Yet Stalin, while talking of the virtues of planning, did not have detailed projects in mind when changing policy in 1928–32. If he had a Grand Plan, he kept it strictly to himself. Nevertheless he was not behaving at random: his activities occurred within the framework of his prejudices and ambition; and there was an internal logic to the step-by-step choices that he made.
Stalin attracted much support from fellow communist leaders. The use of force on ‘kulaks’ was welcomed as an end of ideological compromise: Stalin seemed to be fulfilling the commitments of the October Revolution and ending the frustrations of the NEP. In particular, several central politicians warmed to his initiative: Central Committee Secretaries Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich; Supreme Council of the National Economy Chairman Valeryan Kuibyshev; and Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate Chairman Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Their enthusiasm for Stalin was replicated in many local party bodies. Favour was also shown by low-level functionaries in the OGPU, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, the Komsomol and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Personnel in those institutions with an interest in increasing their control over society were in the forefront of his supporters. In Stalin they found a Politburo leader who gave them the opportunity they had been seeking.
Certain economists, too, backed his case. S. G. Strumilin argued that it did not matter if the setting of economic targets was not based on the normal extrapolation of statistics; his demand was always for the party to aim at achieving the impossible. This ‘teleological’ school of economic planning signified a determination to make the data fit any desired objective. Supporters such as Strumilin treated Stalin’s programme like a priceless photographic film waiting to be exposed to the light by their eager professional chemistry.
Stalin’s actions appalled his ally Nikolai Bukharin. The NEP had entered a critical phase by the winter of 1927–8; but whereas Bukharin wished to assure peasants that the party aimed to foster their immediate interests, Stalin had lost patience. Ostensibly Bukharin was in a strong position. The list of communist party luminaries who supported the NEP was impressive: Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Chairman of Sovnarkom; Mikhail Tomski, Chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions; Nikolai Uglanov, Moscow City Party First Secretary. The fact that Bukharin, Rykov and Tomski also belonged to the Politburo meant that they could press their opinions at the summit of the political system. Moreover, they had privileged access to the media of public communication. Through the pages of Pravda, which Bukharin edited, they affirmed to their readers that the NEP had not been abandoned.
Stalin dared not contradict this. The NEP was closely associated with the name of Lenin, and Stalin always saw the point of identifying his policies as a continuation of Lenin’s intentions. Even in later years, when the NEP had been completely jettisoned, Stalin went on claiming that his new measures were merely an incremental development of the NEP.
His sensitivity had been acute upon his return from the Urals and Siberia; for he knew that he could not yet count on being able to convince the central party leadership that his requisitioning campaign should be extended to the rest of the country. In January 1928 he had already been contemplating the rapid collectivization of Soviet agriculture as the sole means of preventing the recurrent crises in food supplies.1 But he was still unclear how he might achieve this; and his need at the time was to withstand criticisms by Bukharin and his friends. The Politburo met in April 1928 to discuss the results of the requisitioning campaign. Bukharin was unsettled by the violence; but he, too, was reticent in public. Having just seen off the United Opposition, he did not wish to reveal any divisions in the ascendant party leadership. Thus although the Politburo condemned ‘excesses’ of local grain-seizing authorities, the resolution did not appear in the newspapers and did not mention the main culprit, Stalin, by name.
For some weeks it seemed to many who were not privy to the balance of authority in the Politburo that Bukharin was getting the upper hand. The July 1928 Central Committee plenum debated the party’s attitude to the agrarian crisis, and Bukharin proposed that conciliatory measures were overdue. The plenum decided to raise prices paid by governmental agencies for grain. The hope was to revive the willingness of rural inhabitants to trade their surpluses of wheat and other cereal crops. The restoration of voluntary trade between countryside and town seemed to have become the central party’s goal yet again. But the plenum’s decision had little impact on the availability of food supplies and tensions in the Politburo did not abate. In September a frantic Bukharin published ‘Notes of an Economist’, an article which summarized the arguments for the party to abide by the NEP. The impression was given that official policy had reverted to its earlier position and that the emergency situation would shortly be brought to an end.2
In reality, Stalin and Bukharin were barely on speaking terms and Stalin had in no way become reconciled to rehabilitating the NEP. Bukharin was accustomed to standing up for his opinions. As a young Marxist in 1915, he had argued against Lenin on socialist political strategy. In 1918 he had led the Left Communists against signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In 1920–21 he had criticized not only Trotski but also Lenin in the ‘trade union controversy’; and he had held his ground when Lenin had subsequently continued to attack his views on philosophy and culture.
He was intellectually inquisitive and rejected the conventional Bolshevik assumption that only Marxists could contribute to knowledge about history and politics. He lectured at the Institute of Red Professors, and brought on a group of young Bolshevik philosophers as his protégés. His mind had a cultural sophistication; he loved poetry and novels and was a talented painter in oils: he would always come back from his summertime trips to the mountains with freshly-finished canvases. He also liked a bit of levity in his life: he did cartwheels on a Paris pavement in order to impress a new wife.3 Bukharin identified himself with the country’s youth, often wearing the red necktie sported by teenage adherents of the Komsomol. Born in 1888 to a schoolmaster’s family, he was nearly a decade younger than Stalin. As Lenin once remarked, he was ‘the golden boy’ of the Bolshevik party. Even oppositionists found it hard to dislike him.
Bukharin was no saint. In the 1920s he had shown his nasty side in internal party polemics about the NEP. In the universities, moreover, he imperturbably ruined the career of many non-communist academics. But he also had more than his fair share of naïvety. In particular, he had been taken in by Stalin’s gruff charm. They appeared to get on famously together, and Bukharin did much to make Stalin respectable again after the brouhaha over Lenin’s testament. By 1928 it was too late for Bukharin to admit to Kamenev and Zinoviev that they had been right – however belatedly, even in their case – about Stalin’s personal degeneracy.
This was not a politician who had the insight or skills to defeat Stalin. By the last months of 1928 the spat between them was resumed when the results of Bukharin’s defence of the NEP became apparent. The increase in prices offered by the state for agricultural produce failed to induce the peasantry to return to the market on the desired scale. At the Central Committee plenum in November, Stalin went back on to the offensive and demanded a comprehensive policy of requisitioning. From the Urals and Siberia there also came a proposal that the grain supplies should be seized mainly from the kulaks. This would be done, it was suggested, by local authorities calling a meeting of all peasants within a given locality and invoking them to indicate which of the richer households were hoarding grain. The poorer households were simultaneously to be enabled to have a share of the cereal stocks discovered during the campaign. This process, which became known as ‘the Urals-Siberian method’, was applied across the USSR from the winter of 1928–9.4
Every action by Stalin put Bukharin at a disadvantage; for the struggle between them was not confined to the problem of grain supplies. In March 1928, at Stalin’s instigation, it had been announced that a counter-revolutionary plot had been discovered among the technical staff at the Shakhty
coal-mine in the Don Basin. The trial was a judicial travesty. Stalin took a close, direct part in decisions about the engineers.5 His ulterior purpose was easy to guess. He was grasping the opportunity to use Shakhty as a means of intimidating every economist, manager or even party official who objected to the raising of tempos of industrial growth. This was a feature of his modus operandi. Although his own basic thinking was unoriginal, he could quickly evaluate and utilize the ideas of others: Stalin knew what he liked when he saw it, and his supporters quickly learned the kind of thing that appealed to him.
It ought to be noted that he also added his own little flourishes. The Shakhty engineers were physically abused by the OGPU, forced to memorize false self-incriminations and paraded in a show-trial in May and June 1928. Five of the accused were shot; most of the rest were sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment. The Shakhty trial stirred up industrial policy as crudely as Stalin’s visit to the Urals and Siberia had done to agricultural policy. Experts in Gosplan were harassed into planning for breakneck economic growth; and factory and mining managers were intimidated into trying to put all Gosplan’s projects into effect. Otherwise they faced being sacked and even arrested.
A campaign of industrialization was being undertaken that went beyond the ambitions of the defeated United Opposition. By midsummer 1928, Stalin was telling the central party leadership that industry’s growth required that a ‘tribute’ should be exacted from agriculture. Factories were to be built with the revenues from the countryside. Yet most of the expansion, he declared, would be financed not by rural taxation but by a further massive campaign of rationalization of industrial production. Thus the ‘optimal’ version of the Plan sanctioned by the Fifth USSR Congress of Soviets in May 1929 anticipated a rise by only thirty-two per cent in the number of workers and employees in industry whereas labour productivity was expected to rise by 110 per cent. Stalin was supported robustly by Molotov, Kuibyshev and Ordzhonikidze in the press and at party gatherings. Their prognosis was outlandish (although it may possibly have been intended sincerely); but it allowed them to predict that the average real wages of the working class would rise by seventy per cent.6
This placed Bukharin in the unenviable position of arguing against an economic policy purporting to guarantee an improvement in the standard of living of the urban poor. Stalin’s belligerence increased. At the joint meeting of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in January 1929 he upbraided Bukharin for his objections and accused him of factionalism. The last Politburo leader to be found guilty of this, Trotski, was deported from the country in the same month. Bukharin was placed in serious political danger as the charge was levelled that he and Rykov and Tomski headed a Right Deviation from the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
‘Deviation’ was a significant term, implying that Bukharin’s group was too ill-organized to merit being called an Opposition.7 But Bukharin did not give up. At the next Central Committee meeting, in April 1929, he attacked the pace of industrialization being imposed by Stalin; he also castigated the resumption of violent requisitioning of agricultural produce. Stalin counter-attacked immediately: ‘None of your côterie is a Marxist: they’re fraudsters. Not one of you has got an understanding of Lenin.’ Bukharin retorted: ‘What, are you the only one with such an understanding?’8 But the mood of the majority of Central Committee members was against the ‘Rightists’, and the industrial quotas and the grain seizures were approved. Across the country the active supporters of Bukharin, few as they were, were dismissed from their posts. In Moscow, Nikolai Uglanov was replaced by Molotov as City Party Committee secretary. The NEP became virtually irretrievable.
Stalin was roused by the response to his reorientation of policy. The Urals Regional Committee, for instance, commissioned the making of a ceremonial sword: on one side of the blade was inscribed ‘Chop the Right Deviation’, on the other ‘Chop the Left Deviation’; and on the butt were the words: ‘Beat Every Conciliator’. This was the language Stalin liked to hear. His career would be ruined unless the Five-Year Plan was successful, and he was determined that there should be no shilly-shallying. Stalin put the matter vividly in 1931: ‘To lower the tempos means to lag behind. And laggards are beaten. But we don’t want to be beaten. No, we don’t want it! The history of old Russia consisted, amongst other things, in her being beaten continually for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian nobles. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. She was beaten by all of them for her backwardness.’9
The economic transformation, in Stalin’s opinion, could not be accomplished unless the USSR stayed clear of military entanglements abroad. His Five-Year Plan was premised on the Kremlin’s need to purchase up-to-date machinery from these powers. It would obviously be difficult to induce foreign governments and business companies to enter into commercial deals if there remained any suspicion that the Red Army might be about to try again to spread revolution on the points of its bayonets.
The ascendant party leaders assumed that Soviet grain exports would pay for the machinery imports; but there was a further slump in global cereal prices in 1929: the result was that although over twice as much grain was shipped abroad in 1930 than in 1926–7, the revenue from such sales rose by only six per cent.10 Since gold exports were not enough to bridge the gap, short-term credits had to be raised to finance the Five-Year Plan. Banks and businesses in the West were only too eager to sign deals with the USSR after the Great Depression of autumn. Up-to-date machinery was imported, especially from the USA and Germany. Contracts were signed, too, for large foreign firms to supply expertise to assist with the construction of new Soviet enterprises. The American Ford car company, the greatest symbol of world capitalism, signed a deal to help to build a gigantic automotive works in Nizhni Novgorod.11
Stalin hardly needed to be nudged towards allaying Western fears about Soviet international intentions. Under the NEP he had made a name for himself with the slogan of ‘Socialism in One Country’. Repeatedly he had suggested that the USSR should avoid involvement in capitalist countries’ affairs while building a socialist society and economy at home. Foreign policy during the Five-Year Plan was made subordinate to domestic policy more firmly than ever.
Bukharin came to agree with Trotski that Stalin had abandoned the objective of European socialist revolution. The unequivocality of this judgement was incorrect. In 1928, most communists grew to believe in the imminent collapse of capitalism. Stalin went along with them so long as nothing was done to endanger the USSR’s security. The German Communist Party contained many leaders who wanted to break with the policy of a ‘united front’ with other socialist parties in Germany, and in the first year of the Five-Year Plan it was hard to dissuade these leaders from thinking revolutionary thoughts. Under a certain amount of pressure from the German communist leadership, the Comintern at the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928 laid down that an instruction was given that the parties such as the German Social-Democrats and the British Labour Party should be treated as communism’s main political adversaries. Thus the Comintern took ‘a turn to the left’.12 The European political far right, including Hitler’s Nazis, was largely to be disregarded. The task for the German Communist Party was to build up its strength separately so that it might seize power at some future date.
Among Stalin’s several motives in supporting the international turn to the left was a wish to cause maximum discomfort to Bukharin, who was closely identified as the NEP’s advocate at home and abroad. Throughout 1928–9 Bukharin was humiliated by being forced to condemn ‘rightist’ policies among the various member parties of Comintern. This was of considerable help to Stalin in the imposition of the Five-Year Plan at home. Bukharin was no longer the ascendant star of official world communism.
Constantly the Politburo quickened the projected pace of industrialization. Cheap labour
was made available by peasants fleeing the villages. They came for work and for ration-cards, and their arrival permitted a lowering of the wages of labourers; for the commitment to raising wages was soon found unrealistic. In spring 1929 Stalin, seeking still cheaper labour, appointed a Central Committee commission under N. Yanson to explore opportunities for convicts to work on projects in the USSR’s less hospitable regions. The prisons were already crammed with peasants who had resisted being pushed into collective farms: Yanson recommended their transfer to the forced-labour camps subject to the OGPU.13 Among the first results was the formation of the ‘Dalstroi’ trust in the Far East which ran the notorious gold mines of Kolyma.
The Politburo also resolved the question as to how to handle those peasants who remained in the countryside. After two successive winters of grain seizures, the peasants would not voluntarily maintain their sown area. Bolsheviks already believed that collective farms, with large production units and electrically-powered machinery, were the solution to agrarian backwardness. Thus the Politburo majority, against Bukharin’s counsel, came to the opinion that compulsory collectivization should be initiated (although the fiction was maintained in public that coercion would not be used). To Molotov was entrusted the job of explaining this to the Central Committee in November 1929. Bukharin was sacked from the Politburo at the same meeting and, in the following month, Stalin’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated with extravagant eulogies in the mass media. By January 1930 the Politburo was insisting that a quarter of the sown area should be held by collective farms within two years. An agricultural revolution was heralded.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 22