The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  The issues were not clear cut. Bukharin and Zinoviev, while itching to instigate revolution in Berlin, wanted to negotiate with Western capitalist powers. After signing the trade treaties with the United Kingdom and other countries in 1921, the Politburo aimed to insert itself in European diplomacy on a normal basis. The first opportunity came with the Genoa Conference in March 1922. Under Lenin’s guidance, the Soviet negotiators were not too ambitious. Lenin had given up hoping for diplomatic recognition by the Allies as long as the French government demanded the de-annulment of the loans to Russia made by French investors before the October Revolution. People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgi Chicherin was instructed to seek a separate deal with Germany. And so the two pariah powers after the Great War got together. They agreed, at the Italian resort of Rapallo, to grant diplomatic recognition to each other and to boost mutual trade; and, in a secret arrangement, the Soviet authorities were to help Germany to obviate the Treaty of Versailles’s restrictions on German military reconstruction by setting up armaments factories and military training facilities in the USSR.16

  The Rapallo Treaty fitted with Lenin’s notion that economic reconstruction required foreign participation. But German generals proved more willing partners than German industrialists. Lenin’s scheme for ‘concessions’ to be used to attract capital from abroad was a miserable failure. Only roughly a hundred agreements were in operation before the end of 1927.17 Insofar as Europe and North America contributed to the Soviet Union’s economic regeneration, it occurred largely through international trade. But the slump in the price of grain on the world market meant that revenues had to be obtained mainly by sales of oil, timber and gold; and in the financial year 1926–7 the USSR’s exports were merely a third in volume of what they had been in 1913.18

  Bukharin by the mid-1920s had come over to Stalin’s opinion that capitalism was not yet on the verge of revolutionary upheaval. The intellectual and political complications of the discussion were considerable. Trotski, despite castigating Stalin’s ideas about ‘Socialism in One Country’, recognized the stabilization of capitalism as a medium-term fact of life.19 In criticizing the March Action of 1921 and the Berlin insurrection of November 1923, he was scoffing at the Politburo’s incompetence rather than its zeal to spread revolution; and his ridicule was focused upon Zinoviev, whom he described as trying to compensate for his opposition to Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 with an ultra-revolutionary strategy for Germany in the 1920s. Bukharin and Stalin replied to Trotski that their own quiescence in foreign policy by 1924 had yielded an improvement in the USSR’s security. A Soviet-Chinese treaty was signed in the same year and relations with Japan remained peaceful. The Labour Party won the British elections and gave de jure recognition to the Soviet government.

  This bolstered the Politburo’s case for concentrating upon economic recovery. A further adjustment of the NEP seemed desirable in order to boost agricultural output, and Gosplan and the various People’s Commissariats were ordered to draft appropriate legislation. After a wide-ranging discussion, it was decided in April 1925 to lower the burden of the food tax, to diminish fiscal discrimination against better-off peasants, and to legalize hired labour and the leasing of land.

  Yet the Politburo’s unity was under strain. Zinoviev and Kamenev asserted that excessive compromise had been made with the aspirations of the peasantry. Bukharin stepped forward with a defiant riposte. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 he declared: ‘We shall move forward at a snail’s pace, but none the less we shall be building socialism, and we shall build it.’ Throughout the year Trotski had watched bemused as Zinoviev and Kamenev built up the case against official party policy. Zinoviev had a firm organizational base in Leningrad and assumed he was too strong for Stalin; but the Politburo majority were on the side of Stalin and Bukharin, and in 1926 Stalin’s associate Sergei Kirov was appointed to the party first secretaryship in Leningrad. Zinoviev and his Leningrad Opposition saw the writing on the wall. Overtures were made by Zinoviev to his arch-enemy Trotski, and from the summer a United Opposition – led by Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev – confronted the ascendant party leadership.

  The United Opposition maintained that Stalin and Bukharin had surrendered entirely to the peasantry. This was not very plausible. In August 1925 Gosplan took a long stride towards comprehensive state planning by issuing its ‘control figures for the national economy’. At the Fourteenth Congress in December, moreover, industrial capital goods were made the priority for longer-term state investment. The Central Committee repeated the point in April 1926, making a general call for ‘the reinforcement of the planning principle and the introduction of planning discipline’.20 Two campaigns were inaugurated in industry. First came a ‘Regime of Economy’, then a ‘Rationalization of Production’. Both campaigns were a means of putting pressure upon factories to cut out inefficient methods and to raise levels of productivity.

  The USSR’s industrialization was never far from the Politburo’s thoughts. The United Opposition, for its part, was constantly on the defensive. Stalin sliced away at their power-bases as the Secretariat replaced opponents with loyalists at all levels of the party’s hierarchy; Bukharin had a merry time reviling his leading critics in books and articles. The United Opposition’s access to the public media was continually reduced. Prolific writers such as Trotski, Radek, Preobrazhenski, Kamenev and Zinoviev had their material rejected for publication in Pravda. Claques were organized at Party Congresses to interrupt their speeches. In January 1925 Trotski was removed as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, and in December he lost his Politburo seat. Zinoviev was sacked as Leningrad Soviet chairman in January 1926 and in July was ousted from the Politburo with Kamenev. In October 1926 the leadership of the Executive Committee of the Comintern passed from Zinoviev to Dmitri Manuilski.

  The United Opposition leaders fell back on their experience as clandestine party activists against the Romanov monarchy. They produced programmes, theses and appeals on primitive printing devices, keeping an eye open for potential OGPU informers. They also arranged unexpected mass meetings where they could communicate their ideas to workers. They talked to sympathizers in the Comintern. They would not go gently into oblivion.

  Yet although the Left Opposition, the Leningrad Opposition and the United Opposition exposed the absence of internal party democracy, their words had a hollow ring. Trotski and Zinoviev had treated Bolshevik dissidents with disdain until they, too, fell out with the Politburo. Their invective against authoritarianism and bureaucracy seemed self-serving to the Workers’ Opposition, which refused to co-operate with them. In any case, no communist party critic of the Politburo – from Shlyapnikov through to Trotski – called for the introduction of general democracy. The critics wanted elections and open discussion in the party and, to some extent, in the soviets and the trade unions. But none favoured permitting the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Kadets to re-enter politics. The All-Union Communist Party’s monopoly, while having no sanction even from the USSR Constitution, was an unchallenged tenet; and oppositionists went out of their way to affirm their obedience to the party. Even Trotski, that remarkable individualist, said he could not be wrong against the party.

  Such self-abnegation did him no good: Stalin was out to get the United Opposition and the OGPU smashed their printing facilities and broke up their meetings. Stalin’s wish to settle accounts with Trotski and Zinoviev was reinforced by the débâcles in international relations. In May 1927 a massacre of thousands of Chinese communists was perpetrated by Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai. The Soviet Politburo had pushed the Chinese Communist Party into alliance with Chiang, and Trotski did not fail to point out that foreign policy was unsafe in the hands of the existing Politburo.

  This time Stalin had his way: in November 1927 the Central Committee expelled Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoview from the party. Hundreds of their followers were treated similarly. Kamenev and Zinoviev were so demoralized that they pe
titioned in January 1928 for re-admittance to the party. They recanted their opinions, which they now described as anti-Leninist. In return Stalin re-admitted them to the party in June. Trotski refused to recant. He and thirty unrepentant oppositionists, including Preobrazhenski, were sent into internal exile. Trotski found himself isolated in Alma-Ata, 3000 kilometres from Moscow. He was not physically abused, and took his family, secretaries and personal library with him; he secretly also kept up correspondence with his associates elsewhere in the USSR. But the activity of the United Opposition was in tatters, and Pyatakov and V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko were so impressed by Stalin’s industrializing drive that they decided to break with Trotski on the same terms as Kamenev and Zinoviev.

  Victory for Stalin and Bukharin was completed by the end of 1927. The NEP had apparently been secured for several more years and the Politburo seemed to be made up of nine men who gave no sign of serious divisions among themselves. Their record of achievement, furthermore, was substantial. The statistics are controversial, but there seems little doubt that the output of both industry and agriculture was roughly what it had been in the last year before the Great War. Economic recovery had more or less been achieved.21

  And the skewing of official policy since 1925 had led to a reattainment of the late tsarist period’s proportion of industrial production reinvested in factories and mines. The NEP was showing itself able not merely to restore industry but also to develop it further. The engineering sub-sector, which was almost wholly state-owned, had already been expanded beyond its pre-war capacity. But private small-scale and handicrafts output also increased: by 1926–7 it was only slightly less than in 1913. Later computations have suggested that an annual growth of six per cent in production from Soviet factories and mines was possible within the parameters of the NEP.22 The villages, too, displayed renewed liveliness. Agriculture was undergoing diversification. Under Nicholas II about ninety per cent of the sown area was given over to cereal crops; by the end of the 1920s the percentage had fallen to eighty-two. Emphasis was placed, too, upon sugar beet, potatoes and cotton; and horse-drawn equipment was also on the increase.23

  The Politburo could take satisfaction inasmuch as this was achieved in the teeth of hostility from the capitalist world. Direct foreign investment, which had been crucial to the pre-revolutionary economy, had vanished: the Soviet authorities had to pay punctiliously for every piece of machinery they brought into the country. Even if they had not refused to honour the loans contracted by Nicholas II and the Provisional Government, the October Revolution would always have stood as a disincentive to foreign banks and industrial companies to return to Russia.

  The central party leadership did not recognize its own successes as such, but brooded upon the patchiness of economic advance. It was also jolted by difficulties which were of its own making. In 1926 the party’s leaders had introduced large surcharges on goods carried by rail for private commerce; they had also imposed a tax on super-profits accruing to nepmen. Article No. 107 had been added to the USSR Criminal Code, specifying three years’ imprisonment for price rises found to be ‘evil-intentioned’.24 In the tax year 1926–7 the state aimed to maximize revenues for industrial investment by reducing by six per cent the prices it paid for agricultural produce. In the case of grain, the reduction was by 20–25 per cent.25 Simultaneously the state sought to show goodwill to agriculture by lowering the prices for goods produced by state-owned enterprises. The effect was disastrous. Nepmen became more elusive to the tax-collecting agencies than previously. Peasants refused to release their stocks to the state procurement bodies – and even the lowered industrial prices failed to entice them since factory goods were in exceedingly short supply after their prices had been lowered and they had been bought up by middlemen.

  These measures were fatal for the policy inaugurated by Lenin in 1921. By the last three months of 1927 there was a drastic shortage of food for the towns as state purchases of grain dropped to a half of the amount obtained in the same period in the previous year. Among the reasons for the mismanagement was the ascendant party leaders’ ignorance of market economics. Another was their wish to be seen to have a strategy different from the United Opposition’s. Trotski was calling for the raising of industrial prices, and so the Politburo obtusely lowered them. Such particularities had an influence on the situation.

  Nevertheless they were not in themselves sufficient to induce the NEP’s abandonment. Although there was a collapse in the amount of grain marketed to the state, no serious crop shortage existed in the country: indeed the harvests of 1926–7 were only five per cent down on the best harvest recorded before the First World War. But whereas Bukharin was willing to raise the prices offered by the state for agricultural produce, Stalin was hostile to such compromise. Stalin’s attitude was reinforced by the basic difficulties experienced by the party earlier in the decade. The national and religious resurgence; the administrative malaise; poverty, ill-health and illiteracy; urban unemployment; military insecurity; problems in industrial production; the spread of political apathy; the isolation of the party from most sections of society: all these difficulties prepared the ground for Stalin to decide that the moment was overdue for a break with the NEP.

  The alliance of Stalin and Bukharin had been the cardinal political relationship in the defeat of successive challenges to the ascendant party leadership. With help from Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin and Bukharin had defeated Trotski and the Left Opposition. Together they had proceeded to crush the United Opposition of Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev. They seemed a formidable, unbreakable duumvirate. But disagreements on food-supplies policy started to divide them. And whatever was done about this policy would inevitably deeply affect all other policies. The USSR was entering another political maelstrom.

  Part Two

  * * *

  ‘Vaterland.’

  A Pravda cartoon (1938) by Boris Yefimov alleging that the communist leaders put on show trial are like pigs being fed from the trough of Nazism.

  9

  The First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932)

  From 1928 Stalin and his associates undertook a series of actions that drastically rearranged and reinforced the compound of the Soviet order. Lenin’s basic elements were maintained: the single-party state, the single official ideology, the manipulation of legality and the state’s economic dominance. In this basic respect Stalin’s group was justified in claiming to be championing the Leninist cause.

  Yet certain other elements were greatly altered and these became the object of dispute. Compromises with national and cultural aspirations had existed since 1917, and there had been relaxations of religious policy from the early 1920s: Stalin brusquely reversed this approach. Moreover, he crudified politics and hyper-centralized administrative institutions. Yet this was still a compound bearing the handiwork of Lenin’s communist party – and in economics, indeed, he strengthened the state’s existing dominance: legal private enterprise above the level of highly-restricted individual production and commerce practically ceased. Stalin’s enemies in the party contended that a rupture with Leninism had occurred and that a new system of Stalinism had been established. Official spokesmen, inveterate liars though they were, were nearer to the truth in this matter when they talked of the development of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’. Such a term asserted continuity while affirming that Stalin had changed the balance and composition of the elements of the Soviet compound.

  The fracturing of the NEP began not in Moscow but in the provinces – and at the time there were few signs that anything was afoot. Nor did it start with foreign policy or factional struggles or industrializing schemes. The origins can be traced to a journey to the Urals and Siberia taken by Stalin in January 1928. He was travelling there on behalf of the Central Committee in order to identify what could be done about the fall-off in grain shipments to the towns. None of his colleagues had any idea of his true intentions.

  Once he was beyond the scrutiny of his central party colleagues, Stalin
brashly issued fresh instructions for the collection of cereal crops in the region. In many ways he was re-instituting the methods of War Communism as peasants were called to village gatherings and ordered to deliver their stocks of grain to the state authorities. The policy of grain requisitioning was replicated later in 1928 across the USSR. Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev, Andrei Zhdanov, Stanislav Kosior and Stalin’s newly-discovered supporter in mid-Siberia, Sergei Syrtsov, were instructed to lead campaigns in the main agricultural regions. Over the next two years the New Economic Policy was piece by piece destroyed. In agriculture it was replaced by a system of collective farms. In industry it gave way to a Five-Year Plan which assigned both credit and production targets to factories, mines and construction sites. Private commercial firms vanished. Force was applied extensively. Kulaks were repressed, managers were persecuted, wages were lowered.

  Planning as a concept acquired a great vogue around the world. The instability of capitalism after the Great War had an impact upon the attitudes of many people in the West, especially when the foundations of the global financial system were shaken by the Great Depression in autumn 1929. Mass unemployment afflicted all capitalist countries. There was a slump in trade and production across Europe. Bankrupt financiers leapt out of the windows of New York skyscrapers.

  Central state direction of economic development gained in favour as politicians and journalists reported that the Soviet Union was avoiding the financial catastrophe that was engulfing the Western economies. Outside the global communist movement there continued to be abhorrence for the USSR; but the use of authoritarian measures to effect an exit from crisis acquired broader respectability. Dictatorship was not uncommon in inter-war Europe. Benito Mussolini, an ex-socialist, had seized power in Rome in 1922 for his National Fascist Party, and right-wing dictatorships were established in countries such as Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. In Germany, too, democracy was under threat in the 1920s from a Nazi party which – like the German Communist Party – did not disguise its contempt for due legal process. Confidence in the old – and not so old – ways of conducting politics was widely being eroded.