Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  A final showdown between Stalin and Trotsky occurred on October 23, 1927, at a meeting to prepare the next Party congress. Stalin launched a fierce attack on the already-routed opposition and again came out in defense of Lenin, whom Trotsky unwisely (if accurately) had called “Maximilien Lenin,” a term implying Lenin was a dictator along the lines of Robespierre. There was another exchange about Lenin’s “testament,” which Trotsky was trying to use against Stalin. Once more Stalin pleaded guilty to the charge of rudeness, which he said was aimed at those (like Trotsky) who would split the Party. He recalled Trotsky’s great sins, twisting each one for the most damaging effect. It was a masterful performance, and all in the name of holding high the sacred body of Leninism.48

  The united opposition persisted in 1927 with a foolish plan to hold street demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad on November 7, the tenth “official” anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The demonstration was crushed, and within a week Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Party. The Fifteenth Party Congress, which met in December, followed up by expelling seventy-five other “oppositionists,” including prominent figures such as Kamenev, Pyatakov, and Radek. Thirty of those expelled were, along with Trotsky, sent to distant parts of the country early in the New Year. In society at large, there was a purge of sympathizers.49

  Stalin did not take the attacks on him to be serious threats. However, they provided him an opportunity to show his political authority. By the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, he was the only speaker to receive “stormy and prolonged applause.” The Communist Party enthusiastically embraced their now unchallenged leader.50

  9

  STALIN’S NEW INITIATIVES

  On December 3, 1927, Stalin gave a lengthy address to the Party congress about the future of the New Economic Policy (NEP). He began by reviewing the errors of the opposition, whom he accused of having too little faith in Leninism. He said Trotsky was incorrectly advocating the forced transformation of light industry to make up for what was called a “goods famine.” What was needed was a revolution in heavy industry (manufacturing and military goods).

  Bukharin was now faulted for encouraging the kulaks to “enrich themselves.” Stalin claimed that the NEP had reached its limits, and more had to be done to cut the kulaks down to size. Agricultural production was falling behind countries like the United States and Canada. The way out was “to transform the small and scattered peasant farms into large farms based on cultivation of the land in common, to adopt collective cultivation guided by a new and higher technique.”1

  Applause greeted Stalin’s speech, which concluded: “We are in the process of moving from the restoration of industry and agriculture to the reconstruction of the entire national economy on a new technical foundation, at a time when the building of Socialism is no longer simply a prospect but a living, practical matter, which calls for the overcoming of massive internal and external difficulties.”2

  FIVE-YEAR PLAN

  Stalin wanted to end the NEP without causing panic among peasants afraid of a return to the cruel days when government squads simply requisitioned surpluses. He thus had to make the argument that it was crucial to the health and security of the country that the Party take this change of course. An opportunity that came his way was a “war scare” in 1927, one he deliberately exaggerated to drive home the point that the USSR was vulnerable to the hostile West.

  In May, Britain broke off diplomatic relations because the Soviets abetted British strikers and looked like they wanted to foment revolution. There was friction with France, but when Foreign Minister Georgy Chicherin returned home in the summer, he was surprised to learn that war was in the air. Stalin played it up as it gave credence to his demand to industrialize the country as rapidly as possible, to focus on heavy industry, and to drop the NEP in favor of a far more Communistic five-year plan.3

  He also took advantage of political developments at home. For example, local officials in Ukraine during the 1920s blamed the failures of the NEP on what they called bourgeois “specialists” (spetsy). Show trials of these “wreckers” (vrediteli) proved to be popular because they shifted the blame for shortfalls away from workers and onto the shoulders of management and trade-union leadership.4 In late 1927 a secret police official and old comrade of Stalin’s from the North Caucasus informed him about a “wrecking conspiracy” involving fifty-three engineers from the town of Shakhty and the nearby Donbass in Ukraine. On March 10, 1928, the secret police announced they had uncovered the plot.5

  Stalin used the opportunity to stage a mass trial in Moscow in May-June. Like Lenin he believed in the educative value of such rituals, which, to be successful, had to reveal a credible threat by providing a story line plausible to ordinary people. Such trials unmasked the doubledealers and demonstrated treason, and to that end, the event had to be stage-managed carefully.6 Stalin became directly involved and appointed Andrei Vyshinsky judge of a “special judicial presence,” not a regular court. The wreckers were charged with sabotaging their factories on behalf of foreign governments. The object of the show trial, which was held in the former Moscow Club of the Nobility, was to attract publicity and teach. Most of the accused were given prison terms; the foreigners (Germans) were released; and of the eleven sentenced to death, five were eventually shot.7

  The Shakhty trial was supposed to mobilize the country behind the government by demonstrating the imminent threat of war. The message was that enemies within “wore masks;” that is, they were not who they appeared to be, and everyone had to be on the lookout. The miners in the Donbass were evidently convinced about the “conspiracy” and, when the details came out, covered trolleys with the slogan “Long live the GPU!”8 The latter was the latest name (used since 1922) for the Cheka.

  Stalin sounded distinctly warlike at the July meetings of the Central Committee in 1928. Everywhere there were “fronts” to be taken—the “grain front,” the “planning front,” even the “philosophy front.” The refrain was that enemies of the revolution were not going to give up, and the closer they came to defeat, the more desperate they would grow.9

  “Foreign threats” justified the need to fight on the “industrial front.” Whereas imperial Russia’s industry was located mainly in the western, European parts of the empire—with the notable exception of Baku in the Caucasus to the south—Stalin now opted, for defense reasons, to situate new industry east of the Ural mountain range. This decision proved important when the Nazi invasion later overran the western parts of the country.

  Recent findings in Soviet archives show that in 1929–30, Stalin did indeed take these “threats” seriously, even if they seem farfetched today. His letters dealing with the show trials indicate that he believed the conspiracies. He was insistent that the trials and punishments be published in the press.10

  Stalin’s policies called on the peasants to provide plentiful grain at cheap prices. The peasants would have to pay a “tribute,” that is, offer surpluses to be sold abroad so the government could pay for new technology.11 Stalin wrote to Molotov on August 29, 1929, “If we can beat this grain thing, then we’ll prevail in everything, in both domestic and foreign policies.”12

  The Soviet blueprint for constructing socialism was incorporated in the first Five-Year Plan (piatiletka) that began in October 1928 but was only adopted by the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929. This plan was discussed as far back as 1925. In its final version, it visualized a kind of second Russian Revolution that would overcome all the enduring problems plaguing the country since Peter the Great.

  The Five-Year Plan represented the first attempt by a major power to transform all aspects of society and economy. The only other example mentioned in the literature was Germany’s “war Socialism” during the First World War to organize industry and reconcile the interests of labor and management. The new Soviet strategy was much more far-reaching and based on the principle of militant anticapitalism and radical social revolution.13

  THE PLANNED
SOCIETY

  In November 1928, Stalin asserted that the Soviet Union had “overtaken and outstripped the advanced capitalist countries by establishing a new political system. That is good. But it is not enough. To secure the final victory of Socialism in our country, we must also overtake and outstrip these countries technically and economically. If we do not do this, we shall find ourselves forced to the wall.”14

  The plan touched all aspects of social and cultural life and enunciated specific goals for industrialization “to catch and overtake” the West. The aim was to surpass capitalism’s per capita output; to make greater technological advances; to give priority to heavy industry, rather than consumer goods; to raise the standard of living, including providing people access to better education, health care, and welfare; and to secure the country against foreign invaders by locating much of the new development in areas less vulnerable to attack.

  Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry, admitted the challenges were daunting for a “country of the wooden plough.” The bitter pill to swallow was that the Soviets, like Peter the Great, would have to import experts and borrow technology from the West.

  Large American firms, among them the Austin Company, which had just finished an enormous plant for General Motors, signed contracts to build even bigger facilities in the Soviet Union. On August 23, 1929, Austin agreed to construct a gigantic factory complex and new industrial city at Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga. It was a mammoth undertaking by any standard. The plant was designed to produce over 100,000 vehicles per year. Austin created an entire system so they could be made in one place from blueprint to finished product. To provide for every need of the sixty thousand and more workers, a new city was created. The New York Times Magazine published a feature story on the project called “Communism Builds Its City of Utopia.”15

  The Ford Motor Company signed a contract on May 31, 1929, to produce Model A cars and Model AA pickup trucks, with a goal to turn out thirty thousand cars and seventy thousand trucks per year. Initially, Soviet workers would assemble American-made parts until Ford technicians trained Soviets to manufacture parts, as in Nizhni Novgorod. Other American companies were involved in building tractor factories in Stalingrad and Kharkov.16

  Henry Ford was criticized at home for helping Communists. He responded that getting people to work was the main thing. “The adoption of high wages, low prices, and mass production in all countries is only a matter of time,” he declared. “Instead of reducing our foreign markets, it will serve to define them.”17

  One of the spectacular projects put together with the help of the West was the new steel complex at Magnitogorsk, a brand-new city built from the ground up. Everything, from blast furnaces, sources of energy, transportation, and so on, was fashioned as a set piece, but on a grand scale and constructed as quickly as possible. The contract went to Arthur McKee & Co. of Cleveland, Ohio, which was shocked to learn it had to deliver the plan in two months. The engineers were doubly dismayed when they finally got to the construction site: two-thirds of the workers had no previous industrial experience and no skills to speak of, and a good 30 percent were illiterate. Nonetheless, the project, situated on the eastern side of the Ural Mountains in Siberia, was completed in record time and opened on February 1, 1932, to great fanfare by Mikhail Kalinin.

  A sense of the difficulties faced by Soviet industry may be gathered from the fact that the first freight shipments arrived in Magnitogorsk from Moscow after a seventy-day trip. But the new “Socialist city” pointed the way to the future and was the kind of project perfectly suited to Stalin’s gargantuan visions. It was a prime example of the sixty or more towns created out of nothing during the first Five-Year Plan. The new metropolis was to demonstrate all the Communist virtues, that is, planned and modern. Making these communities really work—like the tractor factory city of Chelyabinsk, the “Chicago of Siberia”—was easier said than done. Who really knew how to plan a complete city? The ambition to create them was part of the utopian quest but driven also by fears of being overrun by the capitalists, as well as by dreams of showing them up.18

  Under the heading “Year of the Great Breakthrough” (perlom), Stalin gave a first review of the Five-Year Plan for Pravda on November 3, 1929. The occasion was to celebrate victories on various fronts on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The justification for the intense industrialization drive was couched in typically military language:

  The past year was a year of great change on all the fronts of Socialist construction. The key to this change has been, and continues to be, an unrelenting offensive of Socialism against the capitalist elements in town and country. This offensive has already brought us a number of decisive successes in the Socialist reconstruction of our national economy. We may, therefore, conclude that our Party made good use of our retreat during the first stages of the New Economic Policy and that we are thus able, in the subsequent stages, to organize the change and to launch a successful offensive against the capitalist elements.

  After outlining the growth of industry and the strides taken to collectivize agriculture, he asserted that the Soviet Union was finally making progress:

  We are advancing rapidly along the path of industrialization to Socialism, leaving behind the old “Russian” backwardness. We are becoming a country of metal, automobiles, tractors. And when we have put the USSR on an automobile, and the muzhik [common peasant] on a tractor, let the worthy capitalists, who brag so much about their “civilization,” try to overtake us! We shall see which countries may then be called backward and which ones advanced.19

  Stalin was by no means alone in his drive to transform the country. Quite apart from those in the upper echelons of the Party apparatus, he won the support of many educators, engineers, and administrators well down the line.

  The first Five-Year Plan was accompanied by its own “cultural revolution,” which was above and beyond the kind of sweeping transformation originally envisaged by the Bolsheviks. Taking their cue from the Shakhty case, the changes in 1928–31 called for purges of government offices and institutions of higher learning to root out ubiquitous wreckers. Shakhty and other show trials in 1930 were designed to shake up “bourgeois” specialists and get the technical intelligentsia behind the industrialization drive. The show trials and purges cleared out those sympathetic to the right and made room for those better disposed toward Stalin. These trials were the first “offensives” on the “cultural front,” the aims of which included transforming every worker and backward peasant into the proud “new man.”

  At the end of the 1920s the Soviet Union, with a total population of around 150 million, was still overwhelmingly rural, with only one-fifth classified as urban. A mere 57 percent of the population (aged nine to forty-nine) were counted as literate in the 1926 census, but even that figure probably was overly optimistic.20

  The cultural revolution sought to create a new intelligentsia, one drawn from the working class, whose entrance into higher education was encouraged. The numbers enrolled jumped from 160,000 in 1927–28 to 470,000 in 1932–33, but as always, care has to be taken with the (often inflated) statistics. The drive opened doors for a new generation of intellectuals and political leaders, people like Leonid Brezhnev—future leader of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union—who rose to prominence during the 1930s. While the offspring of poor families were given a chance to move upward, the other side of the coin was that countless individuals were destined to become superfluous because their parents happened to be “former people,” such as members of the bourgeoisie, nobility, or clergy.21

  ASSAULT ON THE COUNTRYSIDE

  In the autumn of 1927 a foreign Communist in Moscow remarked that something had changed from an earlier visit. There was “no meat, no cheese, no milk” in the stores, and the sale of bread was irregular.22 At the turn of the year 1927–28, the secret police reported numerous “anti-Soviet manifestations” across the country that could be traced to grain procurement problems and a “goods famine”—or
shortages of supplies. People in some areas like Ukraine were led to believe the Jews—that is, “the Yids and the government”—had hidden various items “in order to cheat the peasants later.” Kulaks and others were supposedly trying to utilize the discontent to get rid of cooperatives and other Socialist institutions.23 Nearly everywhere in the summer of 1928 there were breadlines and rationing.

  Early in 1928, Stalin sent close associates to key areas to assess the situation and speed up food deliveries. Lazar Kaganovich went to Ukraine, Anastas Mikoyan to the North Caucasus, and Molotov to the Urals. In mid-January, Stalin spent three weeks in Siberia and the Urals, where he browbeat local officials at every stop. He cajoled and threatened, demanding that they use whatever means necessary, including violence, to get food needed for workers and the cities. He was behind the unanimous decision of the Politburo that “extraordinary measures” had to be used.

  This ruthless approach became known as the “Ural-Siberian method” of obtaining the grain. Stalin demanded officials use articles 105 (on trade violations) and 107 (on withholding grain) of the criminal code to prosecute “kulak speculators” and others. The campaign employed radical Communists and workers from the city and doled out rewards to poor peasants who informed on the better-off kulaks and then shared in the spoils.24

  One historian describes the ripple effects of these campaigns as follows:

  Rumors of the most alarming kind began to spread among the population; it was said that there would be famine, that war and the fall of the Soviet regime were imminent. Violence or the threat of violence against Party activists became an everyday occurrence. From Kherson, Melitopol, Semipalatinsk and other regions, came reports of fires, the looting of food from shops and warehouses, civil disorder and attempts to prevent the authorities from taking grain from the agricultural regions. Public discontent in the towns and villages found its expression in riots and demonstrations against the authorities.25