Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CHAPTER 2 APOCALYPSE

Using deception, slander, and cunning against party members, with the aid of unbelievable acts of violence and terror, under the guise of a struggle to uphold the purity of Bolshevik principles and party unity, and using a powerful centralized party apparatus as his base, Stalin has over the past five years cut off and eliminated from positions of leadership all the best, genuinely Bolshevik cadres in the party and has established his personal dictatorship within the party and throughout the country as a whole, breaking with Leninism and taking a path of the most unbridled adventurism and uncontrolled personal tyranny, bringing the Soviet Union to the brink of the abyss.

MARTEMYAN RYUTIN, Communist party official, August–September 1932 ¹

IN THE FALL OF 1930, Japan celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its victory in the Russo-Japanese War with fanfare, paying tribute to Admiral Tōgō (who was still active) and other “war gods” and reenacting Port Arthur’s capture at the Kabuki Theater. “As a father,” a general declares in the play, spurring wild applause, “I am pleased with the death of my two sons for the emperor.”² That same fall, as soon as the surprise harvest bounty had been gathered, Stalin renewed his all-out forced collectivization and kulak deportations.³ The December 1930 Central Committee plenum rubber-stamped his extremism, demanding 80 percent collectivization over the course of the next year in top grain-growing areas (Ukraine, North Caucasus, Lower Volga, Central Volga), and 50 percent in the next group (Central Black Earth, Siberia, Urals, steppes of Ukraine, Kazakhstan).⁴ When the Eastern Siberians balked, Stalin replied that 50 percent was “a minimum target.”⁵ The plenum had also formally approved fulfillment of the Five-Year Plan within four years (by the end of 1932), while stipulating that 1931 would see the most ambitious industrial leap yet: a 35 percent rise in GDP, and a 45 percent jump in industry.⁶ Stalin was spearheading a depiction of industrialization as class war, a revolutionary upsurge against a stepped-up offensive by alien elements, which struck a deep chord.⁷ Some contemporaries did note the obvious falseness of the regime’s ubiquitous slogans, but other observers, such as the American journalist Eugene Lyons, would remark that “these boys are geniuses for advertising.”⁸

Mikhail Koltsov, the journalist-propagandist, boasted in Pravda (January 1, 1931) that “we are welcoming this new year happily and joyfully, without vacillations and doubts.”⁹ To enforce that steadfastness amid his distrust, Stalin used the police and party discipline.¹⁰ He also turned to the bully pulpit, decrying the inept factory boss, the consummate red-tapist, the windbag, all of whom were successes at profusions of loyalty but failures at delivering the goods. More ominously, he would warn of deliberate deception, collusion, double-dealing, and sabotage. But the dictator himself would turn out to be the grand saboteur, leading the country and his own regime into catastrophe in 1931–33, despite the intense zeal for building a new world.¹¹ Peasants would speak of the biblical Apocalypse, some saying that the Virgin Mary had sent a letter in golden script warning that bands of horsemen would descend and destroy the collective farms.¹² Instead, the Four Horsemen arrived in the form of the enforcement of the collectives and mass starvation. Rumblings within the party would surface, demanding Stalin’s removal.

BULLY’S MIND-SET

Henry Ford popularized the fact that manufacturing could be revolutionized by large capital investments and superior organization, throwing up a direct challenge for industry throughout the world economy. Mass manufacturing required costly, risky, up-front investments and a large market, but the Soviet statized economy removed competition (internal and foreign) and manipulated domestic demand, enabling industry to take advantage of assembly lines.¹³ During the Five-Year Plan, the USSR would erect from scratch or wholly rebuild more than 1,000 factories, many in Fordist fashion.¹⁴ All the advanced technology, with the exception of synthetic rubber, would be imported from leading foreign companies, and had to be paid for in hard currency.¹⁵ The imports were assimilated with difficulty, and limited to priority sectors, such as steelmaking, chemicals, and machine building. The construction industry continued to use brick and timber rather than concrete; steam, not electricity, continued to power railways.¹⁶ And even where blast furnaces or turbines were installed, auxiliary work was often still performed by hand or with primitive tools. Still, industry expanded significantly, and simultaneously with a plunge in production all across the capitalist world. Tsarist Russia had produced almost no machine tools in 1914; the Soviet Union, in 1932, produced 20,000.¹⁷

Under the slogan “Catch and Overtake” (the capitalists), the regime was on its way to acquiring not just a new industrial base but, finally, a substantial working class.¹⁸ Already in 1930, employed labor nearly reached the plan target for 1932–33. Full employment, a magical idea, resonated globally. By the end of 1930, unemployment had reached 2.5 million in Great Britain, more than 3 million in Germany (it soon doubled from that), and more than 4 million in the United States (it soon tripled). But the disappearance of the unemployed in the USSR gave rise to unprecedented labor turnover—workers had options—which in turn provoked draconian laws such as prison sentences for violations of labor discipline or perceived negligence, and mandatory labor books to track workers.¹⁹ Many workers and some managers fell into the inconsistently applied dragnet, but the excess of demand over worker supply subverted regime efforts to “plan” labor allocation. The flux was staggering: as many as 12 million rural folk permanently resettled in cities or at construction sites that became cities during the plan. (Moscow, which received migrants from other cities, too, swelled from 2 million to 3.7 million.)²⁰ Many tramped from place to place.²¹

No central decree explicitly outlawed private trade, but Stalin incited attacks against NEPmen (traders).²² The number of shops and kiosks shrank from more than 600,000 in 1928 to 140,000. Party-state pressure also squeezed out individual artisans. (Molotov then decried the severe scarcity of wooden spoons at factory canteens and the sheer impossibility of having clothes or shoes mended.)²³ Many NEPmen disappeared back to villages, but a large number found employment in supply departments, enjoying privileged positions in the new socialist order.²⁴ Meanwhile, with rationing for bread and other staples already introduced in major cities, Stalin had placed the Achilles’ heel of worker provisioning on the December 1930 plenum’s agenda. The gathering endorsed a practice, initiated at some factories, to form “closed” cooperatives inside the gates to distribute groceries and clothes. The larger factories would soon establish their own farms, granaries, and goods warehouses, an unplanned yet foreseeable result of the suppression of legal private trade and private enterprise.²⁵

Simply by virtue of its monopoly over politics and the public sphere and its dynamic mass organizations, the Soviet party-state stood out from other contemporary authoritarian regimes, but piecemeal introduction of a socioeconomic monopoly, too, added another major dimension to fulfilling the aspirations of totalitarian control. Centralized procurement and distribution imposed a nearly impossible administrative burden, and vast corruption and everyday ingenuity afforded people space to maneuver. Still, the Soviet state now asserted sway over not just people’s political activities and thoughts but also their employment, housing, children’s schooling, even their caloric intake—effectively, their families’ life chances.²⁶

The state itself was in upheaval, undergoing headlong expansion, thanks to elimination of private property, and political purging.²⁷ Skilled workers were promoted to fill many of the vacancies created by expansion and arrests.²⁸ This altered the demographics of the apparatus (but not its behavior) and of the working class, pushing the ratio of workers in large-scale industry aged twenty-two and under up to one third; the percentage of female workers rose as well.²⁹ New managers and engineers would have far more hands-on experience than tsarist-era ones, but for now, competence was in short supply and, combined with the frenzied pace, caused an epidemic of accidents and waste.³⁰ Some high-profile projects had to be shelved. Orjonikidze opened an All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry (January 30–February 4, 1931) with a speech that defended quantitative output targets but called for controlling costs, supplementing centralized allocation with direct factory-to-factory contract relations for additional supplies, and holding managers accountable for financial results and output quality. Further, he defended the “bourgeois” specialists, who for eighteen months had been subjected to withering public denunciations and trials for wrecking.³¹

But on the final day, Stalin arrived in the hall. “It is sometimes asked whether the pace can be reduced a bit, and the speed of development restrained,” he stated. “No, this is impossible!” His reasoning was revealing: “To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beat up. But we do not want to get beat up! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten up by the Mongol khans. She was beaten up by the Turkish beys. She was beaten up by the Swedish barons. She was beaten up by the Polish-Lithuanian pans. She was beaten up by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten up by the Japanese lords. All beat her—because of her backwardness, her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. Such is the law of the exploiters: beat up and rob the backward and the weak, capitalism’s law of the jungle. You are backward, you are weak—and therefore you are wrong; therefore you can be beaten up and enslaved. You are mighty, therefore you are right, therefore we must handle you carefully.” He concluded: “We are a hundred years behind the advanced countries. . . . We must make good this gap in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.”³²

The dictator tapped into Russia’s perennial torment over relative weakness vis-à-vis the West, and more recent fears of foreign forces ganging up on the socialist motherland. One participant would recall that Stalin “literally opened a valve through which the steam could be released.”³³ But he challenged bosses to get out of their offices. “There are many people among us who think that management is synonymous with signing papers,” he said. “This is sad, but true. . . . How is it that we Bolsheviks, . . . who emerged victorious from the bitter civil war, who have solved the tremendous task of building a modern industry, who have swung the peasantry on to the path of socialism—how is it that in the matter of the management of production, we bow to a slip of paper? The reason is that it is easier to sign papers than to manage production.” He enjoined them to “look into everything, let nothing escape you, learn and learn again. . . . Master technology. It is time Bolsheviks themselves became experts. . . . Technology decides everything. And an economic manager who does not want to study technology, who does not want to master technology, is a joke and not a manager.”³⁴

DROUGHT AND REGIME SABOTAGE

Who, precisely, was a kulak—an owner of three cows? Four cows? Criteria could be murky. But centrally imposed quotas forced answers.³⁵ Naming “kulaks” often involved preemptively denouncing others to save oneself or settling old scores. “Socialism was a religion of hatred, envy, enmity between people,” a group from Kalinin province (formerly Tver) wrote to Socialist Husbandry (March–April 1931).³⁶ Some peasants were motivated by class-war sentiments, but the quotas could be met only if many middle and poor peasants suddenly got classified as “kulaks.” Those who refused to join the collectives became “kulaks,” no matter how poor. The designation “kulak henchman” made anyone fair game, and ambitious secret police officials exceeded their quotas.³⁷ According to the OGPU’s own classifications, many of those swept up in antikulak operations were petty traders, “former people,” priests, or random “anti-Soviet elements.”³⁸ The haste, arbitrariness, and wanton violence facilitated the operation by inciting chaos and fears of things slipping out of control, spurring further harsh measures.³⁹ Stalin ordered a second wave of internal deportations beginning in late May (through early fall 1931), which proved nearly twice as large as the previous year’s.⁴⁰ He relied on local party bosses but especially the OGPU, and on the barbed rivalry between Yagoda and Yevdokimov for his favor.⁴¹

All told, around 5 million people were “dekulakized”—by the police, by their fellow peasants, or by choosing to flee, with an untold number perishing during deportation or not long after. Up to 30,000 heads of households were summarily executed. OGPU operatives improvised colonization villages, soon rechristened “special settlements,” which were intended to be self-sufficient, but despite a torrent of decrees, actual settlements with housing would be formed only belatedly.⁴² The dispossessed who survived the journeys in cold, dark cattle cars to the taiga had to make it through the first winter in tents or under the open sky.⁴³ They helped build the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, and other Five-Year Plan showcases. The self-dekulakized and peasants who were dispossessed but not internally deported sought livelihoods at the same construction sites, provoking accusations of “infiltration.”⁴⁴ The deputy OGPU plenipotentiary to Eastern Siberia reported mass flight from the special settlements, too, because of “severe living conditions and the food situation,” as well as “epidemic diseases and high mortality among children.” People, he wrote, “were completely covered in filth.”⁴⁵

All the while, the regime was supposed to be facilitating the planting for the next harvest, the first in which the collective and state farms would predominate.⁴⁶ The Five-Year Plan had originally envisioned a 1931 harvest of 96 million tons, and as late as the end of 1930 the harvest was estimated at 98.6 million, far larger than the best prerevolutionary harvests.⁴⁷ But in 1931, a cold spring followed by a summer drought—a fatal combination—struck the Kazakh steppes, Siberia, the Urals, the Volga, and Ukraine.⁴⁸

Stalin got warnings of lagging harvest preparation as well as locust infestation and ordered some actions, but the regime seems not to have perceived the danger.⁴⁹ Kalinin wrote to the holidaying Avel Yenukidze (May 27, 1931), the secretary of the central executive committee of the Soviet, about the “unprecedented weather” in Moscow (“It’s just like the hot south; rain is rare and brief”) yet still asserted that “by all data the harvest should be good.”⁵⁰ He made no mention of the devastating loss of draft animals (slaughtered animals do not consume grain, but they do not pull plows, either).⁵¹ Matters were most dire in Russia’s Kazakh autonomous republic, where the regime had decided that, in order to overcome “backwardness,” it would force-settle nomads.⁵² This region was the country’s main meat supplier, but it was made a destination for several hundred thousand deported kulaks, further diminishing land for herds and increasing claimants on local food. State procurements took such a large proportion of the grain grown here that herders and their animals were effectively left to starve.⁵³ Reports reached Moscow of significant deaths among Kazakhs from famine and of mass flight to Uzbekistan, Siberia, Turkmenistan, Iran, and China in search of food.⁵⁴ Only the mountain territories of Dagestan matched the depth of starvation and epidemics seen again in 1931 in the Kazakh autonomous republic, a territory larger than Western Europe.⁵⁵

Urban rationing, meanwhile, was mired in bureaucracy, while investment in housing, health care, and education took a backseat. Stalin attended both days of a conference of industrial managers (June 22–23, 1931).⁵⁶ In a rousing closing speech, he stressed no-excuses fulfillment of plan targets, while enumerating six conditions for industrial development, such as promoting higher-education graduates and factory workers into administration, and observed that “no ruling class has managed without its own intelligentsia,” a euphemism for the emerging Soviet elite. His other conditions included expanding trade and differentiating workers’ wages to stimulate productivity. “Socialism,” Stalin concluded, “is the systematic improvement of the position of the working class,” without which the worker “will spit on your socialism.”⁵⁷

“SPRINGTIME”

Control over the military is always an issue in a dictatorship. OGPU special departments continued to maintain watch lists for officers with tsarist pasts. Anti-Soviet émigré organizations, in parallel, strained to perceive tensions within the Red Army and infused their correspondence with fantasies about an officers’ anti-Communist putsch. But the OGPU had infiltrated émigré groups and created front organizations to intercept their correspondence, track agents infiltrating from abroad, and entrap disaffected military men at home.⁵⁸ Many former tsarist General Staff Academy graduates would have been glad to see the Communist regime evolve into something else, but, having been relegated to administrative or teaching posts, they were in no position to work for an overthrow.⁵⁹ The smarter ones feared a foreign military intervention, precisely because the regime would round them up as presumed traitors (or, conversely, the occupiers would not forgive them for serving the Reds).⁶⁰ Voroshilov, the only quasimilitary figure in Stalin’s politburo, beat back the OGPU provocations to dredge up “enemies,” including against his own aide-de-camp.⁶¹ Still, dossiers accumulated.⁶² The central special department, in a kind of military equivalent to the Industrial Party trial, brought together initially disparate arrests, alleging a plot for a putsch in coordination with a military attack by the old Entente powers in spring 1931. Hence, the counterintelligence operation was code-named Springtime.

Mężyński certainly knew how to please Stalin, but he might have received direct instructions.⁶³ Stalin suspected Red Army commanders, few of whom were proletarians, to be “rightist” sympathizers secretly opposed to collectivization who would prove “opportunistic” in the event of an aggression from without. The roots of the “plot” were placed in Ukraine, even though the head of the Ukraine OGPU, Balytsky, had initially not taken to the task—until Mężyński reminded him that Ukraine’s Chekists had missed the Shakhty Affair (a “discovery” of the North Caucasus OGPU).⁶⁴ Balytsky telegrammed Moscow (February 15, 1931) about a “counterrevolutionary military organization” in Kharkov. “Ivanovsky talked about the existence of a general operational plan for an uprising in Ukraine,” he wrote of extracted testimony. “The plan was sketched on a map, which Ivanovsky destroyed during the Industrial Party Trial.” Ivanovsky was also said to have corresponded with a parallel Moscow organization; that correspondence, too, had been burned.⁶⁵

More than 3,000 former tsarist officers in Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad were charged with conspiracy and espionage.⁶⁶ Shaposhnikov, the chief of staff of the army, whom Stalin had recently allowed to enter the party without the mandatory period of candidate status, was made to confront an arrested staff officer who accused him of belonging to the clandestine “organization.” Shaposhnikov exposed his accuser as a slanderer, avoiding arrest but suffering demotion, in April 1931, to commander of the Volga military district.⁶⁷ Several score officers were not merely intimidated but executed. The sixty-six-year-old tsarist major general Andrei Snesarev—who, despite having joined the Reds, was Stalin’s old nemesis during the Tsaritsyn days of 1918—was already in a labor camp on a death sentence commuted to ten years. Now he became one of the alleged plot’s “leaders” and was resentenced to death in summer 1931, although, once again, the dictator commuted his sentence (“Klim! I think, for Snesarev, we could substitute ten years instead of the highest measure”).⁶⁸

Tukhachevsky’s name, yet again, had surfaced in the “testimony” of those arrested. But Soviet intelligence had intercepted and decoded a telegram sent March 4, 1931, by the Japanese military attaché in Moscow, Lieutenant Colonel Yukio Kasahara, to the general staff in Tokyo, belittling the Red Army’s capabilities, and urging “a speedy war” before the propitious moment passed.⁶⁹ After four discussions of Japan at the politburo, on June 10, in a surprise for the brass, Stalin returned Tukhachevsky from the Leningrad military district and promoted him to replace the head of armaments, Uborevičius (who went to the Belorussian military district).⁷⁰ As a deputy defense commissar to Voroshilov once more, Tukhachevsky made a summer inspection tour of strategic regions. Thus was the sweeping Springtime operation wound down, for now; the collection of compromising materials on Tukhachevsky and others did not cease.⁷¹

Stalin, in parallel, kept a watch on military technology. In mid-June 1931, with Voroshilov in tow, he visited the central aerodrome, in Moscow, to inspect Soviet aircraft, climbing into the cabin of the new Polikarpov I-5 fighter, under the direction of Alexander Turzhansky (b. 1898), of the Air Force Research Institute. “Listening to my explanations, Stalin suddenly asked, ‘Where’s the radio?’” Turzhansky recalled. “‘On fighters there is no radio yet.’ ‘And how do you fight an air battle?’ ‘By maneuvering the aircraft.’ ‘That is unacceptable!’” A radio engineer hastened to the rescue, reporting that there was a prototype plane with a radio, but it awaited testing. Next up for inspection was a French Potez aircraft. Stalin asked, “‘And the French plane has a radio?’” Turzhansky answered in the negative. “‘Aha!’ said a surprised Stalin. ‘All the same, we need a radio on our fighters. And before them.’”⁷²

UPHEAVAL

Some OGPU operatives looked askance at the primitive fabrications against what were unthreatening military administrators and teachers already on a short leash. Additionally, although Yagoda liked to advertise his office on the third floor of Lubyanka, 2, as open, many operatives despised him. Messing, the second deputy chief and head of foreign espionage, teamed up with Olsky, Yevdokimov, and Abram Levin (who oversaw the regular police and was known as Lev Belsky), to accuse Yagoda and Balytsky of artificially “inflating” cases.⁷³ The rebels were hardly strangers to fabrication (Yevdokimov and Olsky had recently framed a group of microbiologists).⁷⁴ But they saw Yagoda as walking on eggshells over alleged ties to the right deviation. Mężyński’s continuing ill health helped spur the intrigue as well. His weight had ballooned to more than 250 pounds, exacerbating his heart condition, bronchial asthma, and endocrinal deficiency, and he had been reporting to work at Lubyanka perhaps twice a week for a few hours, before finally being sent to Crimea.⁷⁵ (He evidently spent time studying Persian, dreaming of reading the verses of the medieval polymath Omar Khayyám in the original.)⁷⁶ Mężyński returned to work only on June 8, 1931, and not at full strength.⁷⁷

Stalin could have seized on the intrigues to promote a favorite, such as Yevdokimov. The latter knew Stalin had no fondness for Yagoda, but he had miscalculated the dictator’s appetite for disorder in the organs, and for having Chekists force personnel decisions on him. On July 15, 1931, Stalin had Yevdokimov sent on holiday to the spa town of Kislovodsk and, ten days later, installed Ivan Akulov (a deputy head of the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate) as first deputy chief of the OGPU. Yagoda nominally fell to second deputy. Stalin also advanced Balytsky to third deputy, a new post.⁷⁸ Akulov’s appointment from outside was Stalin’s response to the criticisms of OGPU illegalities.⁷⁹ Balytsky’s spot in Ukraine was given to Stanisław Redens, Stalin’s brother-in-law (through his first wife). Yevdokimov was assigned to run the OGPU in Leningrad in place of Filipp Medved (who was reassigned to Belorussia), but then the politburo reversed itself.⁸⁰ Medved stayed; Yevdokimov ended up in Central Asia.⁸¹ The regime warned those transferred not “to bring along any functionary at all close to him from the regions they were leaving when transferring from one place to another,” an entrenched practice of cliques that no decree could halt.⁸² A clique was how Stalin had achieved and exercised power.

Global financial shocks were spiraling, but how much Stalin understood or paid attention remains uncertain. France and the United States together held two thirds of the world’s gold, but their monetary authorities intervened to hold down the money supply, thereby failing to check the inflows of gold and causing global deflation. On July 6, 1931, France reluctantly accepted Herbert Hoover’s proposal for a one-year moratorium on intergovernmental payments, including Germany’s reparations. Hoover was concerned that Germany would default after the failure, in spring 1931, of Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest bank, founded by the Rothschilds and considered impregnable (but lacking liquidity because of efforts to sustain the country’s old industrial structure). That, in turn, had provoked bank runs in Hungary and Germany, too, and attacks on sterling. On July 8, strict controls were imposed on all German foreign exchange transactions, but five days later, one German bank collapsed. British officials fumed over France’s perceived intransigence vis-à-vis Germany’s hardship. “Again and again be it said,” British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald confided to his diary (July 22), “France is the enemy.”⁸³ British recognition of the need to “fix” the Versailles Treaty had only become more acute.

Despite the intense pressure on him, Stalin’s flashes of anger were rarely seen, although at the politburo on August 5, 1931, he exploded in full view at a fellow Caucasus comrade for not removing a skullcap.⁸⁴ The next day, evidently his last in Moscow, he convoked an ad hoc politburo “commission” to draft a party circular on the OGPU events. It explained that the dismissed operatives had “conducted a completely intolerable group struggle against the leadership of the OGPU” by spreading rumors that “the wrecking case in the military was artificially ‘inflated.’”⁸⁵ New rumors spread about what had really transpired.⁸⁶ Yagoda dispatched his own secret circular, approved by Stalin, admitting that “some individual operatives” had “forced the accused to give untrue testimony,” but Yagoda denounced accusations of systematic falsification as slander by “our class and political enemies.”⁸⁷

HOLIDAY MAILBAG

Voroshilov traveled for more than two months in the summer of 1931, stopping in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Blagoveshchensk, Ulan Ude, Chita, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, and Magnitogorsk, and writing to Stalin about the benefits. “You are right: we do not always take into account the colossal significance of personal travel and firsthand familiarization with people, with business,” Stalin answered. “We would gain a lot (and the cause would especially gain a lot) if we traveled more frequently to locales and got acquainted with people at work.” But the dictator did not follow his own advice, leaving Moscow only for Sochi: “I did not want to leave on holiday, but then I surrendered (I got tired).”⁸⁸

Stalin took full advantage of his southern holiday, writing to Yenukidze about having spent ten days in Tsqaltubo, in central-western Georgia, twelve miles from Kutaisi, where he had once sat in a tsarist prison. Its radon-carbonate springs boasted a natural temperature of 91 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. “I took twenty baths,” he observed. “The water was marvelous.”⁸⁹ But field couriers delivered regime business in staggering volume: OGPU reports about Japan’s aggressive behavior, fuel problems, foreign currency expenditures, forestry, nonferrous metals, politburo minutes.⁹⁰ Functionaries often sat paralyzed until he responded. His mailbag was the nexus of what normally would be called the policy-making process. He chose what to read (or not), and his preferences and habits profoundly shaped state behavior. He tended to go on holiday during harvest season and inquired often about grain procurements while paying little attention to the cultivation of crops or animal husbandry.⁹¹ Stalin’s non-holiday mail was also voluminous. In the six months leading up to August 1931, the apparatus processed 13,000 private letters in his name—enumerating each writer’s identity, social origins, and employment and appending summaries of every letter, transferring most to the archives, sending some to government agencies for response, and forwarding 314 of them to Stalin.⁹² His aides tended to pass him letters purporting to be from former acquaintances (requesting material aid or seeking the status of association with him); any that took up Marxist-Leninist theory; and those proposing scientific inventions (one letter from Egypt was forwarded with the annotation “not particularly trustworthy proposal for invention of ‘death rays’”).⁹³ Another type concerned allegations of abuse by officials. Stalin usually forwarded this filtered correspondence to responsible functionaries, expecting an answer. (In May 1931, a member of the Young Pioneers scouts group had written back to report that local officials had finally come through with a pair of boots, making school attendance possible, thanks to Stalin’s intervention.)⁹⁴ “You are now all-powerful,” wrote one correspondent. “Your word determines not only the life but even the freedom of a person.”⁹⁵

The holiday correspondence revealed that Stalin knew of the terrible food situation. “Now it is clear to me that Kartvelishvili and the Georgian Central Committee secretariat, with their reckless ‘policy of harvest gathering,’ have brought a number of regions in western Georgia to famine,” he wrote to Kaganovich (August 17, 1931), using a word the regime would not publicly allow. “They do not understand that the Ukraine methods of harvest gathering, necessary and expedient in grain-growing regions, are not expedient and harmful in non-grain-growing regions that in addition lack any industrial proletariat. They’re arresting people by the hundreds, including party members openly sympathizing with those dissatisfied and not sympathizing with the ‘policy’ of the Georgian Central Committee.”⁹⁶ Stalin directed Mikoyan to send emergency grain to western Georgia.⁹⁷ One could never know which denunciation might catch Stalin’s eye.⁹⁸ He could even rise to officials’ defense when he perceived them to be victims of a vendetta.⁹⁹ Word reached him that one of his old Tiflis Theological Seminary teachers, seventy-three-year-old Nikolai Makhatadze, was imprisoned. “I know him from the seminary and I think he cannot present a danger for Soviet power,” Stalin wrote to Kartvelishvili in Tiflis. “I request that the old man be released and that I be informed of the result.”¹⁰⁰

Kaganovich was now Stalin’s top deputy in the party, and for the first time, the thirty-eight-year-old was managing affairs in the dictator’s absence. Stalin took pride in what he called, to Kaganovich, “our leading group, which was formed historically in the struggle with all forms of opportunism,” and reacted angrily to quarrels among them.¹⁰¹ “I don’t agree with you about Molotov,” he wrote to Orjonikidze (September 11, 1931). “If he’s giving you or the Supreme Economic Council a hard time, raise the matter in the politburo. You know perfectly well the politburo won’t let Molotov or anyone else persecute you or the Supreme Council of the Economy. In any event, you’re as much to blame as Molotov is. You called him a ‘scoundrel.’ That can’t be allowed in a comradely environment. You ignore him, the Council of People’s Commissars . . . Do you really think Molotov should be excluded from this ruling circle that has taken shape in the struggle against the Trotsky-Zinoviev and Bukharin-Rykov deviations? . . . Of course Molotov has his faults. But who doesn’t have faults? We’re all rich in faults. We have to work and struggle together—there’s plenty of work to go around. We have to respect one another and deal with one another.” Soon, an exasperated Stalin would reprimand Orjonikidze yet again: “We work together, come what may! The preservation of the unity and indivisibility of our ruling circle! Understood?”¹⁰²

In Sochi, Stalin was staying up high at the Zenzinovka dacha and measuring temperature differences with the lower Puzanovka dacha, in a reprise of his youthful days as a weatherman at the Tiflis observatory. Nadya had again departed early; her fall classes were resuming. “Everything is according to the usual: a game of gorodki, a game of lawn bowling, another game of gorodki, and so on,” he wrote, addressing her affectionately as “Tatka!” (September 9, 1931). Nadya replied that she had gotten safely back to a dreary capital. On the 14th, he wrote again: “I’m glad you’ve learned how to write substantive letters. There’s nothing new in Sochi. The Molotovs have left. They say Kalinin is coming. . . . It’s lonely. How are you doing? Have Satanka [Svetlana] write something to me. And Vaska, too. Continue to keep me ‘informed.’ I kiss you.” Nine-year-old Vaska (Vasily) wrote to his father (September 21) about how he was riding his bike, raising guppies, and taking photos with a new camera. Stalin wrote to Nadya about a visit from Kirov. “I went one time (just once!) to the seaside. I went bathing. It was very good! I think I’ll go again.” Nadya wrote back, “I’m sending the book by Dmitrievsky (that defector) On Stalin and Lenin. . . . I read about it in the White press, where they say that it has the most interesting material about you. Curious?”¹⁰³

MANCHURIAN SURPRISE

Instigator of mayhem at home, Stalin received a jolt from abroad. On the morning of September 18, 1931, an “explosion” just outside Mukden, on the South Manchurian Railway, disrupted a few yards of track; it did not even prevent the arrival of the latest train.¹⁰⁴ But within an hour, Japan’s Kwantung Army had begun massacring Chinese garrison soldiers sleeping in their barracks in northern Mukden, and by September 19 the Japanese flag already flew over the Chinese city. Japan’s military quickly seized other Chinese cities, revealing a premeditated plan.¹⁰⁵ Manchuria had long been a kind of Balkans of the east, a battleground in successive clashes dating back to the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). Now, Japan claimed to be restoring stability following the supposed vacuum opened up by the Red Army withdrawal after its 1929 military confrontation with China over the Chinese Eastern Railway.¹⁰⁶ Half the world’s soybeans were grown in Manchuria, which found a hungry market in Japan, while exports of Manchuria’s iron ore enabled Japan to become the top steel producer in East Asia. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in Nanking, which faced opposition from Chinese Communists and a breakaway Nationalist faction in Canton, ordered no retaliation by the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang, and sought recourse in the League of Nations.¹⁰⁷

Soviet-Japanese relations had been tense, but Soviet exports to Japan had doubled between 1925 and 1931, while Japanese exports to the USSR, from a very low base, had increased tenfold. Still, Japan’s actions in Manchuria violated the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, which recognized a Russian sphere of influence around the Chinese Eastern Railway. Tokyo pressured Moscow to allow it to use that rail line to move its troops against Chinese forces and, when Moscow refused, arrested some of the Soviet employees; one died in custody (from typhus, Japan claimed), another from supposed suicide. Belatedly, the Soviets acquiesced in Japan’s use of the railroad to chase down Chinese resistance—right to the borders of the Soviet satellite Mongolia and the Soviet Union itself.¹⁰⁸ And so, after all the propaganda about looming “imperialist intervention” and the fabricated crimes of Red Army officers supposedly lying in wait to commit treason in the event of an external attack, an “imperialist” power had acted.

Stalin was preoccupied with the limitrophes, the former tsarist lands on the western frontier.¹⁰⁹ Soviet war plans took as their point of departure an enemy coalition of neighboring states, above all Poland (P) and Romania (R), which would be incited and supported by the Western imperialist powers. This “PR series” of contingency plans, drawn up in 1931–32, envisioned advancing in the Baltic region to protect Leningrad and the right flank, but mostly defending the presumed main axes, the center and the south, even retreating as far as the Dnieper River until full Soviet mobilization enabled a counteroffensive.¹¹⁰ But Stalin was well aware of Soviet vulnerabilities in the Far Eastern theater, too. By 1931, Japan’s Kwantung Army numbered 130,000, with another 127,000 Manchurian soldiers, out of a total Manchurian population of 30 million, versus fewer than 100,000 troops in the Soviet Far Eastern Army and a total Soviet Far East population of just 800,000, of whom one quarter were ethnic Koreans and Chinese.¹¹¹ Soviet rail capacity there was perhaps no more than four or five trains per day, too slight for mass reinforcements.¹¹² The Soviet Far Eastern Army had yet to acquire a fleet, air force, or storehouses in case the Trans-Siberian artery was cut off by enemy air strikes. Japan’s military did not need to read the secret OGPU reports to know that collectivization and dekulakization had undermined Red Army morale. The Kwantung leadership judged the USSR incapable of real war, so that if the Red Army did engage, the Japanese would pounce—and if the civilian government in Tokyo opposed a full-scale clash, then let it fall.¹¹³

Stalin chose not to hurry back to Moscow. At the politburo, some officials demanded resolute action to uphold Soviet administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway, just as in 1929, but Stalin suspected other countries would take advantage of a Soviet-Japanese clash, especially after Kaganovich and Molotov informed him of the lack of reaction by the British and the French. “Most probably, Japan’s intervention is being conducted by agreement with all or some of the great powers on the basis of the expansion and strengthening of spheres of influence in China,” he speculated to his minions (September 23, 1931). “Our military intervention is, of course, excluded; even diplomatic involvement is now not expedient, since it would only unite the imperialists, when it is advantageous to us for them to quarrel.”¹¹⁴

On October 1, 1931, the Council of People’s Commissars quietly raised the investment plan for armaments. Production had barely increased in the first nine months of the year.¹¹⁵ Stalin finally left Sochi for Moscow on October 7. Ten days later, the regime created a “committee of reserves” charged with stockpiling grain in anticipation of war. The ambitious export plans to pay for imported industrial machinery remained in place.¹¹⁶ But heavy rains were hitting drought-stricken areas, ruining part of the harvested grain that had been stacked. Across the Union, the larger-than-expected bulge in the urban labor force had pushed the number of people on rations to 46 million by fall 1931, from 26 million at the start of 1930.¹¹⁷ The army and the growing prison population, not to mention the bureaucratic hydra responsible for distribution of grain, had to be fed, too.¹¹⁸ Grain stocks in the entire Soviet Far East amounted to a mere 190,000 tons.

GLOBAL EARTHQUAKE

On Monday morning, September 21, 1931—nearly simultaneously with the Japanese aggression in Manchuria—Great Britain stunned the world, abandoning the gold standard, even though it had not run out of reserves.¹¹⁹ Within four weeks, eighteen countries followed the UK off gold. Stocks on the New York exchange lost half their value, the second crash in eighteen months. The pound’s resulting devaluation had global consequences, because Britain, along with the United States, served as the world’s principal short-term lender.¹²⁰ Soon London would embrace “imperial free trade,” meaning free only for British dominions, alongside protectionist tariffs for other countries, and would improvise a sterling bloc. This effectively ended a long epoch of Britain upholding an open global economic order.¹²¹

Pravda (September 22, 1931) triumphantly deemed the gold-standard démarche “not only a weakening of Britain, but a weakening of international imperialism as a whole.” Marxists like Stalin assumed the crisis inhered in the functioning of capitalism. In fact, human decisions transformed structural problems into what came to be known as the Great Depression. Central bankers and their acolytes had long believed in the necessity of convertibility between currencies and gold, but a fixed-exchange-rate system works only if there is convergence in the macroeconomic performance of the participants (similar levels of wage and price inflation, public and private deficits, competitiveness) and an absence of shocks. Now, confronted with a shock, monetary authorities chose to raise interest rates, exacerbating the problems. And finances became unglued anyway. By year’s end, nearly 3,000 banks in the United States, the citadel of world finance, would fail or be taken over as confidence and GDP cratered, accompanied by deflation in asset and commodity prices, disruption of trade, and mass unemployment.¹²²

The Depression’s impact proved worse in Eastern Europe than in Western, because largely peasant countries were whiplashed by the commodity price crash while their governments (Czechoslovakia excepted) depended on foreign financing, which dried up. Most Eastern European countries hesitated to depreciate their currencies, for fear of a repeat of hyperinflation, but they closed banks, imposed foreign-exchange and trade controls, raised tariffs, and postponed or suspended foreign debt payments—moves toward autarchy that magnified arbitrary bureaucratic power at the expense of markets and imparted further impetus to authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and xenophobia.¹²³ The USSR was also a predominantly peasant country, and although capitalist economic troubles initially had allowed Stalin to enjoy nearly unfettered Western technology transfer, now he was caught out, dependent on commodity prices and foreign financing for those industrial purchases.¹²⁴

Stalin had been preoccupied with a possible French-led collective boycott that could cut the Soviets off from all advanced technology, and Orjonikidze had bent over backward to a delegation of German industrial luminaries, while Stalin restrained the insurrectionist impulses of the German Communists.¹²⁵ Berlin, for its part, faced shrinking foreign markets and rising unemployment—and was coming around to the idea that Stalin’s crazy building of socialism might work. A bilateral trade agreement had been signed that extended German government-guaranteed credits to the USSR for a period of twenty-eight months, longer than the usual. The Soviets were to use the funds to purchase an additional 300 million marks’ worth of German industrial goods, at favorable prices.¹²⁶ The deal was supposed to underwrite the wild industrial leap of 1931 and put to rest, for now, the feared anti-Soviet boycott. German exports to the USSR would jump to double the level of 1929. But the agreement had not resolved the severe Soviet balance-of-payment problems.¹²⁷ The Soviets even failed to reap the benefits of the pound’s devaluation because of their renewed economic reliance on Germany.¹²⁸

Soviet reliance on expensive short-term credits—the only kind predominantly available to the Communist regime—imposed relentless pressure to retire maturing debt and obtain new loans. With Soviet foreign debt more than doubling in the period 1929–31 (it would increase 50 percent in 1931 alone), rumors of a pending default spread in the Western press. (Turkey and much of Latin America defaulted at this time.)¹²⁹ On October 6, 1931, the British chargé d’affaires in Moscow wrote to London that the severe Soviet balance-of-payments crisis, on top of the failures to meet 1931 output targets, would even compel Moscow to break off rapid industrialization and collectivization.¹³⁰ Wishful thinking aside, the worsening terms of trade and tariffs did force the Soviets to curtail imports of consumer and even capital goods.¹³¹ But the Soviets meticulously paid their debts. The pressure to do so partly explains the regime’s continued export of grain despite fears for the harvest and low global prices.¹³² Only state-imposed deprivation allowed the USSR to avoid external default.

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST KULAK SABOTAGE

Compared with the robust 1930 harvest—officially estimated at 83.5 million tons, but closer to 73–77 million—the 1931 harvest would come in somewhere between 57 million and 65 million tons. A cutback in grain exports loomed, but Stalin stalled the reckoning, continuing to lash out at the “liberalism” of rural officialdom for failing to extirpate “the kulak.”¹³³ He also countenanced intensified religious persecution and ruination of churches.¹³⁴ Still, he had grudgingly allowed a slight reduction in procurement targets for the Volga, the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan, the most drought-stricken regions, while holding the line on Ukraine’s targets and raising the quotas for the North Caucasus (which had largely escaped the drought).¹³⁵ Mikoyan, on October 31, 1931, told a Central Committee plenum that on the eve of the harvest, “we had awaited the season of the grain collections with rainbow perspectives.”¹³⁶ Regional party bosses, given the floor, uttered the truth: drought and a poor harvest had rendered even the reduced quotas impossible. Stalin—who got his back up when officials cited natural causes as excuses—exploded, sarcastically mocking one speaker’s “exactitude” in adducing data on lower crop yields.¹³⁷ And yet, the dictator agreed to gather separately with plenum delegates from the grain-growing regions, which resulted in additional procurement reductions.¹³⁸

Growers were reluctant to sell even what they had at the regime’s punishingly low prices: in 1931, the market price per tsentner of rye was 61.53 rubles, versus the state price of 5.50; for wheat, the disparity was greater still.¹³⁹ But now, procurement agents grabbed even the food for minimal consumption. State collections in fall 1931 (and into early 1932) would leave farmers with less grain, meat, and dairy than in any year since the mid-1920s. “Comrade Stalin, I ask you to look into how collective farmers live on the collective farms,” urged one of the countless letters pouring in about the starvation. “At the meetings it is impossible to speak up; if you do speak up, then they say you are an opportunist.”¹⁴⁰

Stalin was the sole bulwark against retreat from building socialism. On November 16, 1931, as he was walking the short distance between party headquarters on Old Square and the Kremlin, down Ilinka Street, a former White officer and presumed British agent, whom the OGPU had under surveillance, chanced upon him.¹⁴¹ The man, who used the alias Yakov Ogarev, was said to have been so startled that he failed to pull his revolver from under his heavy overcoat. In another telling, the OGPU operative shadowing him had grabbed the enemy’s hand. Either way, Ogarev was arrested. “I recognized [Stalin] immediately from the likeness to his portraits I had seen,” he would testify. “He appeared shorter than I expected. He was moving slowly and looked at me intently. I also did not take my eyes off him.” There was no trial, no mention in the press.¹⁴² The politburo issued another secret resolution forbidding Stalin from walking Moscow on foot. The chance encounter somewhat recalled that of Gavrilo Princip and Franz Ferdinand on a Sarajevo street outside Moritz Schiller’s Delicatessen in 1914. But the armed Ogarev was no Princip.

QUEST FOR NONAGGRESSION

Japan, with its invasion of Manchuria, had seized an industrial territory larger than Germany, France, and Austria combined, while losing just 3,000 killed, 5,000 wounded, and 2,500 frostbitten.¹⁴³ “Japan plans to seize not only Manchuria but also Peking,” Stalin wrote presciently to Voroshilov (November 27, 1931), adding, “It is not impossible and even likely that they will seize the Soviet Far East and Mongolia to soothe the feelings of the Chinese clients with territory captured at our expense.” He further surmised that the Japanese would claim to be safeguarding the region from “Bolshevik infection” while creating their own economic base on the mainland, without which Japan would be boxed in by “militarizing America, revolutionizing China, and the fast-developing USSR.”¹⁴⁴ Stalin supported “serious preventive measures of a military and nonmilitary character,” including additional units for the Soviet Far East, walking a fine line between showing weakness, which might invite attack, and overly strong measures, which might offer a casus belli.¹⁴⁵ He also reinforced Soviet efforts to conclude nonaggression pacts with countries on the western frontier. Such a pact had been signed with Lithuania (1926), but he sought them with Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Romania, and, above all, Poland.¹⁴⁶

Amid reports that the French government was encouraging Japan to launch a war against the USSR and trying to insert a clause into its draft bilateral pact with Moscow that would be invalidated by just such a third-party attack—all of which fit Stalin’s cynical view of the imperialist powers—he suffered an unpleasant surprise: fierce resistance to a nonaggression pact with Poland from inside the foreign affairs commissariat.¹⁴⁷

Stalin, finally, had replaced foreign affairs commissar Chicherin—a hypochondriac frequently absent abroad for treatment—with his deputy, Maxim Litvinov.¹⁴⁸ (In a bitter parting memorandum, Chicherin fulminated against Litvinov, the Comintern, and “the GPU, [which] deals with the foreign affairs commissariat as with a class enemy.”)¹⁴⁹ Litvinov, never a close associate of Stalin’s, became the face of the USSR abroad.¹⁵⁰ Whereas Chicherin was aristocratic and urbane, Litvinov was rough hewn. He was also Jewish. He had lived in exile in the UK from 1907 through early 1918 and afterward as a midlevel embassy counselor, spoke fluent accented English, and had married an English writer, Ivy Low, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, whom he called his bourgeoise. He continued Chicherin’s orientation on Germany while seeking to make all of Europe his bailiwick, but Stalin subdivided the department and inserted rivals.¹⁵¹ Still, issues of Stalin’s control remained (foreign affairs personnel, about one third of whom were Jews, were better educated than functionaries of any other government body).¹⁵² A Polish offer to Litvinov to resume talks for a nonaggression pact had been rebuffed—and Stalin had been informed only ex post facto.¹⁵³

The dictator was convinced that Poland’s ruler, Józef Piłsudski, was secretly working to undermine Ukraine, but also that, without Poland, a major imperialist attack on the Soviet Union would be far less feasible.¹⁵⁴ A Polonophobe himself, he nonetheless warned Kaganovich not to be taken in by the foreign affairs commissariat’s “anti-Polonism.”¹⁵⁵ Stalin discovered, however, that any decrease in tensions with Poland threatened bilateral relations with Germany: the Reichswehr chief of staff, on a visit to Moscow, expressed fears that a Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact would guarantee Poland’s existing borders.¹⁵⁶

Litvinov was also working assiduously, alongside his deputy Lev Karakhan, for a nonaggression pact with Japan, hewing to Stalin’s line to stress Soviet noninterference and to make concessions.¹⁵⁷ On December 13, 1931, the OGPU decoded and forwarded to Stalin an intercepted transcript of a conversation between the Japanese military attaché in Moscow, Kasahara, and his superior (visiting from Tokyo), advocating for war before the USSR became too strong and underscoring that “the countries on the Soviet western border (i.e., at a minimum Poland and Romania) are in a position to act with us.”¹⁵⁸ The attaché added that the Japanese ambassador to Moscow, Kōki Hirota, thought “the cardinal objective of this war must lay not so much in protecting Japan from Communism as in seizing the Soviet Far East and Eastern Siberia.” Stalin circled these territories and circulated the intercept to the politburo and the military command, advising that the Soviet Union risked becoming, like China, a rag doll of the imperialists.¹⁵⁹

Also on December 13, Stalin sat for a two-hour interview with the German psychoanalytical writer Emil Ludwig. When Ludwig noted “a bowing before all things American” in the USSR, Stalin accused him of exaggerating. “We do respect American business-like manner in everything—in industry, in technology, in literature, in life,” the dictator allowed, adding: “The mores there in industry, the habits in production, contain something democratic, which you cannot say of the old European capitalist countries, where, still today, feudal aristocrat haughtiness lives.” Still, in terms of “our sympathies for any one nation, . . . I’d have to say it would be the Germans.” Stalin had been exiled in Siberia, and Ludwig delicately suggested a contrast with Lenin’s European emigration. “I know many comrades who were abroad for twenty years,” Stalin answered, “lived somewhere in Charlottenburg [Berlin] or the Latin Quarter [Paris], sat for years in cafés and drank beer, and yet did not manage to acquire a knowledge of Europe and failed to understand it.”¹⁶⁰ Ludwig inquired whether Stalin believed in fate. “Bolsheviks, Marxists, do not believe in fate,” he answered. “The very notion of fate, of Schicksal, is a prejudice, nonsense, a survival of mythology, the mythology of the ancient Greeks.” Ludwig pressed: “So the fact that you did not die is an accident?” Stalin: “There are internal and external factors whose totality led to the circumstance that I did not die. But utterly independent of that, another could have been in my place, because someone had to sit right here.”¹⁶¹

CONCEALED MILITARIZATION

Despite Soviet groveling, the Japanese government did not bother to reply through diplomatic channels to renewed offers of a nonaggression pact.¹⁶² Voroshilov, in a note to his deputy Gamarnik (January 13, 1932), parroted Stalin’s line of a likely Japanese invasion, yet added skepticism. “The creation of a Far Eastern Russian government is being projected and other claptrap,” he noted. “All of this is rumor, very symptomatic.”¹⁶³ On January 29, Artuzov forwarded to Stalin a secret report (obtained via a mole) by French military intelligence, which envisioned four scenarios for the outbreak of a war: German occupation of the Rhineland, following a possible Nazi revolution; an Italian strike against Yugoslavia, drawing in France; a grudge match between Poland and Germany; and “a conflict with the USSR agreed by many countries.”¹⁶⁴ The fourth scenario—Stalin’s fixation—was supported by other reports of France supplying Japan and Franco-German rapprochement.¹⁶⁵ Anti-Soviet circles in Paris were fantasizing that Japan would make available liberated Soviet territory for the émigrés’ triumphal return.¹⁶⁶ Molotov, at the 17th party conference (January 30–February 4, 1932)—lower in stature than a congress—warned that “the danger of imperialist attack has considerably increased.”¹⁶⁷

A pseudonymous “letter from Moscow” published in Trotsky’s Bulletin abroad reported that at the party conference, Stalin had been largely silent. “After every sitting, delegates and visitors were asked, ‘What did Stalin say?’” the report claimed. “‘Nothing.’”¹⁶⁸ True enough. Secretly, however, Stalin had embarked on energetic steps. Japan had changed his mind.

Whereas Tukhachevsky and the brass had long wanted to prioritize military production, Stalin prioritized heavy industry in general—the base of a modern economy, in his view—but now, just six months after having rejected Tukhachevsky’s wild spending requests, Stalin was himself demanding forced creation of 40 to 50 new divisions.¹⁶⁹ Following the replacement (January 5) of the Supreme Council of the Economy by three commissariats—heavy industry, light industry, and forestry—the regime created a unified main mobilization directorate in heavy industry for the defense factories.¹⁷⁰ On January 19, Stalin agreed to a commission on “tankification” of the Red Army, on which he placed Tukhachevsky, and rammed through a plan for 10,000 tanks in 1932. Fewer than 2,000 had been manufactured in 1931, but Stalin wielded the preposterous new target to force expansion of assembly lines and creation of systematic tank-building capability at tractor and automobile factories, too.¹⁷¹

Stalin needed advanced tank designs—and, amazingly, he got them. The Soviet trade mission in Britain had secured permission to purchase 15 Vickers-Armstrong medium (six-ton) tanks, 26 Carden Loyd light armored machine-gun carriers, and 8 Carden Loyd amphibious tanks, as well as a license for production and blueprints.¹⁷² In parallel, working undercover at the Soviet trade organization in New York, the OGPU had overcome the lack of diplomatic relations and a legal injunction to procure specifications for the Christie M1931 tank. (J. Walter Christie was an engineer, who sometimes tested his designs with race car driving, and his dual-drive tank designs were notable for their innovative suspension and speed; he had offered to sell the technology to the U.S. military, but it had declined.) Two “tractors” shipped out of New York were in reality Christie tanks without the turrets, which became the basis for production of the Soviet track-wheeled “BT” at the Kharkov Locomotive Plant.¹⁷³ The imported designs demanded more sophisticated motors, gearboxes, chassis, caterpillar tracks, optics, traversing mechanisms, and armor plating than Soviet industry had been producing.¹⁷⁴ Still, by the end of 1932, the Soviets, who had been incapable of producing a single decent tank, would manufacture 2,600.¹⁷⁵ Soviet military spending would skyrocket in 1932 to 2.2 billion rubles, from 845 million—all of which Stalin kept concealed.¹⁷⁶

OMINOUS SIGNS

Japanese troops entered Harbin, the main Soviet railway junction in China, on February 5, 1932, to the euphoria of anti-Soviet émigrés.¹⁷⁷ In late February, Soviet intelligence delivered another intercepted Kasahara letter to Tokyo promising that “if we were to attack the USSR, Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states would join (but not immediately), supported actively by the French and the not inconsiderable force of White Russians along the border.”¹⁷⁸ Japanese military aircraft were violating Soviet airspace; Stalin ordered Soviet forces not to yield to the provocations of warmongers.¹⁷⁹ Still, the regime established the Far Eastern Fleet as a separate command and ordered up additional submarines.¹⁸⁰ On March 4, 1932, Izvestiya published excerpts from the decrypted secret Japanese telegrams calling for seizure of Siberia and the Soviet Far East. (Evidently, the Japanese had discovered that the Soviets had broken their codes.) Izvestiya underscored that, while Moscow maintained neutrality in the Sino-Japanese conflict, “the Soviet Union will not permit anyone to violate Soviet borders, advance into its territory, and capture even a tiny parcel of Soviet soil.”¹⁸¹ Tukhachevsky revisited the “PR” war plan, with preemptive destruction of Poland by “heavy bomber strikes in the Warsaw region” and tank armies on the ground.¹⁸²

Japan did not annex Manchuria, as it had the far smaller Taiwan and Korean Peninsula, but it orchestrated the proclamation of a puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchu Land) and, on March 9, installed Henry Pu-Yi, the deposed last Qing emperor (whom the Japanese had recently kidnapped), as head of state in what was the Qing ancestral homeland.¹⁸³ Ten days later, Karakhan offered assurances of Soviet restraint to Japan’s ambassador Hirota, who secretly advised Tokyo that it could do as it pleased in Manchuria.¹⁸⁴ Quietly, the Soviets were offering to recognize Manchukuo, sell Japan the Chinese Eastern Railway, and negotiate fishing rights, oil leases, and trade, in exchange for a Japanese halt to sponsorship of anti-Soviet émigré groups, but Tokyo displayed indifference. The Soviet envoy in Tokyo was instructed to convey that Moscow would not be intimidated.¹⁸⁵ Stalin’s options were narrow, however. Negotiations for nonaggression pacts had been concluded with Finland (January 21, 1932) and Latvia (February 5), and one would be signed with Estonia (May 4), but talks with Romania deadlocked over its disputed annexation of Bessarabia.¹⁸⁶ Negotiations with France were torturous and would not succeed until late fall.¹⁸⁷

Stalin received fresh reports that Warsaw had not desisted from attempts to destabilize Ukraine or cooperate with Japan in a possible military strike against the USSR.¹⁸⁸ Even so, negotiations with Poland would bear fruit in late summer, albeit in a pact valid for just three years. German fears were borne out: Stalin would bow to Poland’s insistence to insert a clause about the inviolability of the latter’s frontiers.¹⁸⁹ But Voroshilov had complained bitterly in a letter (March 12, 1932) to the Soviet envoy in Berlin that only because of necessity were the Reichswehr high commanders “‘friendly’ with us (hating us in their hearts).”¹⁹⁰ The pacts with Poland and France would effectively mark a break in the Soviet pursuit of the elusive special relationship with Germany predicated on Versailles pariah status. This posture had always been aimed at preemption of an anti-Soviet bloc, which the 1931 trade agreement with Berlin and the 1932 nonaggression pacts with Warsaw and Paris would manage to accomplish, for now.¹⁹¹ Still, Soviet intelligence, obsessed with the emigration, had difficulty discerning the motives of foreign governments.¹⁹² And the USSR had no alliances. Nonaggression pacts were signed between enemies.¹⁹³

PRESSURE FOR RETREAT

A land commissariat internal report in early 1932 noted that peasants were quitting the collectives by the hundreds of thousands to roam industrial sites in search of food.¹⁹⁴ The politburo shrank the bread allocation in cities for people on the lower-priority ration lists (numbers 2 and 3), affecting 20 million souls. There was little to ration.¹⁹⁵ Stalin knew. But every time he conceded grain procurement reductions, every time he allowed strategic reserves to go unfilled, the already low rations for workers had to be lowered and grain was not exported, putting the military-industrial buildup at risk. The much delayed first blast furnace at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine had been started up early 1932, in a furious rush in horrendous frosts, to coincide with the 17th party conference. Two giant chemical factories, the first aluminum factory, and a ball-bearing plant were started up, and the first four trucks rolled off the line at the Nizhny Novgorod auto factory. But these were political startups. At Magnitogorsk, the new blast furnace’s cone caved in; it had to be completely rebuilt. Industrial output began to stagnate or even decline in spring 1932.¹⁹⁶

Voices were being raised. “Although you, comrade Stalin, are a pupil of Lenin, your behavior is not Leninist,” the delegate Fedorintseva of the rural soviet “Soldier,” in the Black Earth region, wrote to Izvestiya in spring 1932. “Lenin taught: factories to the workers, land to the peasants, and what do you do? You confiscate not only land but livestock, huts, and possessions from the middle and poor peasants. You threw out Trotsky and call him a counterrevolutionary, but you, comrade Stalin, are the real and first Trotskyite, and a pupil not of Lenin but of Trotsky. Why? They taught us in political circle that Trotsky proposed to build socialism with force at the expense of the muzhik.”¹⁹⁷ Trotsky added his own voice. “Separated from the apparatus, Stalin is . . . a nullity, an empty void,” he wrote in a new “open letter” to the party, in his Bulletin of the Opposition (March 1, 1932), predicting that “the man who yesterday was the symbol of the might of the apparatus tomorrow might become in everyone’s eyes the symbol of its bankruptcy.”¹⁹⁸

Suddenly, the regime backed down from socialization of all livestock, with a decree (March 26, 1932) initiated by land commissar Yakovlev and accepted by Stalin. Functionaries in the commissariat interpreted it as a retreat from collectivization—some asked whether it contained a typo—but the aim was tactical: to end flight from the collectives. Local officials did not hurry to return collectivized animals.¹⁹⁹

Not coincidentally, speculation about the dictator’s health, typical in any dictatorship, intensified. “This is not the first time that false rumors that I am ill have circulated in the bourgeois press,” Stalin wrote in a letter published in Pravda (April 3). “Sad though it may be, the fact is that I am in perfect health.”²⁰⁰

Ukraine party boss Kosior reported to Stalin that one quarter of the republic’s horses had died, and that the surviving ones were “skin and bones.”²⁰¹ The OGPU reported that in Borisov, in the Belorussian republic, a crowd had seized grain warehouses, and several hundred women and children had marched on the local Red Army barracks (“signs of commiseration could be seen among the soldiers and officers”).²⁰² In the textile mills of the Ivanovo region, ration cuts of up to one half, on top of labor intensification measures, provoked strikes and spontaneous assemblies.²⁰³ A sign placed in a shopwindow read “Even as the starving workers of Vichuga and Teikovo were being fired upon because they agitated for bread, here, behind the store’s drawn curtains, Communist functionaries and Red police of the GPU were fattening themselves up.”²⁰⁴ Ten thousand demonstrators ransacked the party and police buildings (“Toss the Communists . . . out the window”). Stalin dispatched Kaganovich, who mobilized local party agitators to speak with workers and himself heard out their grievances.²⁰⁵

Ivanovo’s striking workers did not reject socialism, only its building at their expense, and mostly blamed local officials for their plight.²⁰⁶ They shared a resolute anticapitalism with the Soviet regime, but that anticapitalism afforded the regime bureaucratic control over workers’ employment, housing, and food. The strikers were further stymied by the state monopoly over newspapers, radio, and the public sphere. More profoundly still, the strikers were trapped in the socialist vocabulary of class war.²⁰⁷ Kaganovich’s report for Stalin unfurled clichés, but, unlike the workers, the regime drew power from Bolshevik language: in conditions of “capitalist encirclement,” Kaganovich could equate worker criticism with playing into the imperialists’ hands. He managed to browbeat most strikers back to the shop floor, after which the OGPU arrested worker organizers and officials accused of worker sympathies.²⁰⁸

GRUDGING CONCESSIONS, PRIVATE APOLOGY

In parades on the May Day holiday in 1932, the Soviets offered the first public demonstrations of the Red Army’s mechanization—not only in Moscow, but in Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, Tiflis, and Khabarovsk.²⁰⁹ That same day, the first stage of the Dneprostroi hydroelectric dam supplied power, and this launch would prove durable. (“We are talking to you from the roof of an immense Bolshevik triumph!” gushed Soviet radio.)²¹⁰ Still, workers could not eat or clothe themselves with tanks and electricity.²¹¹ On May 4, Stalin led a politburo discussion that culminated in reduced procurement targets and acceptance of a commission’s recommendation to purchase hundreds of thousands of livestock from Mongolia, western China, Iran, and Turkey.²¹² On May 6 and 10, the regime issued decrees announcing the grain procurement reductions for collective farmers and the remaining individual household farmers, from 22.4 million to 18.1 million tons. The targets for state farms were raised, from 1.7 to 2.5 million, for a new overall target of 20.6 million. This was just 81 percent of actual 1931 procurements. The decrees even forbade further liquidation of individual household farms, ordered the return of confiscated livestock and an end to lawlessness, and stipulated that, after peasants had met procurement quotas for the harvest (deadline: January 15, 1933), they could freely trade in any surplus directly with consumers at “collective farm markets.”²¹³

Could it be? As recently as the October 1931 party plenum, Mikoyan, speaking for Stalin, had flatly rejected suggestions to permit rural trade at market prices after fulfillment of state obligations.²¹⁴ But now peasants were permitted to maintain their own cows (though not horses), cultivate household plots, and sell a significant portion of the fruits of their labor at market prices.²¹⁵ To be sure, private property in the means of production remained outlawed (household plots could not be sold or inherited). Still, it turned out that peasants had to be incentivized with private livestock holdings and market sales of even some of their collective farm output. Workers, too, had to be provided incentives through wage differentiation.²¹⁶ State-owned and state-managed factories were not permitted to engage in direct marketlike relations with one another, but they did so illegally. “The necessity of avoiding a break in production,” one official at Magnitogorsk explained, “will compel the receiving factory to seek the necessary materials from other sources by every possible means.”²¹⁷

The surprises kept coming. Stalin returned Shaposhnikov to a high-profile post in the capital, as director of the Frunze Military Academy, and on May 7, 1932, he even sent a written apology to Tukhachevsky for having denounced his January 1930 super-rearmament memorandum as Red militarism. “Two years later,” Stalin wrote, with a copy to Voroshilov, “when some unclear matters have become clearer for me, I must confess that my judgment was too severe, and that the conclusions of my letter were not correct in all respects.” Stalin noted that Tukhachevsky had been suggesting a peacetime army not of 11 million (per Shaposhnikov’s accusations) but of “8 million souls” and suggested that 6 million well-supplied, well-organized troops were “more or less within our capabilities.” (Soviet forces still numbered fewer than 1 million.) Stalin added: “Do not curse me for the fact that I corrected these shortcomings outlined in my [1930] letter with a certain tardiness.”²¹⁸

What was next? Stalin had long forbidden directing more consumer goods to villages to incentivize the flow of grain, but now he acquiesced in this, too.²¹⁹ He even agreed to importing grain (“54,000 tons of grain have already been purchased in Canada,” he telegrammed the party boss of Eastern Siberia on May 8. “You will get your share”).²²⁰ Tellingly, however, Stalin does not appear to have initiated a single one of these concessions, and invariably he issued barbed reminders of the need for unconditional fulfillment of centrally assigned procurement targets and the perfidy of capitalism.²²¹ Unlike Lenin in 1921, Stalin was not willing to admit a “retreat” or neo-NEP.²²² This reflected his touchiness about admitting any mistakes, desire to maintain his authority at the system’s apex, and nonnegotiable ideological commitment.²²³

Mongolia, the Soviet satellite, provides a stark contrast. Zealots of the Mongolian People’s Party, egged on by Comintern advisers, had launched a “class war” against “feudalism,” confiscating estates, ransacking Buddhist lamaseries, killing nobles and lamas, and collectivizing herders.²²⁴ At least one third of the livestock—the country’s main wealth—was lost. Inflation soared, shortages proliferated. In spring 1932, revolts led by lamas overtook four provinces in the northwest, amid rumors that either the elderly Panchen Lama (from Tibetan exile) or the Japanese would arrive with troops to liberate Mongolia from Communist occupation.²²⁵ The uprisings took Stalin by surprise (“The latest telegrams reported successes; therefore, such an unexpected and sharp deterioration is incomprehensible”). The Soviets dispatched consumer goods and ten fighter planes, which strafed the rebels; about 1,500 would be killed. Facing annihilation, rebels engaged in murder and cannibalism.²²⁶ On May 16, the politburo condemned the Mongolian party for “blindly copying the policy of Soviet power in the USSR.” Mongolian ruling officials were ordered to abandon collectivization of nomads, proclaim an “all-people’s government,” and publicly repudiate the noncapitalist path in Mongolia’s current conditions. The shift would be confirmed at a Mongolian People’s Party plenum and be dubbed the New Course.²²⁷ It was the full reversal Stalin would not countenance at home.

PANIC AROUND HIM

Whether the grudging concessions could save the situation was uncertain. “Stalin figured out trade with collective farms late,” the OGPU reported of one worker’s reaction in Minsk. “If he had thought about this in 1929–30, it would have been better, but now nothing will come of it, because the peasants have nothing; everything was destroyed.”²²⁸ Union-wide stocks of food and fodder amounted to perhaps a month’s supply, with less than that in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Lower Volga. A rattled Kuibyshev handwrote a supersecret memo in blue pencil on May 23, 1932, proposing to slice rations even for those with absolute highest priority (“special list” and “list 1”). The politburo rejected this, but it reduced allocations to the Red Army by 16 percent and resolved to accelerate grain imports from Persia.²²⁹ Molotov led a commission to Ukraine that reported (May 26) that “the situation is worse than we supposed,” and suggested granting still more “loans” of seed, fodder, and food. Stalin conceded release of another 41,000 tons of seeds from the strategic reserves in Ukraine and Belorussia.²³⁰ These loans—which would reach 1.267 million tons Union-wide for the year, three times the amount provided in spring 1931—were supposed to be returned from the pending 1932 harvest, seed for seed.²³¹

In late May, Stalin departed for his annual southern holiday, which would be especially prolonged (through late August). “The number of politburo inquiries has no effect on my health,” he wrote from Sochi. “You can send as many inquiries as you like—I’ll happily answer them with pleasure.”²³² He rebuffed requests to send Red Army troops to Mongolia. “We cannot conflate Mongolia with Kazakhstan or Buryatia,” he instructed Kaganovich (June 4), adding that Mongolian officials “should announce that the leaders of the rebellion are agents of the Chinese and especially the Japanese imperialists, who are seeking to strip Mongolia of its freedom and independence.”²³³ He also ordered documents concerning Soviet-Mongolian relations evacuated from Ulan Bator.²³⁴ “The Japanese, of course (of course!), are preparing for war against the USSR,” he wrote to Orjonikidze in June 1932, “and we need to be ready (for sure!) for everything.”²³⁵ Stalin kept up the pressure. “Will our industrialists produce the planned number of tanks, airplanes, antitank weapons?” he wrote to Voroshilov (June 9). “Have the bombers been sent to the East? Where, exactly, and how many? The trip on the Volga was interesting—I’ll say more: magnificent. A great river, the Volga. Damn.”²³⁶

Stalin’s mood oscillated. “It seems I shall not be getting better anytime soon,” he complained to Kaganovich in mid-June. “A general weakness and real sense of fatigue are only now becoming evident. Just when I think I am beginning to get better, it turns out that I have a long way to go. I am not having rheumatic symptoms (they disappeared somewhere), but the overall weakness is not going away.”²³⁷ He was chauffeured to his usual polyarthritis salt baths at nearby Matsesta. While on the terrace or out fishing, he would tell tales of the revolutionary underground and prison. He tended to his mandarins, berries, and grapes and played badminton or skittles with a cook against a bodyguard. Evenings, he competed in billiards, and the losers, which included himself, crawled under the table to absorb the winners’ banging from above. Gypsy dances and other performances accompanied the late-evening meals and drinking. The lights usually went out in his quarters at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.

Stalin’s holiday mailbag delivered increasingly dire news. “Because of the general famine, as you know, villagers have started flocking” to train stations, the Stalin loyalist Hryhory Petrovsky, in Ukraine, wrote on June 10, 1932. “In some cases, two thirds of the men had left their villages in search of bread.”²³⁸ (Yagoda reported on construction of a dacha settlement in the environs of Moscow using state funds for the grain collection commissariat.)²³⁹ Stalin held firm, proposing (June 18) the convocation of party secretaries from the main grain-growing provinces and republics to ensure “unconditional fulfillment of the plan.”²⁴⁰ He ordered up an editorial in Pravda demonstrating “with documentation the complete victory of the collective and state farms in agriculture, since the weight of the individual farming sector this year does not even reach 20 percent” (a reference to sown acreage). He added, “It is necessary to curse rudely and sharply all the lackeys of capitalism—Mensheviks, SRs [Socialist Revolutionaries], Trotskyites, and right deviationists—stating that the attempts of the enemies of the toilers to return the USSR to the capitalist path have been decisively defeated and turned into ashes, that the USSR has irreversibly adopted the new socialist path, that the decisive victory of socialism in the USSR can be considered already finalized.”²⁴¹ The editorial duly appeared (June 26, 1932). That same day, Stalin conceded a significant reduction in grain exports for the third quarter.²⁴²

The first mass-produced Soviet heavy bomber, the four-engine TB-3, had been tested in the air, but Voroshilov reported (“Dear Koba”) that just four had been manufactured, and that even these had malfunctioning radiators.²⁴³ He also had to inform Stalin about a shocking number of crashes in training: eleven aircraft downed just between June 5 and 20, killing thirty crew members. Voroshilov asked permission to join Stalin for a few days down south (“I have not been sleeping normally for a long time”). Stalin wrote back on June 24: “The most worrisome are the crashes and the deaths of our aviators. The loss of airplanes is not as scary (the hell with them) as the loss of living people, aviators. Live human beings are the most valuable and most important thing in our entire cause, especially in aviation.”^{244, 245}

Regional party bosses gathered in Moscow on June 28, 1932, and Molotov read out Stalin’s stern letter (sent ten days earlier): “In Ukraine, despite a harvest that was not bad, a number of districts with good harvests turned out to be in a state of ruin and famine.”²⁴⁶ This was the second known documented instance when Stalin used the word “famine” (golod).²⁴⁷ Molotov and Kaganovich approved only a slight reduction in procurements.²⁴⁸ Stalin, in two telegrams (July 1 and 2, 1932), spewed venom on Ukraine’s leadership (“demobilizers”) and ordered both of his top minions to attend Ukraine’s upcoming party conference.²⁴⁹ At that gathering (July 6–9), Kosior (a USSR politburo member) pointed out that some regions were already starving, while Ukraine government head Vlas Chubar (a candidate USSR politburo member) challenged Molotov and Kaganovich to go out and see for themselves.²⁵⁰ Afterward, Kaganovich wrote to Stalin that “all members of the [Ukraine] politburo . . . spoke in favor of lowering the plan” for deliveries, but “we categorically turned aside a revision.”²⁵¹

Then, on July 24, Stalin undermined their hard work. “Our governing directive that the grain collection plan for the USSR be fulfilled unconditionally is correct,” he wrote to Kaganovich and Molotov. “But bear in mind that an exception must be made for the districts in Ukraine that have suffered especially. This is necessary not solely from the point of view of justness, but also in view of the special condition of Ukraine and its common frontier with Poland.”²⁵² The next day, he again tried to explain his turnabout, suggesting that at the time of the Ukraine party conference he had not wanted “to derail the grain procurements.” What Kaganovich and Molotov made of Stalin’s zigzagging remains unknown. Stalin was banking on the harvest, whose “prospects,” he wrote, “will become clear (they have already become clear!): they are doubtless good for the USSR as a whole.” But the harvest was being overreported, and Stalin latched on to what he wanted to hear.²⁵³

Sown acreage had shrunk noticeably. Tractive power, seed grain, and fodder were scarce. The spring sowing season had proved short, and wheat sown beginning in late May always produced lower yields and was more susceptible to August rains, which would descend torrentially as early as the beginning of the month. Rust epiphytotics damaged a significant part of the wheat harvest, to the surprise of officials who had failed to identify it.²⁵⁴ Demoralized farmers forced into collectives were threshing and using manure sloppily and showing disregard for collectivized animals.²⁵⁵ Voroshilov had been granted his holiday, and on July 26 he wrote to Stalin about what he saw traveling south: “a scandalous infestation of the grain with weeds” in the North Caucasus.

The defense commissar appeared to be buckling under the pressure, complaining that “when one sees our military cadres, it is enough to make one a misanthrope,” and adding: “I cannot even say that these people do not work; on the contrary, they work until they are exhausted, but with no results.”²⁵⁶ Stalin kept up the pressure. “Six bombers for the Far East is nothing,” he responded (July 30). “We need to send no fewer than 50 to 60 TB-3s. And this needs to be done as soon as possible. Without this, the defense of the Far East is only an empty phrase.”²⁵⁷

An OGPU report to the “Central Committee” (August 1, 1932) estimated rifles at just 85 percent of needs, stationary machine guns at 68 percent, hand grenades at 55, revolvers at 36, modernized howitzers at 26 percent, 107-millimeter shells at 16 percent, and 76-millimeter shells at 7. Only a third of the projected 150 divisions could be fully outfitted.²⁵⁸ Nonetheless, that same day, the politburo confirmed Kuibyshev’s recommendation to reduce capital investments by a whopping 10 percent—more than that in heavy industry. Orjonikidze exploded. Kaganovich sought to conciliate him (“My friend, the financial situation required it”) while making clear that Stalin had signed on (“We wrote to our chief friend, and he thought it absolutely correct and timely to make cuts”).²⁵⁹ In mid-August, yet another Chinese commander resisting the Japanese managed to flee to Soviet territory, but the Japanese army pursued him. The war minister in Tokyo was said to have been barely restrained from launching an attack on the USSR.²⁶⁰

SUMMER DOOM

Telegrams, letters, and reports swamped Sochi with news of mass death of horses, mass failure to sow crops, mass starvation, mass flight from collective farms, and a bewildering lack of government response.²⁶¹ Andrew Cairns, a Scottish Canadian agricultural expert sent by the Empire Marketing Board, in London, to determine if Western farmers might learn something from Soviet collectivization, managed to travel around Ukraine, Crimea, the North Caucasus lowlands, and the Volga valley from May through August 1932, and he observed women pulling up grass to make soup. Of urban canteens he noted, “As each worker finished his meal there was a scramble of children and one or two women and men for their soup plates to lick, and their fish bones to eat.”²⁶² Throughout August 1932, unsigned editorials in Pravda lashed out at kulak “machinations” and grain “speculators.”

Stalin also received reports that “spoilage” was exaggerated and that grain was being stolen from slow-moving freight trains or slipped into ample pockets during mowing, stacking, or threshing, or just not being gathered (remaining in the fields to be eaten). He insisted to Kaganovich that just as private property under capitalism was sacred, so state property under socialism had to be recognized as “sacred and inviolable.”²⁶³ The dictator drafted a law, issued on August 7, 1932, that imposed the death penalty for the minutest theft of collective farm grain.²⁶⁴ He congratulated himself (“It is good”) and ordered a follow-up secret directive on the law sent to party organizations.²⁶⁵ Pravda (August 8) placed the pitiless law on an inside page; Kaganovich corrected this the next day with a front-page editorial.²⁶⁶ Other articles called for firing squads no matter the size of the theft. (One could view the compulsory state grain procurements—paying a mere 4.5 to 6.1 rubles per 100 kilos of rye, and 7.1 to 8.4 rubles for wheat, below production costs—as a form of grand theft, even as this enabled black bread to be sold in cities for just 8 to 12 kopecks a kilo.)²⁶⁷ Some politburo members had objected to the law in draft, but in reporting the objections to Sochi, Kaganovich had omitted names.²⁶⁸

Stalin exploded at Kaganovich (August 11) over fresh requests from Ukraine to lower procurement targets yet again. “Things in Ukraine have hit rock bottom . . . about fifty county party committees having spoken out against the grain procurement plan, deeming it unrealistic. . . . This is not a party but a parliament, a caricature of a parliament.” He demanded removal of Kosior and Chubar, and the demotion of Ukraine OGPU chief Redens. “Bear in mind that Piłsudski is not daydreaming, and his agent network in Ukraine is much stronger than Redens or Kosior think,” Stalin noted. “Also keep in mind that the Ukrainian Communist party (500,000 members, ha-ha) contains quite a few (yes, many!) rotten elements, conscious and unconscious Petliurites [a reference to the civil war Ukrainian nationalist], even direct agents of Piłsudski. If things get worse, these elements will not hesitate to open a front inside (and outside) the party, against the party.” Stalin warned direly: “Without these and similar measures (economic and political strengthening of Ukraine, in the first place in its border districts and so on), I repeat, we may lose Ukraine.”²⁶⁹

Polish spies were infiltrating the USSR, and being caught.²⁷⁰ At the same time, the Polish government had just signed the three-year bilateral nonaggression pact with Stalin, easing the pressure.²⁷¹ Perhaps he was using the threat to sustain Kaganovich’s severity or just could not let go of his fixation on an imperialist intervention provoked by internal difficulties. In the same note, Stalin informed Kaganovich that he had decided to appoint Balytsky as OGPU plenipotentiary in Ukraine and had already spoken with Mężyński. On the sacking of Kosior and Chubar, however, the crafty Kaganovich pushed back, ever so gently—“It is harder for me to judge than you”—and Stalin relented.²⁷² Belatedly, the dictator also accepted land commissar Yakovlev’s critique of excessive expansion of sown area, which disrupted crop rotation, and he reluctantly allowed a slowing to enable crop rotation to be reintroduced.²⁷³ But when, on August 20, 1932, Boris Sheboldayev, party boss in the North Caucasus, telegrammed to report that the harvest had turned out even lower, and farmers were in revolt, Stalin answered, with a copy to Kaganovich: “Either the local party committee is being diplomatic toward the population or it is leading the Central Committee by the nose.”²⁷⁴

Nadya had again accompanied him to Sochi, with the children, Vasily (then ten) and Svetlana (five), but she again returned to Moscow before he did. “We have built a marvelous little house,” Stalin wrote of a new Sochi dacha, to the man in Moscow responsible for such properties down south, Yenukidze, just as his holiday was coming to a close.²⁷⁵

“GRAVEDIGGER OF THE REVOLUTION AND OF RUSSIA”

Stalin had made the USSR more vulnerable to its enemies, especially Japan. Collectivization-dekulakization was his policy, which all party officials knew, having been bombarded by extremist directives in his name. They also knew that the right deviation had predicted calamity. Individual efforts to get Stalin to ease up provoked his rage. Officials’ ability to act collectively was limited to Central Committee plenums, but those took place under the watchful eye of his hard-line loyalists, the secret police, and the stool pigeons who chauffeured vehicles and staffed hotels. Conspiratorially, late one night in August 1932, a few veterans of the revolution and the civil war gathered in a private apartment near Moscow’s Belorussia train station that belonged to Martemyan Ryutin (b. 1890), an editor at Red Star, the army newspaper, to discuss the crisis.²⁷⁶ Stalin had promoted the peasant-born Siberian to candidate membership in the Central Committee—the top elite (then 121 people)—but then in 1928 had sacked him for a “conciliatory attitude toward the right opposition.” Not long thereafter, he had Ryutin expelled from the party.²⁷⁷ Now, Ryutin and the party members Vasily Kayurov, a department chief in the state archives, Mikhail Ivanov, an employee of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, and Kayurov’s son Alexander, a senior inspector in the USSR supply commissariat, had channeled their worries into a seven-page “Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks),” which labeled Stalin an “unprincipled intriguer,” “a sophist, a political trickster, and actor,” “theoretically worthless,” “a dictator” like “Mussolini, Napoleon, Piłsudski, Horthy, Primo de Rivera, Chiang Kai-shek,” and “the gravedigger of the revolution in Russia.”²⁷⁸

“Gravedigger” was the epithet that Trotsky had once hurled at Stalin. Ryutin, infamously, had been a Trotsky scourge.²⁷⁹

Secretly, at a hut in a village about forty miles outside Moscow, on August 21, 1932, Ryutin presented the “Appeal to All Members” as well as a much longer document, “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship,” to perhaps fifteen middling officials in various bureaucratic entities.²⁸⁰ They constituted themselves as the Union of Marxist-Leninists and held elections to leadership posts. One of them hosted a follow-up meeting in his apartment, where it was decided that the documents should be circulated hand to hand. Jānis Stens, an ethnic Latvian professor at the Institute of Red Professors, passed copies to Kamenev and Zinoviev at the dacha they shared outside Moscow. Another conspirator passed copies to Trotskyites in Kharkov. A copy got to the disgraced former Moscow party boss Nikolai Uglanov (Ryutin’s former patron), who was close to Bukharin. (Bukharin would later deny that he had received a copy or knew of the Ryutin group.)

Ryutin’s nearly 200-page “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship” was a marvel. It condemned the “adventuristic rate of industrialization” and “adventuristic collectivization with the aid of unbelievable acts of violence and terror,” defended Trotsky as a genuine revolutionary despite his shortcomings, and excoriated the rightists for capitulation, yet underscored how “the right wing has proved correct in the economic field.” Ryutin brimmed with rage at Stalin’s muzzling of party members, and with idealism about Marx and Lenin. (“To place the name of Lenin alongside the name of Stalin is like placing Mount Elbrus alongside a heap of dung.”)²⁸¹ He proposed twenty-five concrete measures, from new elections to party organs on the basis of intraparty democracy to a mass purge of the OGPU, from dispersal of coercively formed collective farms and loss-making state farms to ending dekulakization, state procurements of grain and livestock, and agricultural exports.²⁸² Ryutin’s prerequisite for these proposals was fulfilling Lenin’s Testament. He concluded that “putting an end to Stalin the dictator and his clique” was “the primary duty of every honest Bolshevik.”²⁸³

There it was again. Remove Stalin. Lenin’s Testament. The subject of endless party discussions that had prompted Stalin to offer to resign at least six times between 1923 and December 1927.

Ryutin acknowledged that “the removal of Stalin and his clique via the normal democratic means guaranteed by the rules of the party and the Soviet Constitution is completely impossible” and explained that “the party has two choices: to continue meekly to endure the mockery of Leninism and the terror, and wait calmly for the final collapse of the proletarian dictatorship; or to remove this clique by force and save the cause of Communism.”²⁸⁴ But his text, even in the version of the document typed up by the OGPU, made no direct call for assassination. And he undertook no such preparations.²⁸⁵ Instead, having diagnosed the party as the instrument of oppression, he imagined it as the instrument of liberation.²⁸⁶ Two party members with knowledge of Ryutin’s texts sent a written denunciation to the apparatus on September 14, 1932.²⁸⁷ Stalin was informed the next day. Arrests followed. Ryutin was hauled in on September 22. That same day, Kamenev and Zinoviev were summoned to explain why, having read the Ryutin documents, they had failed to report them, a party crime.²⁸⁸

Ryutin was not alone. In its September 1932 issue, Trotsky’s Bulletin published a “draft platform” (missing the first page) attributed to unnamed members of a “left opposition” underground in the USSR. It declared a “crisis of the Soviet economy” and called for fixing (in Marxist terms) the imbalance between industry and agriculture by reducing expenditures on industry to ease inflation, dispersing nonviable collective farms, ceasing the coerced liquidation of kulaks, and attracting foreign capital through the old practice of leases (or foreign concessions). Quixotically, the authors even offered to cooperate with “the faction that is ruling at present,” as part of a shift from “the current obviously unhealthy and obviously nonviable regime to a regime of party democracy.”²⁸⁹ That same month, a traveling Soviet official passed a second text, by Ivan Smirnov, a onetime Trotsky supporter who worked as deputy head for transport equipment in the state planning commission, to Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov, in Berlin, who amplified it and published it in the Bulletin. It consisted of selected material from an internal state planning commission report on the first six months of 1932. “In view of the inability of the present leadership to extricate itself from the economic and political blind alley,” the published article concluded, “the conviction is growing in the party that it is necessary to replace the leadership.”²⁹⁰

Sedov wrote to his father—in invisible ink—that a “bloc” had formed inside the USSR of “Zinovievites, the Sten-Lominadze group, and Trotskyites,” an apparent reference to the small Ryutin conspiracy. But Trotsky fretted that the “left” was incorrectly throwing its lot in with the “rightists” and instructed Lev that, with the émigré Constitutional Democrat “Milyukov, the Mensheviks and Thermidorians of all sorts” demanding Stalin’s removal, “we may temporarily have to support him. . . . The slogan ‘Down with Stalin’ is ambiguous and should not be raised as a war cry at this moment.”²⁹¹

THE FOUR HORSEMEN

In September 1932, back from his three-month holiday, Stalin quietly softened his August 7 law: no death penalty for theft of tiny amounts of grain, just sentences of ten years.²⁹² The 1932 harvest was coming in at fewer than 60 million tons, and possibly as low as 50 million, which was close to the horrific result in the famine year of 1921.²⁹³ Reports to Stalin would peg the harvest as bad but much higher than reality, up to 69 million tons, a discrepancy he never came to appreciate.²⁹⁴

Half of all Kazakhs—as many as 2 million—had picked up their tents and remaining herds and fled the collectives. Half of the party functionaries in that republic were said to have deserted their posts.²⁹⁵ One official report to Stalin in August had noted that the Kazakh autonomous republic now counted 6 million head of livestock, down from 40 million in 1929.²⁹⁶ Finally, on September 17, he presented a decree for a politburo voice vote that loosened the form of collective farms in Kazakh territories, allowing each household to own eight to ten cattle, up to 100 sheep and goats, and three to five camels, but still insisted that forced settlement would continue “to eradicate economic and cultural anachronisms.”²⁹⁷ He also authorized reductions in grain collections for the Kazakh regions (47,000 tons), along with food assistance (33,000) and postponement of repayment of seed and food advances (98,000)—which together totaled more than one quarter of their original procurement plan.²⁹⁸ Quotas had already been reduced for Ukraine, but “it is completely incontrovertible that Ukraine will not deliver this amount of grain,” the Ukraine official Mendel Khatayevich had courageously written to Stalin, who underlined this passage in red pencil.²⁹⁹ At the end of September, the North Caucasus received a massive 660,000-ton grain procurement reduction, albeit to a level still unattainable.³⁰⁰

Exports cratered. In 1932, the regime would export just 1.73 million tons of grain, down from 5.06 million in 1931 and 4.76 in 1930. Tsarist Russia in 1913 had exported more than 9 million tons of grain.³⁰¹

With the country in famine’s death grip, Stalin convened a joint Central Committee–Central Control Commission plenum (September 28–October 2, 1932) devoted to trade, consumer goods, and ferrous metallurgy. With the harvest over, he aimed to reduce the spring concessions to household plots and private markets. The plenum also condemned the Ryutin group “as traitors to the party and to the working class who, under the flag of a spurious ‘Marxism-Leninism,’ have attempted to create a bourgeois-kulak organization for the restoration of capitalism and particularly kulakdom in the USSR.” Ryutin, under OGPU interrogation, had claimed sole authorship, to shield his comrades. The plenum adopted Stalin’s resolution calling for immediate expulsion of all who knew about but did not report the group.³⁰² Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Uglanov, who visibly wept, repented yet again, but they were nevertheless kicked out of the party yet again and sentenced to internal exile for three years (Zinoviev to Kustanai, Kazakhstan; Kamenev to Minusinsk, Eastern Siberia).³⁰³

Several tons of meat, sausage, chicken, and fish, 300 kilos of caviar, 600 kilos of cheeses, and large amounts of fruit, vegetables, and mushrooms had been ordered up for the plenum, some of which the attendees were allowed to haul home.

Gossip in Moscow had Stalin tendering his resignation, only to have it rejected.³⁰⁴ In fact, the inner circle closed ranks behind him. “Now,” Kirov stated in a report (October 8, 1932) on the plenum to the Leningrad party, published in Pravda, “everyone can see that we were utterly correct, that the further we proceed on the path of constructing socialism, the more manifest is the counterrevolutionary character of every oppositionist tendency.” Ryutin got ten years. He was remanded to the prison near the large Urals village of Verkhne-Uralsk, joining Trotskyites he had once condemned.³⁰⁵ On November 7, 1932, the revolution’s fifteenth anniversary, in the first of Ryutin’s many letters from prison to his wife, Yevdokiya—aware that any correspondence was read by the authorities—he wrote, “I live now only in the hope that the party and the Central Committee will in the end forgive their prodigal son.” He added, “You will not be touched. I have signed everything.”³⁰⁶

A PERSONAL BLOW

For someone building a new world, Stalin’s home life was unremarkable. As only insiders knew, he lived in an apartment on the second floor of the three-story Amusement Palace, the Kremlin’s only surviving seventeenth-century boyar residence, with vaulted ceilings and wood-burning stoves. He slept on a divan in an undersized bedroom. Nadya had her own, more ample room, with an oriental carpet of distinct color, a Georgian takhta (divan) on which she placed embroidered pillows, as well as a bed, desk, and drawing table. Her window opened onto the Kremlin’s Alexander Garden and scenic Kutafya Tower. Between the couple’s bedrooms was the dining room, “large enough to have a grand piano in it,” their daughter, Svetlana, would recall. Down a hall were bedrooms for Svetlana and Vasily; Svetlana shared hers with a nanny, Alexandra Bychkova. (“If it hadn’t been for the even, steady warmth given off by this large and kindly person,” Svetlana would later write, “I might long ago have gone out of my mind.”)³⁰⁷ Vasily bunked with Artyom, known as Tom (also the nickname for the boy’s deceased father). Stalin’s grown son from his first marriage, Yakov, no longer lived with them. Farther down the same hall, the governesses had a room, as did Karolina Til, an ethnic German from Latvia who oversaw the household. The children could see their father everywhere—on posters and newspaper front pages—but not so much at home.

Most visitors to the Kremlin apartment were regime officials. Stalin had no surviving siblings, and his father was deceased. Keke, his mother, lived alone in Tiflis; Nadya, in letters, expressed regret that Keke could not come to Moscow because of the severe climate. The one surviving letter from Keke to her son, from the 1920s, has her wishing him complete annihilation of his enemies.³⁰⁸ Eighteen of Stalin’s letters to her (in Georgian) have survived, containing a word about his health and the children and wishes for her health and long life, all brief and signed “Your Soso.”³⁰⁹ They invariably included an apology for their rarity (“I, of course, am guilty”).³¹⁰ Stalin had nothing to do with his mother’s or father’s relations. Relatives from both of Stalin’s marriages would stop by the Kremlin apartment: Alexander Svanidze (the brother of Stalin’s deceased first wife, Kato) and his wife, Maria, a former opera singer from a well-off Jewish family; Kato’s sisters, Mariko and Sashiko; Nadya’s father, Sergei Alliluyev, and mother, Olga; Nadya’s brothers, Fyodor and Pavel, and the latter’s fetching wife, Yevgeniya (Zhenya); and Nadya’s sister Anna, who had married Redens (they lived in Kharkov).³¹¹ Several of them lived at the Zubalovo dacha complex, where the Stalins had a dacha that they had remodeled, adding a balcony to the second floor and an outdoor bathhouse. He planted an orchard, and raised pheasants, guinea fowl, and ducks, and liked to lie down on the warm tiled stove in the kitchen to alleviate the pain in his joints.³¹² He also liked to wind up the player piano or gramophone and sing. While Kirov, Voroshilov, and even Molotov danced, he watched.³¹³

Nadya made occasional use of her husband’s position, but she refused to play the smiling wife of the leader, an opportunity other Kremlin wives would have killed for.³¹⁴ “We spoke among ourselves, and many times to Nadya, that she was not a match for him,” recalled Galina Serebryakova, the spouse of a regime official. “He needed a different wife!”³¹⁵ She attended the Industrial Academy under her maiden name, Alliluyeva, and it remains unclear whether her fellow students knew she was Stalin’s wife.³¹⁶ (Nadya belonged to the party, and Nikita Khrushchev, the academy’s party secretary, learned her husband’s identity.) The effects of her exposure to the student milieu—young women in the city selling themselves to make ends meet; students with ties to the famine-stricken countryside—remain difficult to gauge. She kept an emotional distance.³¹⁷ She dressed simply: a white blouse, navy blue skirt below the knee, low-heeled shoes, little jewelry, no perfume. “There was nothing striking about her,” recalled Irina Gogua, who worked in the Kremlin. “In Iosif’s presence she seemed plain; it was obvious that she was tense.”³¹⁸ Svetlana would later try to recollect moments of tenderness, or even attention, from her mother but could not.³¹⁹ “A woman of very strong character,” Karl Pauker, the head of regime bodyguards, was said to have told a Kremlin doctor. “She is like a flint. The Master is very rough with her, but even he is afraid of her sometimes. Especially when the smile disappears from her face.”³²⁰

Nadya was diagnosed with a defective heart valve, angina, and general exhaustion and suffered from migraines, evidently from a cranial impairment that the best doctors could not alleviate. (Some observers thought she had clinical depression or schizophrenia.)³²¹ Regime intimates witnessed shouting matches between her and Stalin, laced with his obscenities. But there were episodes of affection, too. “Once, after a party at the Industrial Academy, where Nadezhda was studying, she returned home severely ill from having drunk some wine, and she felt badly,” Vladimir Alliluyev, the son of Anna and Stanisław Redens, recalled. “Stalin laid her down, comforted her, and Nadezhda said, ‘Anyway, you love me a little bit.’”³²²

Nadya rarely revealed the stress of their almost parallel lives. “Altogether, we have terribly little free time, both Iosif and I,” she had written to Keke. “You have probably heard that I have gone back to school (in my old age). I do not find studying in itself difficult. But it is pretty difficult trying to fit it in with duties at home. . . . Still, I am not complaining, and so far I am coping with it all quite successfully. Iosif has promised to write to you himself. As far as his health is concerned, I can say that I marvel at his strength and his energy. Only a really healthy man could stand the amount of work he gets through.”³²³

In November 1932, Nadya was weeks from graduation and facing exams.³²⁴ On November 7, Svetlana, Vasily, and Artyom watched the Revolution Day parade on Red Square. Nadya marched with the Industrial Academy delegates. “It was cold, and Stalin was on the Mausoleum, as always, in an overcoat,” recalled Khrushchev, who marched with her. When the wind gusted, she said to him, “Look at mine: he did not bring his scarf, he’ll catch a cold and again be sick.”³²⁵ After joining her children, according to Artyom, Nadya complained of a headache and went home early. The children were taken to the Sokolovka dacha, another state facility used by the family, where they could ski. On November 8, Stalin was in his office between 2:30 and 8:05 p.m., which resulted in a menacing circular to Ukrainian officials that cut off all consumer goods until grain flowed again, and a telegram to the Kazakh leadership accusing it of providing low harvest numbers aimed at “deceiving the state.”³²⁶

Nadya was in the apartment, preparing for the customary holiday banquet that evening in the Voroshilov residence in the Grand Kremlin Palace.³²⁷ She put on an unusually stylish (for her) black dress of fabric imported from Berlin, with embroidered red roses, and placed a red tea rose in her dark hair. She was thirty-one years old; her husband was turning fifty-four.³²⁸ Stalin, it seems, sat across from her and drank more than usual. Some witnesses say he flirted with Galina Yegorova, the thirty-four-year-old actress wife of his military crony Alexander Yegorov. There had been much talk of dalliances (a hairdresser; a pretty woman who worked in protocol).³²⁹ Voroshilov tried to ease the tension, but an eruption occurred. Stalin threw something at Nadya (a bread crust, an orange peel, a cigarette butt).³³⁰ She stormed out. Molotov’s wife, Pearl Karpovskaya, known as Polina Zhemchuzhina, followed her. Witnesses mostly cite Stalin’s rudeness; Molotov faulted Nadya. “Alliluyeva was already something of a psychopath at that time,” he would recall. “She left the gathering with my wife. They took a walk on the Kremlin grounds. It was late at night, and she complained to my wife: ‘I do not like this, I do not like that. . . .’ She spoke about the young female barber Stalin saw. It was all simple: Stalin had drunk a little too much, he made some jokes. Nothing special, but it had an effect on her.”³³¹

On the morning of November 9, Karolina Til found Nadya in a pool of blood in her room, near a small toy-sized pistol. (It fit into a lady’s handbag; her brother Pavel had brought it from Germany as a gift.) When Stalin emerged from his room into the dining room, Til evidently told him, “Nadya is no longer with us.”³³²

Nadya had shot herself in the heart.³³³ A call came in to the Sokolovka dacha to prepare the children for return to Moscow; apparently, Voroshilov went to pick up Vasily and Artyom and tried to talk to Svetlana, who was six and a half, but he kept breaking down in tears. Svetlana appears to have remained behind with her nanny.³³⁴ Nadya’s open casket was placed upstairs in a nonpublic section of the State Department Store (GUM), across from the Kremlin on Red Square, where the central executive committee presidium, run by Yenukidze, had offices. “Early morning for the ceremony of bidding farewell, we climbed the second floor of GUM,” Artyom recalled. “Vasily and I climbed the stairs ahead of Stalin. He moved in silence. He was glum. I remember: as soon as Iosif Vissarionovich approached the casket, he began simply to cry, he broke down in tears. . . . Vasily literally hung on to him and said, ‘Papa, don’t cry, Papa, don’t.’”³³⁵ Molotov recalled, “I had never seen Stalin weeping before, but as he stood there by the coffin, tears ran down his cheeks. She loved Stalin very much—that is a fact. . . . He went up to [the coffin] and said, ‘I did not take enough care of you.’”³³⁶

Pravda (November 10, 1932) announced the death of Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva in what was the first mention in the Soviet press of Stalin’s marriage.³³⁷ No cause was given.³³⁸ She had been diagnosed with acute appendicitis but had put off the operation until after her exams, and this became the unofficial cause of death, spread by the secret police.³³⁹ Rumors that Stalin shot her over political disagreements were instantaneous. Some people claimed they heard from a Kremlin doctor or a servant that Nadya’s screams for him to stop had been heard by neighbors (through impossibly thick walls).³⁴⁰ Others whispered that he had driven her to suicide.³⁴¹ Still other rumors had Stalin marrying Kaganovich’s sister Rosa (no such person existed).³⁴² Kirov and Orjonikidze, Stalin’s two closest comrades, were said to have stayed in the Kremlin apartment with him the night of her death. Bukharin, who used to visit Nadya in the apartment, would offer to exchange Kremlin apartments with Stalin. Stalin accepted. Soon, however, he and the children instead moved into the Imperial Senate, to an apartment one floor below his Kremlin office. It comprised seven rooms on a long corridor, with rooms for servants and bodyguards at each end and windows looking out onto the Arsenal.³⁴³

The casket was placed on a white catafalque for an unhurried procession to the Novodevichy Cemetery on November 12. The newspaper had announced the schedule, and Moscow’s streets were lined with people (many of them plainclothes police). Stalin exited the Kremlin on foot, behind the horse-drawn hearse. Whether he marched the full four miles, through many narrow and winding streets, is uncertain.³⁴⁴ TASS announced that grave-site eulogies were delivered by Bukharin (for the Krasnaya Presnya ward party committee, Nadya’s primary party organization) and Kaganovich (Moscow party boss). “We are burying one of the best, most loyal members of our party,” Kaganovich stated. “Raised in the family of an old Bolshevik proletarian, going forward after the revolution for many years in a state of the greatest loyalty to the cause of the working class, Nadezhda Sergeyevna was organically linked with the worker movement, with our party. . . . We, close friends and comrades, understand the severity of the loss of comrade Stalin, and we know what duties this imposes on us with respect to comrade Stalin.”³⁴⁵

After Nadya was lowered into the grave, “Stalin threw a handful of dirt on it,” Artyom recalled. “He told Vasily and me to do likewise. Returning home, we had lunch. Stalin sat silently, contemplatively. Soon he left for a meeting of the government.”³⁴⁶ Pravda published a grace note from the dictator (November 18) offering “heartfelt gratitude to all organizations, comrades, and individuals who had expressed their condolences on the occasion of the death of my close friend and comrade Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva-Stalina.” He exhibited remorse and self-pity, fury and his sense of victimhood.³⁴⁷ Svetlana’s subsequent account, unreliable in most respects, rightly surmised that her father “was too intelligent not to know that people always commit suicide to punish someone.”³⁴⁸

ENEMY WITH A PARTY CARD

Secret reports were now mentioning a threat of starvation even for Moscow and Leningrad.³⁴⁹ Military intelligence estimated that Japan had a standing army of 1,880,000, Poland 1,772,000, Romania 1,180,000, Finland 163,000, Estonia 75,000, and Latvia 114,000.³⁵⁰ Absorbing his personal loss, his subjects starving, his eastern and western borders facing formidable enemies, Stalin could have been moved to carve out a breathing space. But the spring 1932 concessions had failed to produce a harvest miracle, and now he ratcheted up the repression again to squeeze blood from a stone.³⁵¹ He had formed a commission to purge the party in the North Caucasus, sending Kaganovich there to bang heads, and returned Yevdokimov to its capital, Rostov, ordering that villages that failed to fulfill grain quotas be deported in their entirety. (Their houses and fields were to be taken by “conscientious Red Army collective farmers who have too little land or bad land in other regions.”)³⁵² Molotov was dispatched to Ukraine, whence he complained to Stalin (November 21) that in the “opportunist, bourgeois, kulak situation,” local functionaries were urging that farmers’ consumption needs be met before more grain went to the state.³⁵³ That same day, Stalin accused the party boss in the Kazakh republic, Filipp Goloshchokin, of having surrendered despite “a maximal reduction” in procurement quotas, and ordered him to “strike those Communists in counties and below who are in the hands of petit bourgeois anarchy and have slid onto the rails of kulak sabotage.”³⁵⁴

The Soviet agricultural press in November 1932 carried headlines of peasants dying from starvation in Poland (“It is not a crisis; it is a catastrophe”), Czechoslovakia (“dying villages”), China (“hunger despite a good harvest”), and the United States (“poverty and ruin”).³⁵⁵ Not a word about the famine in the Soviet Union.

Once again, the party “opposition” played into Stalin’s hands: he received a denunciation (on or before November 19) against two officials, Nikolai Eismont, commissar of food for the RSFSR, and Vladimir Tolmachev, head of road transport for the RSFSR, who, in connection with the Revolution Day holiday, had been drinking in Eismont’s apartment. They gathered again the next day with Alexander Smirnov, a former agriculture commissar who had been demoted to a position in forestry, and criticized anew Stalin’s destructive policies. Smirnov had become a Central Committee member back in 1912, the same year as Stalin. Eismont had been on the recent commission to the North Caucasus led by Kaganovich and had seen the swarms of starving refugees at railroad stations. Under the influence, the trio had discussed possible replacements for the general secretary: Voroshilov, Kalinin, even Smirnov.

There it was, yet again. Remove Stalin.

The Central Control Commission, now overseen by the Stalin minion Jānis Rudzutaks, deemed the lubricated conversations a “counterrevolutionary grouping.”³⁵⁶ Stalin added the disgraced rightist Mikhail Tomsky (head of the state publishing house) to the “conspiracy,” and summoned a joint session of the politburo and the Control Commission presidium on November 27. “These people,” the attack dog Yemelyan Yaroslavsky fulminated, “are like the Ryutin group, only in a different form.” By now, though, the crisis under Stalin’s rule was pervasive and even some arch-loyalists shrank from full-throated condemnation of their loose-tongued comrades. Kuibyshev referred to Smirnov by his nickname (“Foma”) and recalled their long association, dating back to Narym exile. (Stalin had been there, too, and Smirnov had fed him.) Mikoyan, who used to be Eismont’s boss, awkwardly said almost nothing (until the very end).³⁵⁷

Rumors again circulated that Stalin had verbally offered to resign, and that after an awkward silence Molotov had spoken up to reassure him he had the party’s confidence.³⁵⁸ Be that as it may, Stalin found himself defending his policies.³⁵⁹ He grumbled that the conspirators “represent matters as if Stalin were guilty of everything” and warned that the choice was between becoming a victim of the imperialists—the fate of China—or a socialist industrial power that could defend itself. “What matters is not Stalin, but the party,” he concluded. “You can remove Stalin, but things will continue just as they are.”³⁶⁰

Eismont and Tolmachev were the ones expelled from the party, and Smirnov from the Central Committee, although they were not arrested.³⁶¹ Stalin had a transcript of the proceedings made for circulation to party organizations. He sent another vituperative telegram (also signed by Molotov), this one to officials in the Urals (December 7, 1932), condemning as “unpersuasive” their explanations for local state farms’ failures to fulfill procurement quotas. “The provincial leadership cannot escape its responsibility,” it said, asking for names of the state farm directors. “Announce to the directors that a party card will not save them from arrest, that an enemy with a party card warrants greater attention than an enemy without a party card.”³⁶²

SHARPENING THE CLASS STRUGGLE

On December 12, 1932, the Soviet Union restored diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Nanking. The next day, Japan belatedly replied to the Soviet offer of a nonaggression pact in a note to Soviet envoy Alexander Troyanovsky with a rejection.³⁶³ The Japanese leaked distorted versions of the exchange; the Soviet press published the originals, aiming to demonstrate Japan’s belligerence.³⁶⁴ Stalin, meanwhile, decided to widen the party purge he had imposed on the North Caucasus: on December 11, Pravda had carried a resolution in the name of the Central Committee announcing a multiregion party cleansing for 1933.³⁶⁵ His mood was captured in his greeting to the secret police on the fifteenth anniversary of their founding, December 20, which Pravda printed that day—“I wish you success in your difficult task of extirpating the enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat!”³⁶⁶

Stalin also took the time to repudiate Thomas Campbell, an agricultural expert from Montana who several years earlier had been afforded an audience, and had now published a book about his experiences and meeting with Stalin (“piercing black eyes which concentrate on you even while talking through an interpreter”). It was mostly sympathetic, but on the touchy subject of Comintern subversion, he wrote that Stalin had “unhesitatingly admitted, with disarming frankness, that under Trotsky there had been an attempt to spread Communism throughout the world. He said this was the primary cause of his break with Trotsky. . . . He explained that they had neither the time nor the money to try to communize the whole world, even should they wish to do so.” In his published repudiation (December 23, 1932), Stalin denied that Trotsky’s name had come up, and noted that Campbell’s book mentioned a transcript of their conversation but shrank from including it. Stalin’s rebuttal contained a purported transcript, which had him stressing the need for diplomatic recognition to normalize trade relations and had Campbell mentioning meeting with then President-elect Herbert Hoover prior to setting out for the Soviet Union and promising to convey the Stalin conversation back to Hoover.³⁶⁷

Before the year was out, Stalin pushed through a decree on an internal passport system to purge urban areas of “alien” and “non-laboring elements.”³⁶⁸ Recipients were to include permanent residents aged sixteen or older in cities and towns, and at construction sites, as well as transport workers and state-farm laborers, but not collective farmers. He aimed to diminish the pressure on the urban food supply and force peasants back into the collectives.³⁶⁹ On December 29, 1932, a furious directive in the name of the politburo threatened collective farms that failed to meet procurement quotas with a compulsory early repayment of credits, a cutoff from machine-tractor-station equipment, and confiscation of “all the grain they had, including the so-called seed funds”—the basis for the spring sowing campaign.³⁷⁰

Despite the greater repression, procurements as of January 1, 1933, had reached only 17.4 million tons, 3.7 million fewer than collected by the same time the previous year (and 3 million below the plan).³⁷¹ On January 7, Stalin opened another joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, boasting that “we had no iron and steel industry. . . . We now have one. We had no tractor industry. We now have one. We had no automobile industry”—and so on, through aircraft and more. He admitted that the first Five-Year Plan prioritized heavy industry but baldly asserted that living standards had improved. He had reduced industrial growth targets for the second Five-Year Plan to a more realistic 13–14 percent per annum.³⁷²

Stalin’s most important declaration concerned a sharpening of the class struggle as the country got closer to socialism, a cudgel he had used against Bukharin in 1928 (and a concept Trotsky had articulated a decade earlier). “We need to keep in mind that the increase in the power of the Soviet state will strengthen the resistance of the last holdovers of dying classes,” Stalin asserted. “Precisely because they are dying out and in their last days, they will switch from some forms of striking to other, sharper forms, appealing to the backward strata of the population. . . . On this soil, smashed groups of old counterrevolutionary parties of SRs and Mensheviks, bourgeois nationalists of the center and periphery, may stir and come to life, shards of counterrevolutionary elements of Trotskyites and right deviationists may stir and come to life.” He added: “This, of course, is not scary. But all this needs to be kept in mind if we want to do away with these elements quickly and without especially large numbers of victims.”³⁷³

Opposition, according to Stalin, now worked “on the sly,” masked behind simulated loyalty. In a second set of remarks to the plenum (January 11), he asserted—in line with the reports he received—that “our harvest was not worse, but better than in the previous year.” He blamed any problems on “anti-Soviet elements” and concealed “nests of counterrevolution.” “They sit right in the collective farm, holding positions as storemen, business managers, bookkeepers, secretaries, and so on,” he averred. “They will never say ‘Down with the collective farm.’ They are ‘for’ the collective farm.”³⁷⁴

Trotsky was ever present—his writings had been demanding that 1933 be the year of the major overhaul, an otherwise obscure proposal condemned at the plenum as “slander.”³⁷⁵

The politburo closed ranks around the dictator, and the others fell in line. “We, as members of the Central Committee, vote for Stalin because he is ours. (Applause.),” declared Rudzutaks. “You won’t find a single instance when Comrade Stalin hesitated or retreated. That is why we are with him. Yes, he vigorously chops off what is rotten, he chops off what is slated for destruction. If he didn’t do this, he would not be a Leninist.” Similarly, the disgraced Bukharin stated, “We have won dazzling victories in the building up of the Five-Year Plan. We are currently at war and must exercise the strictest discipline. . . . That is why such groupings must be hacked off without the slightest mercy, without being in the slightest troubled by any sentimental considerations concerning the past, concerning personal friendships.” Smirnov, in futile self-defense, denied that he or any other party member could have uttered the words about the need to “remove comrade Stalin”: “I think that only someone drunk out of his mind or insane could ever say such a thing.”³⁷⁶

At the plenum’s close (January 12), the regime announced suspension of recruitment into the party and the pending purge. That same day, Stalin permitted the politburo to approve, in a poll vote, another reduction in the yearly grain procurement for Ukraine, of 457,000 tons; other regions got smaller reductions. Twelve days later, the dictator sacked the party bosses in Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa, and Kharkov provinces.³⁷⁷ He did the same to the party boss of the Kazakh republic.³⁷⁸ Yagoda reported that eighty-seven “Trotskyites” had been rounded up or soon would be.³⁷⁹ Regime decision making was becoming more and more informal, with most key matters adjudicated in Stalin’s office.³⁸⁰ Secret police reports were claiming an ever greater share of his paperwork.³⁸¹ He floated the notion with the OGPU of deporting another 3 million peasants, a target soon sliced to 2 million, then 500,000, and finally only half of that.³⁸²

The OGPU, in any case, was consumed with forming local detachments to enforce a draconian decree, on January 22, 1933, ordering interdiction of peasant flight from grain-growing regions and blaming local authorities for allowing an exodus, which had helped spread epidemics and become a weapon for discrediting regime policies.³⁸³ Railway ticket sales were suspended and dragnets set up from the Caucasus to the Urals on one side and along the western borderlands on the other.³⁸⁴ Perhaps Stalin feared an unraveling of the collective farm order. In any case, the decree showed that he was very anxious to prevent the spread of further discontent to the urban socialist core. He also had to feed the cities, which could become death traps. Overall, the number of fleeing peasants captured and sent back would be relatively small (low hundreds of thousands, when there were 17 million peasants in collective farms in Ukraine alone). Many farmers were already trapped in regions without adequate food.³⁸⁵

Molotov, meanwhile, gloated to the central executive committee of the Soviet on January 23, 1933, that more and more capitalist states were recognizing the Soviet Union. “Some clever ones still consider further ‘study’ of the USSR necessary (i.e., to delay recognition),” he stated. “It should not be difficult to guess how Soviet might has increased, how our economy is expanding, how much the international weight of the USSR has grown. Those who are full of useless and empty phrases about further study of the USSR are the ones who have the most to lose from the absence of diplomatic ties.”³⁸⁶ Stalin sent a congratulatory note: “The confident-contemptuous tone with respect to the ‘Great Powers,’ the belief in our own strength, the simple spitting in the pot of the swaggering ‘Great Powers’—very good. Let them ‘eat it.’”³⁸⁷

GEOPOLITICAL CATASTROPHE

The Nazis had lost thirty-four seats in Germany’s November 1932 parliamentary elections, seeing their vote drop by 2 million—to 33.1 percent, from 37.4 percent in July 1932.³⁸⁸ The party, an amalgam of territorial organizations and divergent interests, was wracked by dissension and defections, partly triggered by Adolf Hitler’s refusal, even after the electoral reversal, of any post short of chancellor.³⁸⁹ A key driver of Nazi support, the Depression, had bottomed out, and a slow recovery was under way. And yet, traditional conservatives desperate for stability and order proved unable to fashion a parliamentary majority that achieved their goal of excluding the Social Democrats and defanging the trade union movement and the Communists.³⁹⁰ The maladroit octogenarian president, former field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed defense minister Kurt von Schleicher, another soldier turned politician, as chancellor in early December 1932, elbowing aside the ambitious archconservative Franz von Papen. But when Hindenburg refused to declare a state of emergency and allow Schleicher to dissolve the Reichstag to avoid a no-confidence vote, the chancellor resigned. Schleicher colluded with Hitler to try to stop the return of his nemesis von Papen, while the latter persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler, even though the field marshal had trounced the Nazi in elections to the presidency and mocked him as a mere corporal.³⁹¹ Traditional conservatives imagined that they could “tame” Hitler and the radical right while achieving a broadened anti-left coalition. On January 30, 1933, von Papen—having secured the vice chancellorship for himself—escorted the Nazi ruffian into the Chancellery, for the oath of office, through a rear door.³⁹²

“A stubby little Austrian with a flabby handshake, shifty brown eyes, and a Charlie Chaplin mustache,” wrote the world’s best-selling daily newspaper, the London Daily Herald. “What sort of man is this to lead a great nation?”³⁹³

Nazi ranks were electrified. “Hitler is Reich Chancellor,” marveled Joseph Goebbels. “Just like a fairy-tale.”³⁹⁴ Goebbels improvised a torchlight parade through Berlin, playacting a seizure of power, even though Hitler had come to power legally (just like Italy’s Mussolini).³⁹⁵ Success had not come out of nowhere, however. By 1929, the Nazis had 3,400 party branches around the country and were mounting countless public rallies, sponsoring concerts, putting up Christmas trees and maypoles, spotlighting local heroes. They spoke to German people’s fears and prejudices, but also to their aspirations and interests, promising a reckoning with the disgraceful recent past and a future of national unity and rebirth.³⁹⁶ Paramilitary Nazi Brownshirts, known as the SA, engaged in street brawling with the Social Democrats and the Communists (who fought each other as well). The Nazi leadership encouraged violence and lawlessness, just as the Bolsheviks had on their path to power, but the Nazis accused the Communists of fomenting the chaos and called for order.³⁹⁷ Organized opposition to the Nazis was either irresolute or at loggerheads.³⁹⁸ The Reichswehr was focused on rearmament.³⁹⁹

There was one political force that could compete with Nazi storm troopers in the streets—the Communists—but they proactively subverted Weimar democracy, even knowing that this facilitated Nazi aims. Through the Comintern, Stalin was enforcing a struggle to the death—with Social Democracy. “The Nazi tree should not hide the Social Democrat forest,” the German Communist leader Ernst Thälmann had warned.⁴⁰⁰ The catastrophe of the Comintern policy of “social fascism” was vividly brought home in the November 1932 elections, when German Communists had garnered nearly 6 million votes, and the Social Democrats more than 7 million, as compared with the Nazis’ 11.7 million. In no free and fair election did the Nazis ever win more votes than the Communists and Social Democrats combined.⁴⁰¹

Many Communists imagined Nazism, which they labeled “fascism,” to be the terminal stage of the crisis of “monopoly capitalism,” so that the turmoil in Germany would eventually redound to them, which meant they needed to make themselves ready by outbattling their rivals on the left.⁴⁰² Some Communists even welcomed the Nazi accession to power. Stalin did not.⁴⁰³ Still, he appears to have underestimated Hitler, as many—but not all—contemporaries did. He interpreted Hitler and Nazism as creatures of finance capital, a class-based analysis, and assumed that German militarists would continue to shape state policy.Secret German-Soviet military cooperation had been failing.⁴⁰⁴ But Stalin hoped it would be renewed.⁴⁰⁵ Werner von Blomberg, who had played a hand in Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler and stayed on as war minister, would pass on to the Soviet embassy that “a change in Soviet-German relations is out of the question under any circumstances.”⁴⁰⁶ But Nazism’s appeal to German workers was manifest, and its intense ideological radicalism was directed at the Soviet Union.⁴⁰⁷

RADICAL REALIGNMENTS

As the Nazis reveled in Hitler’s chancellorship, Stalin’s regime staged the First all-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers (February 15–19, 1933), attended by more than 1,500 delegates, nearly 900 of whom held no bureaucratic office and half of whom were not party or Communist Youth League members. They were recognized for labor performance.⁴⁰⁸ Kaganovich addressed them in a folksy manner, reciting peasant proverbs, while praising the vicious injunction against theft of socialist property as a “great law.” He boasted of the creation of 200,000 collective farms and 5,000 state farms, asserting that only collectivization had made possible industrialization and the preemption of foreign military intervention.⁴⁰⁹ One collective farm brigadier, who had been asked by Kaganovich whether the collectivized system was better, answered, “Things are, of course, better now. Still, before I was master of my fate, and now I am not the master.”⁴¹⁰

On the final day, Stalin, putting on a folksy air, too, warned biblically that he who did not work would not eat, but promised that each collective farmer would have a cow (“prolonged applause”).⁴¹¹ He scolded those who underestimated women (“Women on the collective farms are a great force”). He acknowledged that “quite a number of people, including collective farmers,” had been skeptical of party policy, but dismissed the idea of a third way, individual farming without capitalists and landowners, because it would inevitably give rise to a “kulak-capitalist regime.” Silent on the famine, he asserted that “the multi-million-mass poor peasants, previously living half starving, have now become middle peasants in the collective farms, they have become well-off. This is an achievement that the world has not seen before.”⁴¹²

On February 27, a fire consumed the German Reichstag, and a young, unemployed bricklayer, recently arrived from the Netherlands, was found inside and arrested. He was a member of the Dutch Communist party. The Nazi party was still a minority in the parliament, but now Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree suspending the governments of Germany’s federal states and most civil liberties “as a defensive measure against the Communists.”⁴¹³ Dissolution of parliament and snap elections, which were scheduled for March 5, afforded Hitler a campaign of intense hysteria about Communist subversion. The Nazis still won only 43.9 percent (288 of 647 seats), but with their partners, the German National People’s Party, who won 8 percent, they had a governing majority.⁴¹⁴ Hitler had been handed power, but now he seized it, proposing an Enabling Act to promulgate laws on his authority as chancellor without the Reichstag for a period of four years. It required a two-thirds vote. Only the Social Democrats, twelve of whose deputies had been imprisoned, voted against the measure, which passed 441 to 94.⁴¹⁵ Soon the Nazis were the sole legal party in Germany.

Hitler—who had become a German citizen only in 1932—was dictator of the country, upending the traditional conservatives.⁴¹⁶ “With few exceptions, the men who are running this government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” the American consul general wrote in a message to the state department. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”⁴¹⁷

Elements in the Nazi movement—assisted by colluding police—exuded fanatical delight in physically annihilating leftist property, institutions, and people. Hitler fulminated against “Judeo-Bolshevism” as a worldwide conspiracy.⁴¹⁸ At the same time, he received the Soviet envoy, Lev Khinchuk, on April 28, 1933, and shortly thereafter allowed Germany to ratify the long-delayed extension of the 1926 Berlin treaty, ostensibly reaffirming good bilateral relations.⁴¹⁹ “The cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy is the maintenance of peace,” Izvestiya editorialized (May 6). “In this spirit, the Soviet Union does not wish to alter anything in its attitude to Germany.” But Radek penned an essay in Pravda (May 10) noting that the fascist regimes led the way in “revision of the robber baron peace of Versailles,” and warning that this would entail “the creation of a worse Brest-Litovsk peace.” He hinted at a Soviet effort to cozy up to Poland.⁴²⁰

Communist parties outside the USSR numbered 910,000 members, and the German party had accounted for 330,000 of them, the second largest after China (350,000).⁴²¹ But Hitler crushed them. This left the French and Czechoslovak parties, with just 34,000 and 60,000 members, respectively, as the next largest. Communists in France and Czechoslovakia pressured Moscow to abandon the “social fascism” policy. But in spring 1933, when seven Social Democratic parties issued a joint public appeal for a nonaggression pact with Communists, Stalin approved instructions “to step up the campaign against the Second International,” arguing that “it is necessary to emphasize the flight of Social Democracy to the fascist camp.” This stance was shared by many of the foreign Communists he had gathered at Comintern HQ.⁴²² The long-standing civil war on the left persisted.⁴²³

EDUCATION OF A TRUE BELIEVER

Upward of 50 million Soviet inhabitants, perhaps as many as 70 million, were caught in regions with little or no food.⁴²⁴ More than a million cases of typhus would be registered in 1932–33, and half a million of typhoid fever.⁴²⁵ The OGPU claimed in a report to Stalin (March 1933) that it had interdicted 219,460 runaways in search of food, sending 186,588 back to their points of origin and arresting the others.⁴²⁶ Human and animal corpses littered county roads, railroad tracks, the open steppe, the frontiers. Peasants ate dogs and cats, exhumed horse carcasses, boiled gophers. The Dnepropetrovsk OGPU reported to Kharkov (March 5, 1933) “on the rising cases of tumefaction and death on the basis of famine, verified and confirmed in documents by physician observation.” The regional OGPU boss sent tables with the numbers of starving families by county, and named conscientious laborers who were starving, adding that a traveling commission had delivered grain from the reserves to the suffering areas.⁴²⁷ It was, of course, too little too late.

Death and disease wracked the entire Soviet wheat belt—Ukraine (including the Moldavian autonomous republic), the North Caucasus (including the Kuban, Stavropol, and Don provinces), the Middle and Lower Volga valley (from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan, including the Volga German autonomous republic), and the Central Black Earth region—but also Vologda and Arkhangelsk in the north, the Urals, and the Kazakh autonomous republic.⁴²⁸ Party officials begged for emergency aid to “save the lives of many people from starvation death,” as the ethnic Kazakh official Turar Ryskulov wrote to Stalin (March 9, 1933).⁴²⁹ An OGPU operative assembled a summary of starvation in the cities in the Urals, Volga valley, and North Caucasus, underscoring the negative effects on workers’ political mood.⁴³⁰ Reports of cannibalism in Ukraine were averaging ten per day. Parents were killing one child and feeding it to the others; some prepared soup stock and salted the remaining flesh in barrels to preserve it.⁴³¹ The secret police reported on cannibal bands that targeted orphans: “This group cut up and consumed as food three children, including an eleven-year-old son and an orphan whose parents perished from starvation.”⁴³²

Reports and letters to Stalin’s office were graphic.⁴³³ The documents show that he became livid not when he learned that people were driven to eating human flesh but when he learned that an American correspondent was given permission to travel to famine-stricken regions (“We already have enough spies in the USSR”).⁴³⁴ When even the unsqueamish Kaganovich confirmed the catastrophe, it evidently got through to the dictator.⁴³⁵ On March 20, 1933, the politburo, with Stalin signing the protocol, resolved to supply more tractors (though fewer than requested), send more food aid to Ukraine, allow free trade in foodstuffs in Kharkov and Kiev, and mobilize all internal resources for the sowing campaign.⁴³⁶ (That same day, the politburo directed the OGPU to remove guns from the population.) ⁴³⁷

Voroshilov, on holiday again, had written to Stalin complaining of insomnia and stomach problems. Stalin answered, “I still feel poorly, sleep little, and am not getting better, but this is not manifested in work.” Orjonikidze wrote to Voroshilov (April 9) that he was sick and exhausted and complained about how his first deputy, Pyatakov, worked hard but did not believe in the party’s strategy, and how Orjonikidze needed a trusted deputy who could relieve him as commissar, because “I am rather ill and cannot make it much longer.”⁴³⁸

How did the regime not come apart altogether? How did higher-ups writing and receiving the reports not concede that the situation called for repudiation of regime policies? How did local officials persist in implementing orders?

Lev Kopelev (b. 1912) was a Communist Youth League militant, the editor in chief of an agitation paper, and a 25,000er requisitioning grain in his native Ukraine from late 1932 into spring 1933. He had been arrested, for ten days in 1929, for putting out leaflets defending the “Bolshevik-Leninists” (as Trotskyites called themselves).⁴³⁹ Young and naïve, he had admitted his error. His life rippled with meaning. “The grain front!” he recalled of the procurement campaigns. “Stalin said the struggle for grain was the struggle for socialism. I was convinced we were warriors on an invisible front, fighting kulak sabotage for the grain which was needed by the country, by the Five-Year Plan.” Kopelev noted how a local OGPU operative was the son of a miner and had worked in a mine himself (“We believed him without reservation”), while meetings with villagers took place under religious icons. “Every time I began to speak, I wanted to prove to these people that they were making a serious mistake by hiding the grain”—after all, workers in the cities were putting in two and three shifts yet did not have enough food; Japanese militarists and now German fascists surrounded the country. Villagers were eating grass and gnawing on twigs, denying that they had grain to give, before being hauled off—“and I persuaded myself, explained to myself: I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity,” Kopelev said. He convinced himself that “the famine was caused by the opposition of suicidally unconscientious peasants, enemy intriguers, and the inexperience and weakness of the lower ranks of [party and soviet] workers.”⁴⁴⁰

Kopelev was “speaking Bolshevik,” or making the revolution personal, internalizing its inescapable vocabulary, worldview, and presentations of self. The regime compelled people to write and recite autobiographies using prescribed categories and ways of thinking. Kopelev was a true believer, but it was not necessary to believe. It was, however, necessary to appear to believe and even the reluctant came to employ the language and thought processes of the regime to view the world through party directives and official reportage—class and enemies, factory output, and imperialist threats, false versus genuine consciousness. This is what gave Stalin’s regime its extraordinary power.⁴⁴¹

Even in the hospital with diarrhea, Kopelev devoured the reportage of Five-Year Plan triumphs and Stalin’s catechismal speeches. If doubts crept in, he took inspiration from role models—like the orphaned son of a hired farm laborer who had worked for “kulaks” but become chairman of a village soviet. Stalin purged the Ukrainian party apparatus and replaced the Kharkov party boss with Pavel Postyshev, a Bolshevik originally from industrial Ivanovo-Voznesensk, who now became the number two in Ukraine. Postyshev, Kopelev wrote, “stood in line at grocery stores, cafeterias, bathhouses, and he sat with petitioners in the waiting rooms of various government establishments.” Postyshev opened cafés in factory shops, had flowers planted, and viciously condemned Ukrainian intellectuals as bourgeois nationalists and agents of fascism. “For me, Postyshev became a hero, a leader, a paragon of the true Bolshevik—and not for me alone.”⁴⁴² In newspaper photographs of turbines and tractors, in live glimpses of freight cars loaded with steel, Kopelev saw the new world coming into being. When a peasant tried to burn down a collectivized barn, Kopelev was confirmed in his conviction that sabotage existed. Capitalist encirclement was a fact. In 1933, he was awarded a coveted place at Kharkov University.⁴⁴³ “I believed,” Kopelev wrote, “because I wanted to believe.”⁴⁴⁴

CONSEQUENCES

Hay carts were going round to gather the corpses, as during the medieval plagues.⁴⁴⁵ “I saw things that are impossible to forget until one’s death,” the Cossack novelist Mikhail Sholokhov wrote to Stalin (April 4, 1933) of his native Don River valley. Stalin responded (May 6) that he had directed that the area be provided food aid and that the information in Sholokhov’s letter should be investigated, but he stood his ground. “Your letters create a somewhat one-sided impression,” Stalin wrote. “The esteemed grain growers of your region (and not only your region) carried out a ‘sit-down strike’ (sabotage!) and would not have minded leaving the workers and the Red Army without grain.” He deemed their actions “a ‘quiet’ war with Soviet power. A war of attrition, dear comrade Sholokhov.”⁴⁴⁶

Stalin was indeed at war—with the peasantry, and with his own Communist party for supposedly going soft at this perilous hour. On May 4, he had received a report from Yagoda on how newly arrived emaciated conscripts were eager for the promised bread toasts and a lump of sugar, while relatives trailed them, looking for handouts. One was overheard to say, “When there were no collective farms, peasants lived a lot better. Now, with collective farms, everyone is starving. If war breaks out, no one will defend Soviet power; everyone will go against it.”⁴⁴⁷

Japan’s Kwantung Army attempted to seize Jehol, in Inner Mongolia, a springboard for attacking both Peking (Beijing) and Outer Mongolia, the Soviet satellite.⁴⁴⁸ Chiang Kai-shek’s earlier appeal to the League of Nations had merely resulted in Japan quitting that body, which Tokyo had come to see as a racist Anglo-American conspiracy to emasculate it.⁴⁴⁹ On the last day of May 1933, Kwantung generals signed a truce with “local” officials in the port of Tientsin (Tianjin), in northern China, that extended Manchukuo’s borders to the Great Wall, gave Japan control of the strategic mountain pass, and created a demilitarized zone extending sixty miles south of the wall and just north of the Peking-Tientsin district.⁴⁵⁰ Stalin suspected that Chiang, whose signature was not on the truce, was secretly negotiating an end to the war, which would free up Japan to attack him. Presumed Japanese saboteurs were crossing into Soviet territory.⁴⁵¹ The dictator received intercepted communications between the British ambassador in Tokyo and the foreign office in London, asserting that Japan’s military buildup went beyond its aims in China and that Japanese army observers viewed war with the Soviet Union as inevitable.⁴⁵² Stalin had Soviet newspapers publish intelligence excerpts, in disguised form, to expose Tokyo’s aggressive desires.⁴⁵³

The party journal Bolshevik tried to rebut a sense of “the capitulation of the Soviet Union in the face of world imperialism in general and Japanese imperialism in particular.”⁴⁵⁴ But whether the USSR could even fight a war had become doubtful. On May 7, 1933, the politburo had prohibited the OGPU from imposing the death penalty—the Soviet Far East was granted an exception—and the next day Stalin and Molotov had issued a secret directive to party organizations and OGPU branches suspending mass peasant deportations and ordering release of Gulag inmates guilty of lesser infractions, in light of “the three-year struggle that has destroyed our class enemies in the village.”⁴⁵⁵ “The moment has arrived when we no longer need mass repressions,” the decree explained, conceding that further “severe forms of repression” could “bring the influence of our party in the village to zero.”⁴⁵⁶ But then, when Kosior and others in Ukraine had reported on severe repression being undertaken against peasants there, Stalin responded (May 31), “Finally you are beginning to apply yourself in Bolshevik fashion.”⁴⁵⁷

Early June brought a small measure of relief: berries, green onions, young potatoes, carrots, and beets became ready for consumption, for those who maintained household gardens (and guarded them round the clock).⁴⁵⁸ Hungry children who were discovered rooting around in the plots were sometimes killed, then and there, by farmers protecting their families’ food.⁴⁵⁹ The regime was purchasing livestock from western China and again reducing grain exports. For 1933, it would end up at 1.68 million tons, when the original plan had been for 6.2 million. Exports in 1933 would bring in a mere 31.2 million gold rubles, a fivefold revenue plunge since 1930.⁴⁶⁰ The general crisis forced a halt to the generous increases in military expenditures, which would decrease in 1933 to 2 billion rubles (from 2.2 billion).⁴⁶¹

On June 1, 1933, the announced party purge commenced. The procedures specified ferreting out self-seekers, the politically passive, and the morally depraved, but also—in a conspicuous indication of Stalin’s hand—“open and hidden violators of party discipline, who do not fulfill party and state decisions, subjecting to doubt and discrediting the plans by the party with nonsense about their ‘unreality’ and ‘unattainability.’” The party journal explained that the enemy, unable to proceed openly and frontally (like the class-alien targets of the previous general purges), deceitfully penetrated the party and hid behind a party card to sabotage socialism from within (“double-dealers”).⁴⁶²

During the Five-Year Plan, membership had ballooned by more than 2 million, to 3.55 million (2.2 million full members, 1.35 million candidates). Each party organization established its own purge commission, and every Communist—this now included Central Committee members—had to place their party cards on the table, recite their autobiographies, and submit to interrogation. The commissions usually had records of previous autobiographies and any denunciations; the proceedings were open to non-party workmates to chime in. The previous purge, in 1929–30, had expelled around one in ten. Now, nearly one in five would be expelled, and nearly as many would quit rather than submit to the procedure, bringing the total number who did not keep party cards to more than 800,000.⁴⁶³ Expulsion was not cause for arrest, which required accusations of a crime, but Stalin’s commentary implied guilt until proven innocent.⁴⁶⁴

STALIN’S FAMINE

Before 1917, to import machinery, Russia had been exporting more than would have seemed permissible, given domestic consumption needs. (“We will not eat our fill, but we will export,” Alexander III’s finance minister had remarked.)⁴⁶⁵ A famine had broken out in 1891–92. In the four years prior, Russia had exported about 10 million tons of grain, but then a dry autumn, which delayed fall planting, severely cold winter temperatures without the usual snowfalls, a windy spring that blew away topsoil, and a long and dry summer damaged the harvest. The tsarist state had contributed to the vulnerability by reducing the rural workforce (conscripting young males), enforcing peasant redemption payments for former gentry land in connection with the serf emancipation, and having tax collectors seize vital livestock if payments fell short. Even after crop failure and hunger were evident, grain exports continued for a time. And the finance minister had opposed even this belated stoppage. The tsarist government refused to use the word “famine” (golod), admitting to only a “failed harvest” (neurozhai); censors prevented newspapers from reporting about it. Around 500,000 people died, primarily from cholera epidemics triggered by starvation.⁴⁶⁶

Stalin’s famine, involving extirpation of capitalism and denomadization, was incomparably worse. In 1931–33, famine and related epidemics probably killed between 5 and 7 million people. Perhaps 10 million more starved nearly to death.⁴⁶⁷ “I don’t know how they stood it!” Molotov would say later in his long life. In the Kazakh autonomous republic, starvation and disease probably claimed between 1.2 and 1.4 million people, the vast majority of them ethnic Kazakhs, from a population of roughly 6.5 million (of whom perhaps 4.12 million were ethnic Kazakhs). This was the highest death ratio in the Soviet Union.⁴⁶⁸ In Ukraine, the death toll was around 3.5 million, out of a population of 33 million. Statistics on livestock were not published in the Soviet press in 1932 or 1933, but the country likely lost half of its cattle and pigs and two thirds of its sheep. The horse population declined from 32.6 million to around 16 million; by 1933, tractors supplied only 3.6 million to 5.4 million horsepower equivalents. Kazakh livestock losses were beyond staggering: camels from 1.06 million to 73,000, sheep from 21.9 million to 1.7 million, cattle herds from 7.5 million to 1.6 million.⁴⁶⁹ By 1933, a Kazakh family owned, on average, just 3.7 cattle, compared with 22.6 in 1929. And Kazakhs ended up only nominally collectivized: the regime reinstituted private control of animals, and the majority of Kazakhs worked household plots and failed to work the requisite number of days for the collectives. But the damage to the USSR’s meat supply was done, and enduring.⁴⁷⁰

Many contemporaries, such as the Italian ambassador, who traveled through Ukraine in summer 1933, deemed the famine deliberate.⁴⁷¹ Monstrously, Stalin himself made the same accusation—accusing peasants of not wanting to work.⁴⁷² Regime propaganda castigated the starving refugees besieging towns for “passing themselves off as ruined collective farmers.”⁴⁷³ Nonetheless, the famine was not intentional.⁴⁷⁴ It resulted from Stalin’s policies of forced collectivization-dekulakization, as well as the pitiless and incompetent management of the sowing and procurement campaigns, all of which put the country on a knife-edge, highly susceptible to drought and sudden torrential rains.⁴⁷⁵ Stalin appears to have genuinely imagined that increasing the scale of farms, mechanization, and collective efficiency would boost agricultural output. He dismissed the loss of better-off peasants from villages, only belatedly recognized the crucial role of incentives, and wildly overestimated the influx of machines. He twice deluded himself—partly from false reporting by frightened statisticians, partly from his own magical thinking—that the country was on the verge of a recovery harvest.

Always grudgingly, Stalin approved, and in some cases initiated, reductions in grain exports, beginning already in September 1931; in 1932 and 1933 he signed reduced grain collection quotas for Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Volga valley, Crimea, the Urals, the Central Black Earth region, the Kazakh autonomous republic, and Eastern Siberia on nine occasions.⁴⁷⁶ The 1933 grain procurement target fell from 24.3 to 19.6 million tons; the actual amount collected would be around 18.5 million tons.^{477, 478} Altogether, the regime returned about 5.7 million tons of grain back to agriculture, including 2 million tons from reserves and 3.5 million from procurements. Stalin also approved clandestine purchase of grain and livestock abroad using scarce hard currency.⁴⁷⁹ Just between February and July 1933, he signed or countenanced nearly three dozen small allocations of food aid to the countryside, primarily to the North Caucasus and Ukraine, as well as the Kazakh lands (which necessitated sharp reductions in the bread rations for city dwellers, many of whom were put on the brink of starvation). All of these actions were woefully insufficient for avoiding the mass starvation in the countryside caused by his policies, in the face of challenging natural conditions. Still, these actions do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians.⁴⁸⁰ In the Kazakh autonomous republic, probably between 35 and 40 percent of the titular nation—as compared with 8 to 9 percent of Slavs there—perished from starvation or disease, not because the regime targeted Kazakhs by ethnicity, but because regime policy there consisted of forced denomadization. Similarly, there was no “Ukrainian” famine; the famine was Soviet.⁴⁸¹

In the spring of 1933, officials gave the famine a self-justifying pedagogical gloss. Ukrainian party leader Kosior wrote that “the unsatisfactory preparation for sowing in the worst affected regions shows that the hunger has not yet taught many collective farmers good sense.”⁴⁸² In the same vein, an official report to Stalin and Molotov from Dnepropetrovsk claimed that collective farmer attitudes had improved as a result of “the understanding that . . . bad work in the collective farm leads to hunger.”⁴⁸³ Such reports followed Stalin’s lead. He admitted privately to Colonel Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross (May 13, 1933)—who had met with Lenin during the acknowledged Soviet famine of 1921–23—that “a certain part of the peasantry is starving now.” Stalin claimed that hardworking peasants were incensed at the indolent ones who caused the famine. “The collective farmers roundly curse us. It is not right to help the lazy—let them perish. Such are the morals.” It was ventriloquism.⁴⁸⁴

Once Stalin had caused the horror, even complete termination of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. The regime had no strategic grain reserves left, having released them.⁴⁸⁵ Only more aggressive purchases of food abroad and open appeals for international assistance could have averted many (and perhaps most) of the deaths. The world had plenty of food in 1933—indeed, the glut was depressing global prices for grain—but Stalin refused to reveal vulnerability, which, in his mind, would incite enemies. Admission also would have been a global propaganda debacle, undermining the boasts about the Five-Year Plan and the collective farms.

• • •

STALIN HAD CAUSED A DOMESTIC CALAMITY and rendered the Soviet Union vulnerable in the face of Japan’s expansionism, while contributing significantly to the ascent in Germany of Hitler, who threatened expansionism, and provoking blistering internal critiques.⁴⁸⁶ But his faction felt compelled to rally around him. “Loyalty to Stalin,” wrote a military official who later defected, “was based principally on the conviction that there was no one to take his place, that any change in the leadership would be extremely dangerous, and that the country must continue in its present course, since to stop now or attempt a retreat would mean the loss of everything.”⁴⁸⁷ A correspondent wrote to Trotsky on Prinkipo, in early spring 1933, that “they all speak about Stalin’s isolation and the general hatred of him, but they often add: ‘If it were not for that (we omit the strong epithet), everything would have fallen to pieces by now. It is he who keeps everything together.’”⁴⁸⁸

Resolute in extremis, Stalin ordered the forced return of peasant escapees, the blacklisting of entire counties (they would suffer the highest mortality), and the banning of fishing in state waters or even private charity—anything that would have made it possible to avoid the collectives.⁴⁸⁹ The OGPU arrested 505,000 people in 1933, as compared with 410,000 the year before.⁴⁹⁰ Some farmers were still refusing to sow crops, since the regime would only take the harvested grain away.⁴⁹¹ But most weeded the fields, sowed, and brought in the harvest. “All the collective farm workers now say: ‘We understand our mistakes and we are ready to work,’” one local report noted. “‘We will do everything expected of us.’”⁴⁹² Officials concluded that they had broken the peasants’ will, indirectly suggesting the regime had partnered with famine to achieve subjugation.⁴⁹³ Indeed, it was the famished peasants who would lift the regime and the country out of starvation, producing between 70 and 77 million tons of grain in 1933, a bumper crop comparable to the miracle of 1930.⁴⁹⁴ The peasants, in their land hunger and separate revolution, had made possible the advent of a Bolshevik regime in 1917–18; now enslaved, the peasants saved Stalin’s rule.⁴⁹⁵

Through it all, he had revealed escalating rage and pathological suspicion, to the point that not only bourgeois specialists or former tsarist officers were considered as enemies, but many workers and party loyalists. At once self-righteous and self-pitying, the aggressor who somehow was always the victim, full of rage, Stalin could display affection as well. He wrote (June 25, 1933) to Avel Yenukidze, the overseer of Kremlin affairs, who had gone to Germany for treatment of a heart condition, recommending he avoid fats. “Try to observe a diet, move about more, and get fully healthy,” Stalin wrote. “We extended the length of your holiday by a month, and now it’s up to you.” The dictator exhibited his own good spirits. “We have ramped up agriculture and coal,” he added. “Now we’re going to ramp up rail transport. Harvest gathering in the south has already begun. In Ukraine and the North Caucasus, the harvest is taken care of. This is the main thing. In other regions, the outlook so far is good. I’m healthy. Greetings! Your Stalin.”⁴⁹⁶