructions for a trial of a “Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine,” which was staged in Kharkov’s Opera House with forty-five defendants: writers, theologians, philologists, schoolteachers, a librarian, medical personnel. “We ought not to hide the sins of our enemies from the workers,” he wrote to the bosses of Soviet Ukraine. “In addition, let so-called ‘Europe’ know that the repressions against the counterrevolutionary part of the specialists who try to poison and infect Communists-patients are completely justified.”260
The entire country, it seemed, was honeycombed with wreckers—including in the Red Army command: on September 10, 1930, Mężyński sent Stalin interrogation protocols incriminating Tukhachevsky and other high-placed military men in a conspiracy against the regime.261
Tukhachevsky had been demoted from chief of staff to commander of the Leningrad military district. He remained a polarizing figure, a former nobleman who mixed prominently with tsarist general staff types, even though he had never gone to the general staff academy. Many people deemed him, as one put it, “smart, energetic, firm, but vile to the last degree, nothing sacred besides his own direct advantage.”262 At a public book discussion, he had been the target of resentful shouts in the hall (“You should be hung for 1920,” a reference to the Polish-Soviet War debacle).263 Recently, he had submitted a fourteen-page memorandum to Voroshilov calling for massive increases in military industry. Tukhachevsky argued that no modern army could prevail without tanks, aircraft, chemical weapons, and parachute infantry for greater mobility. He called for annual production of no less than 50,000 tanks and 40,000 airplanes (which would rise in the future to 197,000 tanks and 122,500 aircraft). This unsolicited program had put Voroshilov—already anxious about Stalin’s fondness for Uborevičius, another modernizer—on the spot.
Voroshilov had had the memo vivisected by the new chief of staff, Shaposhnikov. Although Tukhachevsky had not specified the size of his proposed standing army, Shaposhnikov reckoned it at a preposterous 11 million, fully 7.5 percent of the Soviet population.264 Then the defense commissar had sat on these materials for weeks.265 Immediately after “Dizzy with Success” was published castigating excesses, Voroshilov had sent the original and Shaposhnikov’s damning assessment to Stalin, noting that “Tukhachevsky wants to be original and . . . ‘radical.’”266 Stalin had answered, “You know that I greatly respect comrade Tukhachevsky as an especially capable comrade,” a remarkable admission. But Stalin, too, dismissed Tukhachevsky’s “‘fantastic’ plan” as out of touch with “the real possibilities of the economic, financial, and cultural order,” and concluded that “to implement such a ‘plan’ would entail ruining both the country’s economy and the army. It would be worse than any counterrevolution.”267
Stalin’s letter had deemed Tukhachevsky a victim of “faddish ‘leftism,’” but in Mężyński’s September 10, 1930, letter, he was accused of harboring “rightist” sentiments as the head of a military plot. Collectivization had provoked hints of wavering in the Red Army (something Voroshilov denied), and Stalin was preternaturally given to seeing an ideological affinity between the party right deviation and the tsarist-era officers. Police informants who suffused the military milieu reported gossip, on the basis of which the OGPU had arrested two military academy teachers close to Tukhachevsky.268 At first their “testimony” was vague, involving his Gypsy lover (who might be working for foreign intelligence), but under police direction they began to “recollect” Tukhachevsky’s possible links to “right deviationists,” until soon enough they spoke of a monarchist-military plot to seize power.269 “I reported this case to comrade Molotov and asked for authorization, while awaiting your directives,” Mężyński wrote in his letter to Stalin, asking whether he should immediately arrest all the top military men named or await Stalin’s return, which, given the alleged existence of a coup plot, could be risky. Stalin instructed Mężyński to “limit yourself to maximally careful surveillance.”270
Had Stalin believed in the existence of a genuine military plot, could he have suggested waiting to arrest the plotters and remained on holiday, far from the capital, for another month? It is impossible to establish his thinking definitively. Still, it appears that for him the “coup plot” derived not from facts per se, but from Marxist-Leninist logic: criticism of collectivization ipso facto meant support for capitalism; support for capitalism meant colluding with the imperialists; furthering the cause of imperialism meant effectively plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime; plotting an overthrow perforce entailed assassinating Stalin, since he embodied the building of socialism.
Elections in Germany on September 14, 1930, meanwhile, delivered a sensation: the National Socialists received 6.37 million votes, 18.25 percent of the total, and increased their parliamentary deputies from 12 to 107, becoming the second-largest party in the Reichstag, after the Social Democrats, at 143. Communist deputies increased from 54 to 77. Pravda (September 16) deemed the vote a “temporary success of the bourgeoisie,” even while noting that millions of those who had voted for the Nazis had rejected the existing order.
Stalin at this time seems to have been more fixated on his nemesis Rykov, complaining to Molotov (September 13) that “the Council of People’s Commissars is paralyzed by Rykov’s insipid and essentially anti-party speeches. . . . Clearly, this cannot continue. Radical measures are needed. As to what kind, I shall tell you when I get to Moscow.” But Stalin could not wait, writing again from Sochi, “Rykov and his lot must go as well. This is now inevitable. . . . But for the time being, this is just between you and me.” By September 22, Stalin was urging Molotov to take Rykov’s place as head of government. “With the arrangement I am proposing to you,” Stalin noted, “we will finally have a perfect union between the top levels of the state and the party, and this will reinforce our power.” Stalin instructed Molotov to discuss the idea “in a tight circle with close friends” and report any objections. He appears to have written the same to Kaganovich.271 Stalin also showed deep frustration over circumvention of central directives, despite newspaper exposés. In the same letter, he proposed “a standing commission established for the sole purpose of systematically checking up on implementation of the center’s decisions.”272
From reports of eavesdropped conversations, Stalin could read that the populace was unhappy with the consequences of wholesale collectivization, dekulakization, and accelerated industrialization—which was why Rykov was especially dangerous: he was a leader who could rally the disaffected and the opportunistic. It was not Rykov alone, moreover: at a politburo meeting on September 16, 1930, the Stalin protégé Syrtsov, head of the Russian republic’s Council of People’s Commissars, had agreed with Rykov, head of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars, regarding an accumulation of problems not being addressed, and supported Rykov’s proposals to sell scarce goods, such as sugar, at market prices to stabilize state finances.273 Molotov told the dictator that at the politburo meeting, Syrtsov had spoken “with frantic right-wing opportunist claims that it is not possible to solve acute economic problems with repressive ‘OGPU’ methods.”274 Despite Stalin’s impatience, the removal of Rykov—an ethnic Russian with a peasant background, who had worked with Lenin, occupied Lenin’s former position, and refused to embrace the role of opposition—would be no simple matter.275
Stalin forwarded the OGPU interrogation protocols incriminating Tukhachevsky to Orjonikidze on September 24. “Read without delay the testimony,” he suggested. “The material, as you see, is utterly secret, and Molotov, myself, and now you are the only ones to know about it. I do not know if Klim knows. It turned out that Tukhachevsky is a captive of anti-Soviet elements and was thoroughly worked over by anti-Soviet elements from the ranks of the rightists. . . . Is it possible? Of course, it is possible, since it is not excluded. . . . It seems the rightists are prepared to embark on the path of military dictatorship if only to escape from the Central Committee, collective and state farms, Bolshevik tempos of industrialization.” Here, again, was that objective “logic” of conspiracy. And yet, Stalin concluded the letter ambiguously: “We cannot end this affair in the usual way (immediate arrest and so on). We need to think this through.”276
On October 2, 1930, Mężyński sent Stalin interrogation materials relating to a clandestine Industrial Party. “To the OGPU, comrade Mężyński. In person only. From Stalin,” the dictator wrote back, specifying the exact content of the conspiracies and demanding corroborating testimony, which, if extracted, “will be a serious victory for the OGPU.” Stalin either believed or made it appear that he believed in the fabrications, instructing Mężyński’s interrogators to ascertain: “1) Why was the [foreign military] intervention in 1930 put off? 2) Is it because Poland was not ready? 3) Perhaps because Romania was not ready? 4) Perhaps because the Baltic states and Romania have not yet come to terms with Poland? 5) Why have they put off the attack to 1931? 6) Might they put it off to 1932?” Stalin added that the confessions would be made available to “the workers of the world. We shall launch as broad a campaign as possible against interventionists and thwart them in their attempts for the next one or two years, which is of great significance to us. Everything understood?”277
RUN THE GOVERNMENT?
Nadya had already returned to Moscow in August. “How was your travel?” Stalin had written with tenderness (September 2, 1930). “Write about everything, my Tatochka. I’m getting a little better. Your Iosif.” Writing again, he asked her to send his textbook for English.278 On September 8, he had written her about his difficult dental work. He sent peaches and lemons from his Sochi orchard. But something was amiss. “The Molotovs scolded me for leaving you alone,” she answered him (September 19). “I explained my departure by reference to my studies, but that of course was not the real reason. This summer I did not feel that you would like me if I prolonged my stay; quite the contrary. Last summer I felt very much that you would, but this time I did not. Of course, there was no point in staying in such a mood. Write, if my letter does not make you cross, but as you like. All the best. A Kiss. Nadya.” Stalin (September 24) denied that her presence had been undesirable (“Tell the Molotovs from me that they are wrong”) and assured her that, despite having had eight teeth filed down in a single day, “I am healthy and feel better than ever.” On September 30, she wrote that she had required an operation on her throat and had been bedridden for days. On October 6, she complained that “for some reason I am not hearing anything from you. . . . Probably you are distracted by your quail-hunting trips. . . . I heard from a young, interesting lady that you are looking fantastic—she saw you at lunch at Kalinin’s. She said that you were exceptionally jolly and gave no rest to everyone taken aback by your personage. I am glad to hear it.”279
On October 7, Molotov, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, Kuibyshev, Mikoyan, and Kaganovich—but not Kirov (in Leningrad), Kosior (in Ukraine), Rudzutaks, or Kalinin (both away on holiday and outside the innermost circle)—met without Stalin to discuss his proposal that Molotov replace Rykov.280 The next day, Voroshilov wrote to Sochi that “Mikoyan, Molotov, Kaganovich, in part Kuibyshev, and I think that the best resolution would be unification of the leadership.” He left out Orjonikidze. Voroshilov added that “as never before, the Council of People’s Commissars needs someone with the strategist’s gift.” Stalin’s episodic interventions in day-to-day government operations had a disruptive quality, and regularizing them could be beneficial.281 It is also possible that they reasoned that having Stalin shoulder responsibility for the details of government could diminish his dictatorial behavior, for someone else would have to run the controlling party apparatus. Voroshilov admitted in his letter that “the most important, the most, from my point of view, acute question in the combination under discussion would be the party leadership.”282
Mikoyan, in a separate letter, affirmed his support for “a consolidated leadership,” “like what we had when Ilich was alive.” Kaganovich wrote to Stalin (October 9) leaving it to him to decide, noting that “the most important strategic maneuvers in the economy and politics were determined, and would be determined, by you, wherever you might be. But will things get better if there is a change? I doubt it.” He concluded that this argued for Molotov’s appointment. Molotov wrote that same day, listing the reasons he was unsuitable and encouraging Stalin to take the post, but acknowledging that party work and the Comintern would suffer. Unsurprisingly, Stalin decided to hold on to the party apparatus, which afforded him the final word on policy and personnel without the day-to-day burdens of the government. Orjonikidze had ascertained from private conversations that Stalin felt it was “inexpedient at the current time to have a complete (including externally, in front of the whole world) merger . . . of the party and Soviet leadership.” Orjonikidze, perhaps the other obvious choice to replace Rykov, agreed with Stalin that Molotov should be the one. “He [Molotov] expressed doubts about how much authority he would hold for the likes of us,” Orjonikidze wrote to Stalin, “but of course all that is nonsense.”283
FICTION
Stalin returned to Moscow and, on October 14, 1930, received the OGPU hierarchs Mężyński and Olsky (the newly named head of the special department for the army).284 That same day, Bukharin phoned him on Old Square, requesting a face-to-face meeting. Stalin had forwarded to Bukharin some Industrial Party interrogations that mentioned a terrorist plot against the dictator, with connections to the right deviation. On the phone, Stalin accused Bukharin of fostering an atmosphere for terrorist acts by criticizing the party line. Bukharin exploded that day in a private letter: “I consider your accusations monstrous, demented slander, wild and, in the last analysis, unintelligent.” Stalin circulated the missive to the other politburo members.285 On October 15, the politburo removed Pyatakov from the state bank but postponed a decision on Bukharin until he could appear in person.286
Formal politburo sessions continued to take place, as in the time of Lenin, in the rectangular meeting room on the third floor of the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, in front of Lenin’s preserved corner office. But officials were bypassing formal structures to obtain Stalin’s approval. Back from holiday, in his Old Square office, he received economics officials, the head of the railroads, a professor who had founded the Soviet biochemical industry, and the new head of foreign trade, Arkady Rosenholz (known as Rozengolts), in tandem with the foreign affairs commissar.287 On October 17 and again on the eighteenth, Stalin received Vissarion “Beso” Lominadze, recently appointed South Caucasus party boss, whom he did not trust, and Ruven “Vladimir” Polonsky, newly appointed Azerbaijan party boss. The second day’s tête-à-tête to sort out the Caucasus infighting lasted three and a half hours.288
The politburo assembled again (October 20) and, with Syrtsov reporting, ordered the designation of several priority regions—Moscow, Leningrad, the Donbass, Baku—with higher norms of supply for workers.289 The body also directed the OGPU to continue investigations of wrecking by alleged underground parties; decided to move the secret department of the central party apparatus from Old Square to the Imperial Senate, instructing Voroshilov to clean out undesirables still living in the Kremlin; and obliged Stalin to cease walking on foot in Moscow.290 Bukharin seems to have asked what more was demanded of him, accused Stalin of violating their truce, and stormed out of the session. The politburo ruled that Stalin had been correct in refusing the one-on-one meeting. The dictator supposedly said, “I wanted to curse him out, but since he has left, there’s nothing to say.”291
Stalin was not the only one engaged in provocations. On October 21, Boris Reznikov, a student and party organizer at the Institute of Red Professors, who had worked under Syrtsov in Siberia as a deputy newspaper editor and had joined Syrtsov’s group of intimates in Moscow, sat in the office of Lev Mekhlis, a Stalin aide and editor at Pravda, and wrote a denunciation of “factional activities” by Syrtsov as well as Lominadze. According to Reznikov, Syrtsov’s “group” foresaw a collapse of Stalin’s regime as a result of economic catastrophe. Mekhlis forwarded Reznikov’s denunciation to Stalin that evening.292 Reznikov, who nursed his own grievances against the dictator, played the role of agent provocateur, initiating a second informal meeting on October 22, in a private apartment, where he and Syrtsov again made critical remarks about the Stalin regime. Reznikov had aggressively solicited secret information from Syrtsov about the recent politburo meeting, and proposed that they link up with the right deviation, which profoundly worsened Syrtsov’s indiscretions.293 That same day, Stalin summoned Syrtsov to Central Committee HQ, on Old Square.294 Those present when Syrtsov had spoken, summoned to a confrontation with Reznikov, repudiated his accusations, but all the same, they were expelled from the party and arrested, and they confessed. As Orjonikidze would put it, “They did not want to speak the truth to the Central Control Commission, but when they were imprisoned in the OGPU they bared their souls in front of comrade Mężyński (laughter).”295
Reznikov further claimed that Syrtsov had said that if push came to shove, a number of party secretaries, including Andrei Andreyev (North Caucasus), Nikolai Kolotilov (Ivanovo-Voznesensk), and Roberts Eihe (Western Siberia), “might turn on Stalin.” Syrtsov had also stated, according to Reznikov, that “a large share of party activists, deeply dissatisfied with the current policy and political regime, still believe a tradition of collective leadership exists in the politburo. . . . We need to dispel these illusions. The ‘politburo’ is a fiction. In reality, all decisions are made behind the backs of politburo members, by a small clique of party insiders, who meet in the Kremlin or in the former apartment of Clara Zetkin.”296
The next day, Stalin forwarded the written denunciations by Reznikov against Syrtsov and Lominadze’s factional group (“essentially right-deviationist”) to Molotov—now the one away on holiday—commenting, “It is unimaginable vileness. Everything goes to show that Reznikov’s reports correspond with reality. They played at staging a coup; they played at being the politburo.”297
Meanwhile, Tukhachevsky, in the presence of Stalin, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, and other politburo members, had been made to confront his two accusers from the military academy, and he, in turn, accused them of lying. It seems that Jan Gamarnik (head of the army political department), Iona Yakir (commander of the Ukrainian military district), and the latter’s deputy, Ivan Dubovoi, were also present and vouched for Tukhachevsky.298 Whether Stalin intended merely to intimidate the military men or had really wanted to incarcerate them remains unclear. In the October 23, 1930, letter to Molotov, he wrote, “As for the Tukhachevsky affair, he turns out to be 100 percent clean. This is very good.”299
Syrtsov and Lominadze would not get off as easily. “I considered and consider Stalin’s unwavering firmness in the struggle against Trotskyites and the right opposition an enormous historical service,” Lominadze wrote in his defense (November 3, 1930). “But at the same time I thought that Stalin has a certain empiricism, a certain lack of ability to foresee. . . . Further, I did not like and do not like that sometimes (especially during the days of his 50th jubilee), in certain speeches in the press, Stalin was placed on the same plane as Lenin. If memory serves, I said this to comrade Orjonikidze and pointed to the corresponding places in the press.” Lominadze’s admission put Orjonikidze in a bind.300
Their cases were adjudicated at a joint session of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission presidium (November 4), where Lominadze and Syrtsov both confessed to engaging in political discussions with the other. Syrtsov did not back down from claims that politburo decisions were pre-decided.301 “I did not doubt for one minute the need for the liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” he stated. “But I believe that, in addition to slogans, it is necessary and correct to have a detailed discussion of the implementation of these measures in a Central Committee plenum or a detailed meeting of the politburo. It seems to me we could have avoided many of the costs by doing so.” For stating the achievements of regime policy but also the problems—the precipitous drop in workers’ real wages, the shortages of goods (“an enormous counterrevolutionary danger emanates from queues”), the mass loss of livestock, inflation, budget shortfalls—and for suggesting the reintroduction of market mechanisms such as free trade, Syrtsov was accused of being a right opportunist and pro-capitalist, like Rykov.302
Stalin in his remarks denied using Clara Zetkin’s unused Kremlin apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace—except maybe a little, to avoid distracting phone calls as he composed his report to the party congress. “While I was working in this apartment at different times, Molotov, Kalinin, Sergo, Rudzutaks, and Mikoyan each came to see me once,” he further divulged. “Did we, certain politburo members, occasionally meet? Yes, we did, mostly in the Central Committee building [on Old Square]. What is bad about that?” In a passage Stalin would edit out of the transcript, he inadvertently confirmed Syrtsov’s charge, elaborating how the regime actually worked: “Sometimes a question arises, you phone Voroshilov: Are you home? Home. Come over, let’s talk.”303
So Syrtsov was right: the “politburo” had become a kind of fiction.
Stalin played the victim (“Let them abuse me. I’m used to that”) and sought to accentuate the seriousness of the affair.304 “School pupils gathered, fancied themselves big politicians, and decided to playact as the politburo—is it worth it for us to waste time on these pupils?” he asked. “In another time and under different circumstances, one could agree with that assessment. But in the current conditions, when the class struggle has sharpened to the ultimate degree, when every factional sally against the party leadership strengthens the front of our class enemies, and double-dealing of unprincipled people is transformed into the most dangerous evil of interparty life—in such conditions, such an assessment of the ‘left’-right bloc would, at the least, be careless.” He characterized talk that blamed him as an invitation to “a host of terrorists.” Before closing, he turned his fangs on Rykov: “Your post does not exist for ceremonial purposes, but for implementing party orders on a daily basis. Is this the case now? Unfortunately not. . . . Such a state of affairs cannot last long.”305 When it came to the decision on Syrtsov and Lominadze, Stalin sought to appear the moderate, as usual, proposing only their demotion from full to candidate status. But a vote for expulsion from the Central Committee had already passed.306
SELLING OUT TO THE CAPITALISTS
Soviet newspapers (November 11, 1930) published lengthy indictments of prominent scientists and engineers accused of establishing a clandestine Industrial Party. It was said to contain more than 2,000 members who had worked undetected for years to wreck Soviet industry and transport and, ultimately, overthrow the regime with the assistance of foreign military intervention (by half a dozen countries), thereby delivering Ukraine’s wealth to Poland and France, and Caspian oil to Britain. “If the enemy does not surrender,” Gorky, from Italy, obligingly wrote in Pravda (November 15), “they will be annihilated.”307 Under klieg lights in the chandeliered House of Trade Unions (the former nobility club) on November 25, in front of scores of Soviet and foreign correspondents, eight engineers stood in the dock. Meetings at Soviet factories and the Academy of Sciences approved resolutions demanding the death penalty. Columns of workers were marched through snow in Moscow and other cities carrying banners: NO MERCY FOR THE CLASS ENEMIES.308 Thirteen days of delirium and treason tales ensued, with blanket coverage. The politburo decree specified the headlines, including “Our answer to the class enemy—millions of workers in the ranks of shock workers.”309
The problems faced by Soviet workers were all too real. An internal report (November 10) from a secret OGPU survey of cafeterias noted that half were being patronized far beyond capacity, and that “in all cafeterias (even in restricted ones) there are long queues, which causes worker dissatisfaction and negatively affects labor discipline.” The OGPU found rats (dead and alive), cockroaches, and flies (including in the soup), a lack of spoons, forks, and knives (forcing long waits for their reuse), lunches far below daily caloric norms, theft by employees, and filth beyond description.310
Just as in the Shakhty trial two years earlier, the only “evidence” in the Industrial Party trial consisted of confessions recorded in secret police custody, which were repeated at the proceedings. (The published indictments had noted that one arrested engineer had “died under questioning.”) No witnesses were called. All eight defendants pleaded guilty. Leonid Ramzin, director of the All-Russian Thermal Engineering Institute, confessed to leading the underground “party,” and spoke of foreign panic at Soviet successes and of a pending invasion by Romania, to be joined by Poland, then France, and supported by the British Royal Navy, with émigré collusion.311 Two of the émigrés named had died before the supposed meetings took place. Also, Ramzin named as the prospective head of a replacement “bourgeois” republic a Russian engineer who admired Herbert Hoover (as an engineer) but who had already been executed, without a public trial, in a previous case.312 Never mind: Nikolai Krylenko, the prosecutor, hinted at veiled links between the “bourgeois specialists” and rightists in the party. All in all, the published trial transcript might be the best extended record to date of the workings of Stalin’s mind: the possible and the actual were fused into a narrative that could be—must be—true.313
Stalin’s truculence, too, was evident. If in the Shakhty case he had willfully put several German citizens in the dock during negotiations for a Soviet-German trade agreement, now he targeted France, which he had recently called “the most aggressive and militarist country of all aggressive and militarist countries of the world.”314 France had imposed restrictions on Soviet imports; the Soviets had countered with reductions in imports from France.315 Krylenko elicited laughter by reading out French news accounts of Russian émigrés in Paris gathering in protest of the proceedings: grand dukes, clergy, merchants—that is, “former people.” But Ramzin testified at trial that he and other plotters had cooperated directly with none other than the former French president and prime minister Raymond Poincaré. The latter’s office issued a denial, which was adduced at trial as “proof” of the plot.316 A foreign affairs commissariat official tried to render the charges credible, giving a briefing for foreign representatives that waved off necessarily simplistic propaganda of an imminent military intervention but insisted that influential anti-Soviet circles in capitalist countries were inciting war through provocations such as assassinations of Soviet foreign envoys, seizure and publication of secret Soviet documents, and press campaigns about Soviet kidnappings abroad.317
Stalin needed no further evidence of such Western plots, but he had received a copy of a transcript of a recent confidential conversation between Winston Churchill, the former chancellor of the exchequer (out of office following the Labour party victory), and Prince Otto von Bismarck, a grandson of the famous chancellor. Churchill was recorded as telling the prince, who served in the German embassy in London, that “the growing industrialization of the Russian state presents all Europe with an extremely great danger, against which we can manage . . . only by creating a bloc of all the rest of Europe and America against Russia.”318 Behind the scenes, Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Edvard Beneš, had sought to ingratiate himself with Moscow by telling the Soviet envoy in Prague (September 1930), “Confidentially, not long ago in Geneva, the French strongly insisted on action by Poland against the USSR with the active support of all members of the Little Entente” (an alliance of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, which the French hoped to direct against Germany and the members saw as directed against Hungary). Beneš shocked the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat by adding that if a military intervention against the USSR by France, Britain, and Italy took place, Czechoslovakia was “a member of the European states and will do the same that they do.”319
Presiding judge Andrei Vyshinsky, as per instructions, read out guilty verdicts, sentencing three to prison terms and five, Ramzin included, to death. This came without right of appeal. The hall erupted in an ovation. Two days later, the regime announced that Soviet power was strong and had no need for revenge: the executions had been “commuted” to eight- or ten-year terms.320 The morning after sentencing, Ramzin was spotted at his institute office cleaning out his desk, without apparent guard.321 He was permitted to continue scientific work while serving his prison term.322 Some Soviet workers saw through the “wrecking” burlesque.323 But the leniency might have provoked the greater fury.324 Even émigré enemies of the USSR acknowledged that a majority of workers accepted the guilt of the “bourgeois” specialists. “They got 3,000 [rubles per month] and traveled in cars, while we live on bread and potatoes,” the well-informed Menshevik Socialist Herald quoted Soviet workers as saying. “They sold themselves to the capitalists.”325
Lurking in the background was Stalin’s long-standing personal nemesis, whose pen was once again prolifically engaged.326 Now forty-eight years old, Trotsky in 1930 published My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, in Russian, German, English, and French, aiming to document how he was the true Leninist. He also wrote a stirring three-volume History of the Russian Revolution, in which his own and Lenin’s roles were uppermost and Stalin’s nonexistent; the book’s preface was completed on Prinkipo on November 14, 1930. As it happened, that same day, Stalin returned a devoted young apparatchik of uncommon diligence to the central party apparatus as department head for economic personnel. His name was Nikolai Yezhov (b. 1895). Stalin received him on November 21, the first of what would be hundreds of private audiences connected to rooting out sabotage and treason.327
MYSTERY MAN
Rumors that Stalin had been killed were being spread out of independent Latvia, where many governments ran their intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, and on November 22 Eugene Lyons, a Belorussia-born, New York–raised UPI correspondent in Moscow and a Soviet sympathizer, suddenly got summoned to Old Square for a seventy-minute audience. Stalin had last granted an interview four years earlier, to the American Jerome Davis, and was still pursuing the same aim of normalizing relations with the United States, which had become the USSR’s third-largest trading partner, after Germany and Britain, but remained the only great power that withheld diplomatic recognition. In Stalin’s office, Lyons noted portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the wall. “My pulse, I am sure, was high,” he would recall. “No sooner, however, had I stepped across the threshold than diffidence and nervousness fell away. Stalin met me at the door and shook hands, smiling. . . . He was remarkably unlike the scowling, self-important dictator of popular imagination. . . . ‘Comrade Stalin,’ I began the interview, ‘may I quote you to the effect that you have not been assassinated?’ He laughed.”
Lyons established for a foreign audience that Stalin had a wife and three children (the Soviet populace did not know), and that he could be charming. “Commenting on the fact that he is called Russia’s Dictator,” Lyons wrote, “Comrade Stalin exclaimed with another hearty laugh: ‘It is just very funny!’”328 Lyons was treated to tea and sandwiches in an adjacent room while typing his dispatch. Russia’s dictator approved the typescript (“in general, more or less correct”), allowing it to be transmitted to New York, where the scoop created a sensation. Lyons returned to the United States for a twenty-city lecture tour. “One cannot live in the shadow of Stalin’s legend,” he observed, “without coming under its spell.”329
The Soviet-friendly New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty erupted at his handlers over Lyons’s scoop. Belatedly, Duranty, too, was granted an interview, also of seventy minutes, on November 27. He wrote that Stalin believed that the current global crisis in capitalism would deepen but not mark its demise, and yet the result would be a war over markets in the future, and the downfall of the the Versailles settlement.330 “Stalin is the most interesting personality in the world,” Duranty enthused in his telegram to the United States, which passed Soviet censors. “But of all national leaders he is the least known, he remains removed from everyone, mysterious, like a Tibetan Dalai Lama.”331
A friend of Duranty’s, H. R. Knickerbocker, got his own scoop: an interview with Stalin’s mother, Keke Geladze, in Tiflis, for the New York Evening Post (December 1, 1930). “Revolutionary posters and the eternal appeal for harder work on the Five-Year Plan reminded one that all the way from Siberia to the edge of Persia the Soviet Union is dominated today by a single purpose, and a single will,” Knickerbocker wrote. Keke, speaking through an interpreter of Georgian, took responsibility for Stalin’s failure to finish the seminary: “He was not expelled. I took him out on account of his health. He did not want to go. I took him out. He was my only [surviving] son.” She pointed at a pile of periodicals, all mentioning Stalin. “See how he works,” she said. “All this he has done. He works too hard.” The article was titled “Stalin Mystery Man Even to His Mother.”332
STOUT INNER CIRCLE
All authoritarian regimes require a sense of being under siege by sinister “enemies.” The inhabitants of the USSR found themselves exhorted to relentless vigilance against class enemies, supposedly longing for foreign military intervention to overturn the Soviet regime, restore capitalism, and exact revenge. Under such a vision, even diehard socialists could be denounced as “White Guards”—as Lenin and Trotsky had denounced the Kronstadt sailors in 1921—if they opposed the Soviet regime. Pervasive domestic difficulties rendered the treason tales plausible, press reports gave them life, and Stalin afforded them great intensity.333 During the proceedings against Syrtsov and Lominadze, he had interrupted Mikoyan to say of his Communist party critics, “Now they are all White Guards.”334 Working intimately with the obliging Mężyński, he had elaborated a comprehensive scenario: a right deviation, a right-left bloc, “bourgeois specialist” wreckers, and a military conspiracy with right-deviation links, all of them with foreign ties, aiming to bring on war, reverse collectivization, sabotage industrialization, and remove him.335 He was the fulcrum.
On December 1, 1930, Syrtsov became the first politburo official expelled by the method of merely polling Central Committee members over the phone, without a plenum.336 During the whole year, not a single multiday Central Committee plenum had taken place. One had been postponed, perhaps because Stalin had to cajole members into accepting the sacking of Rykov.337 Now Stalin wrote to Gorky in Sorrento, divulging Rykov’s imminent replacement by Molotov, calling it “unpleasant business” while championing Molotov as “a bold, smart, utterly modern leader.”338 As for Bukharin, Stalin wrote to him on December 13, in his now customarily put-upon fashion, that “I have never refused a conversation with you. No matter how much you cursed me, I have never forgotten that friendship that we had. I am leaving aside the fact that the interests of the cause require each of us unconditional forgetting of any ‘personal’ insults. We can always talk, if you want.”339
Finally, on December 17, 1930, the delayed plenum opened, and at the last minute it became a joint session of the Central Committee and the punitive Central Control Commission.340 On the third day, after Rykov’s report had been lacerated by all and sundry, Kosior suddenly proposed relieving Rykov of his post and nominated Molotov to head the government. No one could doubt who stood behind the move. The vote was unanimous.341 “Until now I have had to work mostly as a party functionary,” Molotov told the joint plenum. “I declare to you, comrades, that I go to the work in the Council of People’s Commissars as a party functionary, as a conductor of the will of the party and its Central Committee.”342 Bukharin, in a speech also delivered on December 19, mocked himself and his allies and joked about executions of rich peasants and the shooting of party oppositionists, eliciting laughter, while still managing to score points about Stalin’s wild-eyed industrialization and collectivization—a bravura performance. (“This is turning into an incoherent discussion. I am deeply sorry for this fact, but it is not my fault.”)343 Over repeated interruptions, Bukharin had finally just told Molotov that they would do whatever they wanted, since “all power and authority are in your hands.”
Molotov had no prior experience in government, but he would prove himself up to the task. Born the ninth of ten children, in 1890, to a shop clerk in central Russia, under the name Skryabin (he was a nephew of the composer and pianist Alexander Skryabin), he had joined the Bolshevik faction in 1908 while a teenager, and in 1912 took the name Molotov (“Hammer”). Bukharin, speaking to Kamenev, had fumed about “that blockhead Molotov, who tries to teach me Marxism,” but Molotov had attended the St. Petersburg Polytechnic and edited Pravda before Bukharin did. Molotov’s underground hardening and diligence had attracted him to Lenin, who called him Comrade Filing Cabinet. An underling recalled that “everything he was given to do was done faultlessly, in time, and at any price.”344 Another observer, who described Molotov as “fully conscious of his importance and power,” noted that he could sit for long hours of hard work and was informally called Stone Ass.345
On the final day (December 21), Rykov was expelled from the politburo; Orjonikidze assumed his spot on that supreme body.346 Kaganovich assumed Molotov’s place as Stalin’s top deputy in the party. Whereas Molotov had been methodical and wooden, Kaganovich was dynamic and showy. The Menshevik Socialist Herald rightly judged the latter to be “of quite exceptional abilities,” with an excellent memory for names and faces, “a quite exceptional ability to deal with people,” an immense capacity for work, and willpower.347 Kaganovich ran the orgburo, which oversaw personnel and ideology, but Molotov, as head of government, would now chair politburo meetings, by tradition going back to Lenin. Molotov had known Stalin since 1912, and Kaganovich had known Stalin since 1919.348 “He was generally personally always against me,” Molotov recalled of Kaganovich later in life. “Everybody knew this. He would say, ‘You are soft, you are an intelligent, and I am from the workers.’” Molotov added, “Kaganovich, he is an administrator, but crude; therefore, not all can stand him. He not only pressurizes, but is somewhat personally self-regarding. He is strong and direct—a strong organizer and quite a good orator.”349
Voroshilov and Orjonikidze were closer to Stalin personally (the former had known him since 1906, the latter since 1907), and while Voroshilov continued to oversee the military, Stalin appointed Orjonikidze head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, in place of the faltering loyal dog Kuibyshev, who was transferred to the state planning commission.350 Kuibyshev had gone from voicing skepticism about lunatic plan targets to promoting them zealously; now Orjonikidze went from sharply criticizing industrial cadres to being their protector, and gathered around him capable “bourgeois” experts, even if they had been imprisoned for a time.351 Sounding a bit like the sacked state bank chairman and former Trotsky supporter Pyatakov, whom Orjonikidze would make his deputy, he pointed out, in a long memorandum on industry in December 1930, that “money is being spent without any budget. . . . Accounting is exceptionally weak and muddled.” Stalin made only superficial notes on the memo; these were Orjonikidze’s worries now.352
None of the men in Stalin’s faction had the revolutionary profiles of Zinoviev or Kamenev, let alone Trotsky, but the Stalinists were hardened Bolsheviks and, under the pressure of events, strove to enforce his line and resolve problems, sometimes presenting him with solutions.353 He confided in them, writing scathingly about everyone else in the regime, and to an extent he allowed them room to work, reserving the right to reverse any of their decisions; they acknowledged his power to do so, knowing the burdens he shouldered. The heart of the regime remained awkwardly divided between party headquarters on Old Square, where Stalin had his principal office, and the Imperial Senate in the Kremlin, where the government had its offices but where the secret department of Stalin’s apparatus had moved, the politburo met, and Central Committee plenums were held. Voroshilov, in his letter concerning Rykov’s replacement, had noted that “having the headquarters and main command point” on Old Square was “cumbersome, inflexible, and . . . organizationally problematic,” adding that “Lenin in the current situation would be sitting in the Council of People’s Commissars” in the Kremlin.354 Clara Zetkin’s empty apartment in the Kremlin had served as a kind of transition to a permanent move to the Kremlin by Stalin, but this transition would be gradual; he continued to use his top-floor Old Square suite.355 In any case, as Kaganovich had mentioned, the regime was now wherever Stalin’s person happened to be.
• • •
INTO 1929, his seventh year as general secretary, Stalin had continued to enlarge his personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship, and by the end of 1930 he had amassed still vaster power. This process of acquiring and exercising supreme power in the shadow of Lenin’s supposed Testament calling for his removal and the criticisms in the party made Stalin who he was.
Around the time of the December 1930 plenum, Iona and Alexander Pereprygin, two of the six siblings of Lydiya Pereprygina—the orphaned, scandalously young teenager with whom Stalin had had a long cohabitation during his last Siberian exile—were arrested for long-ago White Army service. They wrote an appeal to Stalin, reminding him of the “former friendship you nourished with us.”356 The brothers did not mention the son (Alexander) whom Stalin had allegedly fathered with Pereprygina and abandoned, but it is possible that one of Pereprygina’s sons was Stalin’s. (“Ёsif was a jolly fellow, singing and dancing well,” Anfisa Taraseyeva, of Kureika village, would recall. “He desired girls and had a son here, with one of my relatives.”)357 Pereprygina, who had married a local fisherman, was now a widow with numerous children; Stalin never assisted her. What action, if any, he took in response to her brothers’ letter remains unknown.358 When doodling, Stalin would sometimes draw wolves, but his days in a remote eight-log-cabin settlement among the indigenous Evenki on the Arctic Circle—where he almost died in sudden blizzards while hunting or fishing through holes cut in the ice—were a world away.
What Stalin forced through all across Eurasia was flabbergasting, using newspaper articles, secret circulars, plenipotentiaries, party discipline, a few plenums, a party congress, the secret police and internal troops, major foreign technology companies and foreign customers for Soviet primary goods, tens of thousands of urban worker volunteers and a tiny handful of top politburo officials, and the dream of a new world. Trotsky perceived him as an opportunist and cynic, a representative of the class interests of the bureaucracy, a person bereft of convictions. With Rykov’s expulsion from the politburo, Trotsky even predicted, in his Bulletin of the Opposition, that “just as the rout of the left opposition at the 15th Party Congress [in 1927] . . . preceded the turn to the left . . . the rout of the right opposition presages an inevitable turn to the right.”359 Others in the emigration knew better. “Stalin is acting logically in the new peasant policy,” Boris Bakhmeteff, the former Provisional Government ambassador to Washington and a civil engineering professor at Columbia University, had observed of collectivization to a fellow émigré as early as February 12, 1929. “If I were a consistent Communist, I would be doing the same.” No less shrewdly, he added, “Stalin is capable of adapting, and, in contrast to other Bolshevik politicians, possesses tactical gifts. But it seems to me wrong to think that he is an opportunist and that for him Communism is a mere name.”360
The Soviet state, no less than its tsarist predecessor, sought control over grain supplies to finance imports of machinery to survive in the international system, but Stalin ideologically excluded the “capitalist path.” His vision was one of anticapitalist modernity. The perpetual emergency rule required to build socialism afforded free rein to his inner demons as well. Stalin’s persecution of his friend Bukharin in 1929–30 revealed new depths of malice, as well as self-pity.361 At the same time, his deft political neutering of Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov had demanded considerable exertion.362 The rightists possessed an alternative program that—whether or not it could possibly work to achieve socialism—commanded support. Indeed, it is striking how much potential power the right wing of the party had possessed within the politburo, and how Stalin crushed them anyway.363 They were hard pressed to match his cunning, and immobilized by their own aversion to schism: amid the mass peasant revolts that Rykov himself had predicted, the rightists shrank from too public a challenge to the party line.364 Tactics aside, the rightists were handcuffed by party structures and practices: they had no way to capitalize on the deep disillusionment in the army and the secret police, except via a conspiracy, even when they were still members of the politburo. Rykov was respected but had made no friends throttling army budgets, and, unlike Stalin, had not earned plaudits at the front in the civil war.365
Stalin had adroitly positioned himself as the incarnation of the popular will and historical necessity, but his resounding political triumph of 1929–30 had demonstrated a certain dependency, beyond even the luck of the harvest. His power rested on Mężyński and Yagoda, who were in operational command of the secret police and not personally close to him, though keen to demonstrate their loyalty—but could Stalin be sure? Not for nothing had he promoted Yevdokimov. More fundamentally, Stalin’s power rested upon just four fellow politburo members: Molotov, Kaganovich, Orjonikidze, and Voroshilov. The first two seemed unlikely ever to waver. But Orjonikidze and Voroshilov? Had they acted on their knowledge of the dangerous muddle Stalin had created with his “Great Break” and embraced the well-founded critiques put forward by the Stalin protégé Syrtsov and the Orjonikidze protégé Lominadze, the two authoritative figures in the politburo could have taken Stalin down. Of course, the question would have been, Who could replace him? No one in Stalin’s faction appeared to consider himself the dictator’s equal. Still, what if, going forward, they changed their minds? What if further difficulties arose, and this time foreign capitalists selling their state-of-the-art technology, and the peasants and the weather delivering a bounteous harvest, did not come to Stalin’s rescue?
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