Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  What Bukharin had not bargained for was the reaction of several powerful leaders. He had expected Voroshilov and Kalinin to criticise what had happened in the Urals and Siberia.21 Even Ordzhonikidze was sometimes disloyal to Stalin behind the scenes.22 Bukharin remained hopeful that he could win over individuals such as OGPU leader Yagoda as well as the rest of the party. The reversion to War Communism had to be exposed for what it was.23 Yet Stalin won all of them to his side. (It was said that Kalinin’s weakness for ballerinas allowed Stalin to put pressure on him.) By summer 1928 Bukharin was becoming frantic. He even started to worry that Stalin would bring Kamenev and Zinoviev back into public politics as useful allies. Bukharin made overtures to Kamenev to prevent this. ‘The disagreements between us and Stalin,’ he told him, ‘are many times more serious than all the ones we had with you. The Rightists… wanted Kamenev and Zinoviev restored to the Politburo.’24 Bukharin’s overtures were a sign of panic. He could not assemble sufficient support at the highest party levels. His sole prominent allies against the General Secretary were Rykov, Tomski and Uglanov.

  Yet Bukharin believed that the ‘Urals-Siberian method’ would be disowned and that the market mechanisms of Lenin’s NEP restored. Initially his optimism seemed justified. The ‘excesses’ reported in the expropriation campaign were officially castigated and denials were issued that the ‘extraordinary measures’ implied an abandonment of the NEP. Although Stalin successfully insisted that a stronger commitment to early collectivisation also be inserted into public statements, the feeling was widespread that he had damaged himself politically.

  Bukharin did not give up. Having written inscrutable prose for most of his adult life, he came down to earth and published ‘Notes of an Economist’. Bukharin castigated ideas of ‘super-industrialisation’. According to him, these were Trotskyist and anti-Leninist. He claimed that only a balanced, steady relationship between the interests of industry and agriculture would secure healthy economic development.25 There was nothing in the ‘Notes’ that jarred against anything Stalin had said up to 1928; and since Stalin still avoided disowning the NEP, Bukharin did not need special permission to publish what he wanted in the hope of neutralising a politician whom he had come to regard as the USSR’s Genghis Khan.26 But he also misjudged Stalin by assuming that all that interested him was to keep power.27 What had started as a crisis over food supplies had acquired other dimensions. Stalin’s group in the Politburo and Central Committee were not going to be satisfied by changes to agricultural measures. They wanted fast industrial progress and military security. They wished to crush nationalism and religiosity. They aimed to eradicate hostility to the Soviet regime, and the remnants of the old propertied classes were to be got rid of. Cities, schools and cinemas had to be established. Socialism was to be spread as an idea and a practical reality.

  Stalin and Bukharin clashed every time they met. In his condition of heightened expectancy, Stalin applied his programme to international relations. He now denied that ‘capitalist stabilisation’ prevailed, and he declared that the world economy was facing yet another fundamental emergency. He resolved that this should be reflected in the world communist movement. Before the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in July 1928, Stalin declared that anti-communist socialists in Europe — members of labour and social-democratic parties — were the deadliest enemies of socialism. He called them ‘social-fascists’. Bukharin was horrified: he understood the dangers posed by the European far right. Appreciating the qualitative difference between conservatism and fascism, he wanted Hitler’s Nazis to be the main object of the German Communist Party’s political attack. But Stalin amassed the support required in the Politburo for a change of policy in the Comintern. The internal breach with the NEP obtained an external aspect. Until then it had been the official line that world capitalism had stabilised itself after the Great War. Now Stalin insisted that a ‘third period’ had commenced as capitalism entered its terminal crisis and that revolutionary opportunities were about to present themselves in Europe.

  This had been under discussion in the Politburo for a year or two but no serious alteration of the Comintern’s practical instructions to Europe’s communist parties had followed. Wanting to do down Bukharin, Stalin had a personal interest in changing policy. But there was probably more to it. Stalin had had doubts about ‘European socialist revolution’ in 1917–18. Yet his scepticism was absolute and sometimes his Bolshevik instincts took him over. Aiming at the transformation of the USSR, he might have been reverting to radical type. From mid-1928, however, Stain’s group ordered communists throughout the continent to adopt the stance taken by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Extreme radicalism became dominant again and the Comintern, at the Politburo’s instigation, purged the doubters and vacillators — as well as the Trotskyists — from the ranks of its parties. World communism was being readied for the imminent revolutionary upheaval.

  Stalin, while insisting that revolutions were about to break out in Europe, continued to stipulate that the Russian Communist Party should concentrate on building ‘socialism in one country’. His enemies took this as proof that Stalin was a hypocrite or a bungler. Trotski reminded everyone of Stalin’s cack-handed instructions to the Chinese Communist Party in 1927; Bukharin was baffled by the turn in policy. There was no fundamental paradox in Stalin’s change of policy. His controversial commitment to socialism in one country did not imply a basic disregard for the necessity of international revolution. Stalin had never ceased to accept that the USSR would face problems of security until such time as one or more of the globe’s great powers underwent a revolution of the Soviet kind. This did not mean, however, that he was willing to risk direct intervention in Europe; he still feared provoking a crusade against the USSR. But he no longer sought to restrain the communist parties in Germany, France and Italy which had made no secret of their frustration with the Comintern’s insistence that they should collaborate with social-democratic and labour parties in their countries.

  He seldom did anything for one sole reason. When allied to Bukharin before 1928, Stalin left a lot of the handling of the Comintern to him. Bukharin had many supporters in leading positions in the foreign parties. By altering policy and expelling dissenters, Stalin could bring his own people to the top. Prone to moodiness, Bukharin contemplated resigning as a means of putting pressure on Stalin.28 Stalin had frequently offered his own resignation from posts since the October Revolution; but he would not have treated Bukharin with the indulgence which he himself had received. His only idea of victory involved crushing and humiliating the enemy.

  Much ground had already been prepared for him. In moving forward to comprehensive state ownership and regulation, the ascendant party leadership was moving backwards towards the Soviet economic system of the period of the Civil War. The Supreme Council of the People’s Economy had been established to supervise all economic activity after the October Revolution.29 The banking and industrial sectors had been seized by the state in the Civil War and much had subsequently been retained. Gosplan had been created in February 1921. After starting the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin and his associates suggested that they were initiating a calculated strategy from this transformation. The word ‘plan’ implied that this was the case. No such strategy in any definitive form existed and there were many zigzags on the route to transformation. Policies were modified and sometimes abandoned. Once announced, targets for economic growth were frequently altered. Yet Stalin was not without a compass when he threw the NEP overboard. Although he lacked a calculated strategy, he always possessed a set of operational assumptions, and these assumptions were shared by many in the central and local party leaderships.

  Sooner or later, as even Nikolai Bukharin thought, the market had to be eliminated from the economy and the social elements hostile to socialism — the kulaks, the nepmen, clergy, ‘bourgeois specialists’, nationalists and supporters of all other political and cultural trends — had somehow to disappear. The need for a wholly state-owned economy and
state-directed society was the shared objective of leading Bolsheviks. They did not flinch at the use of force. Hardened by their experiences before and after the October 1917 Revolution, they were more than willing to ensure compliance by crude methods. The frustrations of the NEP were immense. The military threat from abroad did not fade and the technological gap between the USSR and the West was growing. Loyal supporters of the ascendant party leadership, moreover, were embarrassed by oppositionists who declared that they had betrayed the objective of the Revolution led by Lenin. Such a mentality offered a framework of assumptions inside which it was possible for Stalin to make his piecemeal proposals from 1928 and to count upon substantial support in the wider party.

  Stalin started with basic assumptions about the world. These came from his peculiar and distorted reaction to his Georgian background, to his experience of the revolutionary underground and to the Bolshevik variant of Marxism. Whatever the matter to be decided, he was never perplexed to the point of vacillation. His axioms did not prescribe policy in detail. By thinking and commanding according to his fundamental ideas, he could be instantly decisive. Any given situation might sometimes require much study — and Stalin worked assiduously even after the Second World War at keeping himself well informed. But most situations could be decided without a great deal of work; indeed Stalin could afford to leave them to his subordinates and demand reports on what had been decided. He surrounded himself with persons such as Molotov and Kaganovich who shared his assumptions, and he promoted others who could be trained to internalise them (or to go along with them out of ambition or fear). It is this inner world of assumptions which gives the clue about Stalin’s otherwise mysterious capacity to manoeuvre in the changing situations of the 1930s.

  During the First Five-Year Plan the USSR underwent drastic change. Ahead lay campaigns to spread collective farms and eliminate kulaks, clerics and private traders. The political system would become harsher. Violence would be pervasive. The Russian Communist Party, OGPU and People’s Commissariats would consolidate their power. Remnants of former parties would be eradicated. ‘Bourgeois nationalists’ would be arrested. The Gulag, which was the network of labour camps subject to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), would be expanded and would become an indispensable sector of the Soviet economy. Dozens of new towns and cities would be founded. Thousands of new enterprises would be created. A great influx of people from the villages would take place as factories and mines sought to fill their labour forces. Literacy schemes would be given huge state funding. Promotion of workers and peasants to administrative office would be widespread. Enthusiasm for the demise of political, social and cultural compromise would be cultivated. Marxism–Leninism would be intensively propagated. The change would be the work of Stalin and his associates in the Kremlin. Theirs would be the credit and theirs the blame.

  24. TERROR-ECONOMICS

  Stalin in 1929 was determined to alter the USSR’s economic structures and practices. Gosplan was put under a political clamp and told to produce ever more ambitious versions of the First Five-Year Plan. The Politburo resolved that targets should be hit inside four rather than five years, and the officials of Gosplan were commanded to carry out the gigantic task of amending schemes involving the country’s industry, agriculture, transport and commerce. Warnings by experts against hyper-optimism were ignored. Whole new cities such as Magnitogorsk were constructed. Digging began of the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Engineering plants in Moscow and Leningrad were expanded; new mines were sunk in Ukraine, the Urals and the Kuznets Basin. Peasants in their millions were attracted into the expanding labour force. Skilled workers became managers. Factories were put on to a seven-day working week. American and German technology was bought with revenues which accrued from the rise in grain exports. Foreign firms were contracted to establish new plants and help train Soviet personnel. Educational facilities were expanded. Youth was promoted. A vast economic transformation was put in hand.

  Industrial wages were meant to rise by about a half, but the skyrocketing of food prices discounted any such gain, especially after the introduction of bread rationing in early 1929. Housing construction lagged far behind the needs of the expanded urban population. Having aimed to build a hundred thousand tractors, security considerations turned the Politburo and Gosplan towards raising the proportion of the budget devoted to armaments. The needs of consumers were also downgraded as the requirements for coal, iron, steel and machinery were increased.1

  Having forcibly extracted grain from the hands of the peasantry since January 1928, the Politburo ignored Bukharin’s call for a reversion to the New Economic Policy and began to designate his ideas as a Right Deviation from Marxist–Leninist principles. In 1929 it resolved upon the mass collectivisation of agriculture. There had been many sorts of collective farms in the 1920s. Stalin selected two types to be introduced. The ‘higher’ type was the sovkhoz, whose land was owned by the state and whose workers were simply the rural equivalent of the hired factory labour force. The other type was the kolkhoz. This stood for ‘collective farm’ in Russian; the difference from the sovkhoz was that kolkhozes formally rented the land from the state and agreed to deliver a fixed quota of the harvest to the state. Whereas sovkhoz workers were paid a regular wage, workers on a kolkhoz were paid according to the number of days they contributed to the farm. The real difference was minimal for peasants. The Politburo’s policy as publicly announced was that entrance to either type of collective farm should be on a voluntary basis. Local party committees were ordered to conduct propaganda to encourage the phenomenon. Once Bukharin had been ejected from the Politburo in November 1929, Stalin stiffened the campaign.2

  The Politburo repeatedly raised the tempo of implementation. The process quickened even in summer as the authorities strove to procure the required grain from the villages at prices resented by the peasants. An article by Stalin on 7 November, the anniversary of the October Revolution, contended that many rural households saw the advantage of collective farms without the need for the state to compel them; and it drew a contrast with the proposals of the United Opposition.3 A Politburo commission was established to work out implementation. The purpose was to prioritise the setting up of collective farms in the lower Volga region (which was famously fertile). Russia’s Far North was to be the last region to undergo total collectivisation in 1933. It was a short schedule but it became shorter. Central and local cadres who argued for a delay were firmly overruled. Instructions were kept confidential and vague; and party and governmental functionaries, concerned that they might be judged lacking in obedience, set about imposing total collectivisation with immediate effect.4

  In July 1929 it stayed official policy that terror should be avoided and that kulaks as well as the majority of the peasantry ought to be enlisted in the collective farms. Stalin, however, wanted none of this. In December 1929 he announced that kulaks should be banned from becoming collective farm workers. His words were blunt:5

  Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes and sovkhozes… Now dekulakisation is being undertaken by the masses of the poor and middling peasant masses themselves, who are realising total collectivisation. Now dekulakisation in the areas of total collectivisation is not just a simple administrative measure. Now dekulakisation is an integral part of the creation and development of collective farms. When the head is cut off, no one wastes tears on the hair.

  On 30 January 1930 the Politburo chillingly approved the liquidation of kulaks as a class. A Central Committee directive was sent out in February. Three kulak categories were designated. The first consisted of individuals to be sent to concentration camps, the second to distant parts of the USSR and the third to other parts of their province. The Politburo called for religious bodies to be simultaneously targeted.6 The OGPU was managed in the same way as the economy. Quotas were assigned to reg
ions for dekulakisation, and destinations in the north Urals and Kazakhstan were prescribed. The Politburo handed down the schedule for operations.7

  Stalin, like other Bolsheviks, detested the kulaks. He seems to have sensed that the peasantry would not join the sovkhozes and kolkhozes unless they were afraid of the consequences of resistance. Repression of a sizeable minority would bring this about — and anyway he probably genuinely believed that the kulaks would seriously disrupt the operation of collective farms. Over 320,000 households were subjected to dekulakisation by July 1930. The violence was immense. The superior force of the authorities, aided by the suddenness of the campaign, prevailed. A whole way of rural life was being swept into oblivion.8

  Already in 1927 the Politburo had sanctioned the use of forced labour to expand the mining of gold. This initiative was translated in the following year to timber hewing.9 Stalin gave rulings on the use of concentration camps not just for the social rehabilitation of prisoners but also for what they could contribute to the gross domestic product in regions where free labour could not easily be found. He had never been reluctant to contemplate such camps as a central component of communist party rule; and he did not flinch from ordering arrests and ordering OGPU chief Vladimir Menzhinski to create the permanent organisational framework. Among the victims were categories of persons whom he feared and resented. Members of outlawed political parties were high on the list. Stalin also had ‘bourgeois nationalists’, priests and private traders in his sights as well as recalcitrant economic experts. His method was a continuation of the techniques developed at Shakhty. Leading individuals and groups in ‘anti-Soviet’ categories were put on show trial. The objective was to intimidate all their followers and sympathisers into giving up thoughts of opposition in case they too might be arrested.