Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  His handling of the plenum was a masterpiece of persuasion. He reminded the Opposition that previously he had rejected calls for the expulsion of Trotski and Zinoviev from the Central Committee. ‘Perhaps,’ he waspishly suggested, ‘I overdid the “kindness” and made a mistake.’

  The joint plenum excluded Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Central Committee. On 14 November 1927 Trotski and Zinoviev were expelled from the party entirely, and this decision was ratified by the Fifteenth Party Congress in December. The Stalin–Bukharin axis had triumphed. Their version of revolutionary policies at home and abroad had prevailed after a decade of constant factional strife among Bolsheviks. Bukharin maintained friendly relations with his defeated adversaries. But Stalin refused to compromise. At the Fifteenth Party Congress the further exclusion of seventy-five oppositionists, including Kamenev, was announced. Stalin and Bukharin had seen off the acute threat to the NEP. No one imagined that within a month the political settlement would be destroyed and that the two victors would become enemies. In January 1928 the New Economic Policy was about to be torn apart by the Party General Secretary.

  PART THREE

  Despot

  23. ENDING THE NEP

  Suddenly at the end of the 1920s Stalin trampled on the New Economic Policy like an angry bull. The economic compromise inaugurated by Lenin’s Politburo seven years earlier was rejected. Massive violence was used to introduce a system of collective farms. Forced-rate industrialisation began. Persecution of kulaks, nepmen and ‘bourgeois specialists’ was intensified. Politics too underwent change. The internal party regime was further tightened and show trials were resumed against surviving leaders of the moribund rival parties. An offensive began against every kind of nationalist tendency.1 The boundaries of cultural expression were drastically reduced and organised religion became the object of violent assault. The controversial settlement that had held since 1921 fell apart.

  Stalin initiated the changes after the shortfall in grain supplies became critical at the end of 1927. On 6 January 1928 the Secretariat sent out a secret directive threatening to sack local party leaders who failed to apply ‘tough punishments’ for grain hoarders.2 Stalin let his feelings show in a letter to Sergei Syrtsov and the Siberian party leadership:3

  We hold that this is the road to panic, to the raising of prices — the very worst form of barter when it is plainly impossible to meet the needs of a countryside full of peasants with marketable grain stocks: it strengthens the capacity of the powerful stratum of the countryside to resist… The peasant will not hand over his tax on the basis of a Pravda editorial — compulsory schedules are crucial for him.

  Siberian communists were put on notice that an immediate increase in grain procurements was demanded. Unlike Ukraine and the north Caucasus, Siberia — which had supplied a third of Soviet wheat exports — had experienced a warm summer. Stalin was determined to extract the grain from its kulak owners. He and a select group of party functionaries set off by train from Moscow on 15 January 1928. Politicians like Mikoyan, Kirov, Zhdanov, Shvernik, Postyshev and Kosior made similar trips, accompanied by thousands of party officials, to the agricultural regions of the USSR.4

  State grain procurements had tumbled to only 70 per cent of the total obtained a year before. The difficulties had arisen from the Politburo’s mishandling of the economy. Since 1926 several measures had been introduced to squeeze additional revenue from the private sectors. A class tax was levied on the kulaks: fiscal revenue from them rose by over 50 per cent in 1926–7. ‘Evil-intentioned’ hoarding of industrial and agricultural products was in 1926 made a criminal offence under Article 107 of the Criminal Code. Surcharges were imposed on the traffic of private goods on the railways. The government expropriated many private flour-mills. These measures followed the reorientation of immediate economic objectives proposed by Stalin and Bukharin at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December. Party policy was being geared to an accelerated pace of industrialisation through a steady expansion of state capital accumulation. This emphasis was reaffirmed in July 1926. Gosplan — the State Planning Committee, which was responsible for drawing up a plan for the country’s economic development — was told to prepare for a situation where enterprises would become subject to greater instruction and supervision. Moves were made towards bringing the entire economy under central governmental authority.5

  Politburo members became impatient about the NEP; and as they turned policy in the direction of radical change they committed themselves to the socialist and industrialising aims of the makers of the October Revolution. In opting for rapid and fundamental change they were intensifying the transformation of the USSR in the direction of ‘modernity’. The vestiges of the old order were to be eradicated. Irked by Trotski, they wished to demonstrate their credentials. They also knew that the slow pace of economic transformation made fertile soil for the United Opposition’s propaganda among party leaders in the provinces6 — and despite the ceaseless political centralisation since mid-1918 there was reason for the ascendant leaders to fear a sudden flaring up of resistance to their supremacy. But they believed in what they were doing. Stalin lived for Bolshevism; but he combined ideological adherence with feelings towards his rivals — jealousy, rancour and vengefulness — that were far from pure.

  The predictable consequence of the economic measures from 1926 was the disruption of the market economy. Even before hacking at the roots of the NEP, Stalin — together with Bukharin until the expropriations of January 1928 — had been giving them a serious bruising. They had disturbed the garden still earlier by lowering prices for products from state-owned factories as a means of resolving the ‘scissors crisis’ in 1923. The effect was cumulative. A shortage of goods was reported as traders bought up what was available. Three years later Stalin and Bukharin also brought down prices they were willing to pay for grain. The result was a decline in the marketing of the cereal harvest. The two leading individuals in the Politburo had competed with each other in incompetence. Only one of them, Bukharin, saw the error of his ways by indicating to the Central Committee that retail prices needed to be raised to avoid calamity. Stalin faced him down. He had had enough: the NEP in its early years had restored the economy but could not secure industrial advance at a pace rapid enough for Politburo members. The Central Committee plenum in February 1927 backed the measures taken in the previous year.

  Stalin and Bukharin had tipped the economy downhill, and Stalin refused to recognise their stupendous blunder. What was he thinking of in 1927? Stalin never explained his strategy in detail. Some have suggested that he merely wanted power and had to pick a fight with Bukharin on terrain where he could count on him taking a stand out of line with opinion in wider party circles. This is a possibility. But the more plausible explanation is that Stalin, having agreed with Bukharin on a more militant approach to industrialisation, refused to back down. He had a blunted faculty of judgement. The NEP had always left a bad taste in the mouth of Stalin and many leading Bolsheviks at the centre and in the provinces. The recurrent emergencies had kept them edgy. There had been the terrible famine in 1922 and the ‘scissors crisis’ in commerce in 1923. The party had tried to squeeze more out of the workers in factories and mines by rationalising the process of production. But this was never enough to satisfy the critics on the political left. In their diverse ways the oppositionists — the Democratic Centralists, the Workers’ Opposition, the Left Opposition, the Leningrad Opposition and the United Opposition — made the Politburo edgy by castigating it for ideological cowardice and betrayal.

  The NEP had achieved more than its critics allowed. The volume of industrial and agricultural output by 1926–7 by most estimates had wholly or nearly reattained the level of the last year before the Great War; and the Soviet state was raising its rate of investment in capital projects. The NEP appeared capable of generating a moderate pace of economic development in the years ahead. There was also much political and social stability. Party, OGPU and Red Army held un
challengeable power. A Georgian uprising occurred in 1924; there were also disturbances in central Asia. But otherwise there was tranquillity. The clamp-down on public dissent was effective.

  The question remained whether the pace of economic development was sufficient for the USSR to protect itself against potential external enemies. By the late 1920s the main dangers were thought to be Britain (which broke diplomatic relations in May 1927), France (which continued to demand the repayment of Russia’s old state loans) and Japan (which greedily eyed Soviet possessions in the Far East). It was doubtful that the Red Army was well enough equipped to deal with any of them in a war. Although industrial development was proceeding, the technological gap between the Soviet Union and the West’s most advanced economies was growing. The Bolsheviks had come to power as firm believers in the vital necessity of science and engineering as vehicles of socialist progress. A decade after the October Revolution nothing had happened in the USSR which suggested that the gap could soon be closed. The USA and Germany were racing ahead. Stalin and his associates were concerned about the Soviet regime’s persistent failure.

  The party’s mood did not rest only on calculations of economic development. Nepmen made fortunes while manufacturing little. A wealthy stratum of peasants, whom the Bolsheviks referred to as the kulaks, again emerged in the countryside. Priests, imams and rabbis spread the word of God. Marxist–Leninist atheism was unpopular. Sections of the intelligentsia, especially among the non-Russian peoples, were cultivating nationalist ideas. Concessions on the national question had been promoted since the October Revolution and reinforced under the NEP. In Ukraine there was a systematic campaign of ‘Ukrain-ianisation’ of schools, press and public personnel. Similar drives were undertaken in other Soviet republics. Yet nationalism was on the rise everywhere in the USSR and was outmatching the spread of socialist consciousness. The basic policy of Lenin and Stalin was backfiring spectacularly. Moscow responded in 1926 by endorsing measures to deport a number of religious and tribal leaders in Azerbaijan.7 The handling of the national question grew harsher at the same time as severity increased in economic policy. Stalin’s associate Kaganovich, who headed the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1925–6, mooted measures to deport Poles from the western borderlands to the USSR’s internal regions. His purpose was to prevent Ukraine being infiltrated by Piłsudski’s intelligence agencies.8

  The same party which had made the October Revolution in the name of the working class and the poorest peasants looked out on a society where capitalism, religion and nationalism were growing in strength. Even the ranks of the party caused concern. Membership in 1927, after an intensive recruitment campaign, rose to 1,200,000. Although this was a substantial total, it disguised official worries that the quality of recruits in terms of ideological fervour and educational accomplishment left much to be desired.9

  It was against this background that the destabilising economic measures had been introduced from the mid-1920s. Stalin had long had a penchant for economic autarky. Unless state policy produced indigenous industrial growth, he assumed, it was inappropriate. He had written to Molotov in June 1925:10

  Either we resolve [this serious question] correctly in the interests of the state and of the workers and the unemployed, whom it would be possible to set up in expanded production or else, if we don’t resolve it correctly, we’ll lose tens of millions — apart from everything else — to the benefit of foreign manufacturers.

  Whereas Bukharin advocated industrialisation at a slowish pace and tried to discourage demands for acceleration, Stalin displayed increasing frustration. The partnership of Stalin and Bukharin was disintegrating without either of them yet anticipating that a decisive rupture was about to occur. They still got on well in the Politburo. They also saw each other socially. But Stalin’s ideas were hardening. In December 1926 he denied that the USSR would take fifty or more years to match the volume of the economics of foreign capitalist powers. Indeed he declared that ‘giant steps’ forward could and should be taken.11

  Stalin’s contribution to discussions of economic policy until January 1928 had been of a measured nature and — apart from his licensed attacks on the internal party oppositions — his outward behaviour had been calm since Lenin’s death. His rivals had some excuse for misreading the situation; but it was not a mistake they were going to be able to repeat without pain. Stalin was acting craftily. He breathed not a word to Bukharin about the war on the countryside he was about to start. Closeted for two days on the Trans-Siberian Railway with his aide Alexander Poskrëbyshev and others, though, he was in a pugnacious frame of mind. (Poskrëbyshev was the latest of Stalin’s personal assistants and was to remain in post until 1953.) Anybody who got in Stalin’s way on his trip was going to receive ferocious treatment. On arrival in Novosibirsk, he ordered arrests of ‘anti-Soviet’ kulaks. Grain procurement quotas were to be fulfilled. The campaign started to ‘expand the establishment’ of collective farms.12 Squads were assembled in west Siberia and the Urals to collect the quotas set for grain collection. They travelled out to the farms armed to the teeth and grabbed whatever produce they discovered. As in 1918–20, Bolsheviks entered villages, summoned peasant gatherings and demanded immediate compliance at gunpoint.

  Stalin returned to Moscow on 6 February 1928 with wagons of grain seized from ‘hoarders’. Pravda celebrated the achievement.13 It seemed that Stalin’s line had triumphed without resistance in the central party leadership. He and the other leaders insisted that the ‘middle peasants’ as well as the kulaks needed to be coerced into releasing their harvests.14 Bukharin was outraged. The change in policy had been undertaken in the provinces without prior sanction by the Politburo or the Central Committee. There was no precedent in the party’s history. Stalin had arrived in Moscow like a thief with his loot; instead of acknowledging his crime, he expected to have his virtue commended. The Politburo was in uproar. Its members stopped speaking to each other outside official meetings. When challenged about his policies, Stalin grew angry and imperious. Bukharin complained to him about his demeanour on 16 April. Stalin wrote back: ‘You won’t force me to stay quiet or hide my opinion by your shrieks about “my wanting to teach everybody”. Is an end ever going to be put to the attacks on me?’15 These words combined self-righteousness and over-sensitivity in a pugnacious mixture.

  Stalin understood how to exploit the situation. He wanted faster agricultural collectivisation and state-planned industrialisation. Most party officials had never felt comfortable with the NEP. They itched to go over to a more ‘revolutionary’ line. In the Komsomol — the party’s youth organisation — there were also many militants who yearned for the Politburo to abandon compromise. This trend was also found in the OGPU: many police officials were eager to enforce a regime with greater control over an unruly society. The Red Army had leading commanders eager for economic transformation and an end to the constriction of their budgetary opportunities.16 Although agriculture had been the focal point of Stalin’s initiative in January 1928, he associated himself with a much larger agenda. Like his supporters in the party and other public bodies, he wanted to accelerate and deepen the country’s transformation. Industry, schooling, urban construction and socialist indoctrination were to be prioritised. The state was to become more penetrative and traditional attachments to religion and nationhood were to disappear. The USSR was to turn itself into a military power which could defend itself.

  Moving beyond agricultural policy, Stalin organised a trial of engineers and ‘industrial specialists’, including several foreigners, from Shakhty in the Don Basin. They were charged with deliberate sabotage. Officially the OGPU under Genrikh Yagoda was conducting an independent enquiry. In reality it was Stalin who was accuser and judge. Investigative procedures were ignored. The Party General Secretary ordered the arrested individuals to be beaten into confessing to imaginary crimes. He was resetting the machinery of Soviet politics. He was cracking the resistance of industrial specialists — managers, engineers and plan
ners — to demands for quicker industrial growth. Through the Shakhty plaintiffs he established a case of widespread sabotage. The shadow of suspicion fell over specialists throughout the USSR.

  Stalin had let others do his dirty business. He avoided calling for the execution of the accused in the Shakhty Affair. He manoeuvred so as to get his results while protecting a pure reputation.17 Meanwhile Gosplan was preparing directives for the USSR’s entire economy. Sovnarkom had given instructions to this effect in June 1927 and the work was coming to completion in summer 1928. The first variant of the Five-Year Plan was scheduled for inauguration in October. The output targets were astonishingly high: capital goods were projected to increase by 161 per cent and consumer goods by 83 per cent.18 All sectors of the economy were to be subjected to state control. Although priority was given to the development of heavy industry, the Politburo anticipated that the popular standard of living in the towns would simultaneously improve. There was also an expectation that a hundred thousand tractors would be manufactured for use in agriculture and put at the disposal of the collective farms which were about to be created. Revenues for this over-optimistic scheme were to come from the main beneficiaries of the NEP. Stalin wanted to exact a tribute from the better-off peasantry. Bukharin described this as ‘idiotic illiteracy’.

  Bukharin in April secured a decision at the Central Committee plenum condemning ‘excesses’ in recent practices in procurement. When the Central Committee met again on 4 July, its official resolution gave a commitment to the NEP and even promised a rise in grain prices.19 The problem for Bukharin, though, was the failure of his measures to restore economic stability. Peasants refused to release grain stocks. The violence had exacerbated relations between the villages and the administrative authorities. In any case the shortage of industrial products for purchase gave no incentive for the peasantry to return to the market.20 The Politburo had hoped to alleviate problems by importing wheat; but this was too little and too late to terminate the food-supplies deficit. Nor did it do anything about the difficulties with the peasants. Meanwhile the towns remained short of grain and vegetables. The Politburo could not ignore the monthly reports: the USSR faced a winter of urban malnutrition.