by Simon Ings
The triumvirate responded to the economic troubles and strikes of the early 1920s by bringing bourgeois specialists more firmly into their confidence. And the loudest and most effective advocate of this policy was, incredibly, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the former head of the secret police; Bloody Felix, whose Cheka had become notorious for torture and mass executions.
Dzerzhinsky was now head of VSNKh, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, in charge of all big industry, and overseeing the uneasy alliance of bourgeois factory managers and so-called ‘red directors’, who acted as political commissars in the workplace. These red directors were phenomenally ill-educated. To support them, cover for their deficiencies, and generally oil the wheels of industry, Dzerzhinsky brought in former secret policemen, whose ruthless efficiency made the work of the harried bourgeois managers a great deal easier. Dzerzhinsky, a fiercely practical man, turned out to be a champion of the NEP and a staunch defender of scientists and engineers, politics be damned.
Dzerzhinsky had a strong ally in Alexei Rykov, the rightist chairman of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars – a high office that made him effectively head of state. In 1924 Rykov had gone so far as to offer specialists a ‘bill of rights’, insisting that ‘the specialist, the engineer, the man of science and technology must have full independence and freedom to express his opinion on matters of science and technology’.3
To all appearances Joseph Stalin, too, was a staunch supporter of the NEP. But Stalin nursed an extraordinary plan of his own. Rather than merely return to the ramshackle command-and-control apparatus of War Communism, as Trotsky advocated, he wanted to leapfrog capitalism entirely, industrialise the country by fiat, and – by controlling the economy with iron precision – rattle through the stages by which true communism might be achieved. His was arguably the purest expression of Bolshevik impatience that ever was. Even at the outset, it was clear that the cost in lives would be horrendous.
That plan took shape as numerous strikes, plus Lenin’s illness, pitted Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev against Trotsky, who was still holding out for a world revolution. The defeat of revolutionary movements in Germany and Hungary ought to have cured Trotsky of his quixotic notion, and at the Thirteenth Party Conference in January 1924, Stalin and his colleagues unsurprisingly won national support for their more practical approach: defend the nation, and secure national gains. Establish socialism in one country. The world can wait.
Dzerzhinsky’s death in 1926 robbed the old specialists of their most powerful patron, and a very different kind of economic order arose in place of the old. On 3 November 1929 Stalin produced an article declaring ‘a great break on all the fronts of Socialist construction’. This ‘great break’ eliminated unemployment at the stroke of the pen and drew peasants into the factories on an unprecedented scale.
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The peasants who flocked to the cities to work in the factories were accident-prone, ignorant, hostile and clumsy, and not at all the kind of workers who ‘had endured the famine during the civil war … beaten the class enemy, and raised our economy from the verge of ruin’. At a Moscow textile factory one worker, angry at being transferred to lower-paying work, hurled a bolt into a printing machine, causing 20,000 roubles in damage. Workers in the Donbass burned themselves with acid in order to shirk, while new arrivals migrated from one mine to another in search of better housing and lighter work. According to one worker from a factory in the Ukraine, they were interested less in working than in gambling and drinking; ‘fist-fighting’ was their favourite pastime. ‘Bumpkins’, ‘sandal-wearers’, ‘niggers’: by 1929 they were lowering the pay rates for everybody else and arousing the hostility of old hands who treated them with contempt and abuse.4
The unions and Party had great difficulty teaching new workers the basics of industrial work. All manner of schemes were introduced to rein in, inform and discipline the unruly peasant workforce, from comrades’ courts to socialist competition to training sessions conducted by Alexei Gastev’s Central Institute of Labour. The most effective long-term solution was education. Military measures were brought in to train technicians and scientists in the shortest time and between 1928 and 1932, the student body trebled. In some places, the theoretical parts of physics and chemistry were abandoned altogether, while new methods of teaching and grading in ‘brigades’ saw students learning through ‘continuous productive practice’.
In the Central Committee, Dzerzhinsky’s old ally Alexei Rykov could make no sense of what was happening. The government was on the verge of launching a series of heroic big engineering projects. Surely what mattered, at this crucial time, was to improve and expand technical education. Why flood overstretched institutions with ill-prepared students?
But Stalin’s plan was to swamp the old technical intelligentsia, once and for all, with sheer numbers of proletarian engineers (dissolving them ‘in a sea of new forces’, as a State Planning Commission report of 1930 put it) and – being a great believer in the Bolshevik adage ‘learn by doing’ – he was quietly happy to see the distinction between work and education virtually eradicated. He even proposed turning the whole of higher technical education over to the Supreme Council of the National Economy. When it came to the vote, Stalin failed to get his way, but he was a master of bureaucratic attrition – Comrade Filing Cabinet, indeed – and by 1930 the Education Commissariat had ceded control of all higher technical education to the Supreme Council and other economic bodies. ‘And nothing has happened,’ Stalin quipped, ‘we are still alive.’5
It was now important for Stalin that he ruin Alexei Rykov. Rykov had tied his flag to the fate of bourgeois specialists and engineers, and had consequently become the figurehead of right-wing opposition to Stalin and the First Five-Year Plan. And in eliminating Rykov, Stalin achieved a great deal besides.
Late in 1927 Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, head of the secret police, received a disturbing letter from his man in the northern Caucasus, Yefim Yevdokimov. Apparently a group of wreckers was operating in the mountain town of Shakhty, conspiring with their former, émigré owners to wreck the district’s coal mines. Yevdokimov had evidence, too, in the form of letters written in code. Menzhinsky smelled a rat. He wrote back to Yevdokimov giving him two weeks to decode the letters. If he didn’t, Menzhinsky threatened to have him arrested for false accusation.
Yevdokimov went straight to Stalin – they were friends and went on holidays together – and Stalin ordered the wreckers’ arrest. Rykov and Menzhinsky both protested that Stalin had exceeded his authority. Stalin, in reply, produced a telegram from Yevdokimov that hinted darkly at high-level Moscow links to the conspiracy.
On 7 March 1928 five German nationals were implicated in the case and arrested. The timing was exquisite. Russia’s national economy depended on successful negotiations with Germany, and in charge of these negotiations was none other than Alexei Rykov. Rykov was trapped: the more he tried to do his job, smoothing Germany’s ruffled diplomatic feathers, the more he risked accusations of covering up the Shakhty case.
Rykov trod carefully: in a speech reported in Pravda on 11 March 1928, he berated everyone for not uncovering the conspiracy sooner and tried in vain to create an independent commission to establish the facts of the Shakhty case.6 Of course he had no illusions about what was happening:
Without a doubt the existence of this conspiracy arouses extreme concern on all sides. But it would be unusually harmful and dangerous if the discovery of this conspiracy were to bring in its wake a development of specialist baiting.7
Of course, this was precisely the outcome Stalin wished for. He aimed to achieve a truly socialist state overnight by main force, so it was key to his strategy that class struggle would intensify, justifying a wider use of coercion and terror.
The Shakhty trial began on 18 May 1928 in Moscow, in the main hall of the House of Trade Unions, formerly the ornate dining room of the tsarist Nobles’ Club, a three-storey marble building with Corinthian columns. The immense hall retained large crystal
chandeliers and baby blue walls topped with a frieze of dancing girls. The judge, Party legal scholar Andrei Vyshinsky, turned up in hunting costume for the benefit of the cameras. And there were plenty of them: nearly a hundred reporters, Soviet and foreign, attended the trial, and a hundred thousand spectators, schoolchildren, Pioneers, visiting delegations of peasants … this when there were barely 1,100 mining engineers in the whole Soviet Union.8
Yevdokimov’s letters were never presented. Evidence against the Shakhty ‘conspirators’ consisted entirely of affidavits and confessions. Driven to hysterical self-incrimination, some defendants implicated people who were already dead. The prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko, demanded that nearly half of the fifty-three defendants be executed. The twelve-year-old son of one of the accused demanded death for his father in a letter, published in Pravda and read out in court:
I denounce my father [Andrei Kolodoob] as a whole-hearted traitor and an enemy of the working class. I demand for him the severest penalty. I reject him and the name he bears. Hereafter I shall no longer call myself Kolodoob but Shaktin.9
In the end, only five of the accused were executed. Several were acquitted. The sentences were beside the point. The Shakhty trial was but the first salvo in a carefully orchestrated three-year-long class war that saw the prosecution of thousands of engineers – the most qualified, the most experienced, the most likely to oppose Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan on technical grounds.
The Shakhty case and subsequent trials succeeded in uniting unruly factory workers under the twin flags of paranoia and xenophobia. By raising the spectre of foreign-backed saboteurs, the campaign gave the workers a pressing reason to regiment themselves.10 In a speech to the Party on 12 April 1928, Stalin explained:
Formerly, international capital thought of overthrowing the Soviet power by means of direct military intervention. The attempt failed. Now it is trying, and will try in the future, to weaken our economic power by means of invisible economic intervention, not always obvious but fairly serious, organising sabotage, planning all kinds of ‘crises’ in one branch of industry or another, and thus facilitating the possibility of military intervention. It is all part and parcel of the class struggle of international capital against the Soviet power and there can be no talk of any accidental happenings.11
Stalin’s carefully orchestrated trials of the late 1920s and early 1930s put an entire class on show. Alexei Rykov was simply the headline act. Opposition to Stalin crumbled under the onslaught. Rykov was accused of organising a rightist faction within the Bolshevik Party, and a loyal Stalinist, Vyacheslav Molotov, replaced him as the head of the Soviet government. Gorbunov was dismissed at the same time. So Russia’s scientists lost their two most powerful patrons, and Stalin became as a consequence a sort of über-patron around whom, like it or not, they were all obliged to gather. By the end of the 1930s they were calling him ‘the Great Scientist’, and ‘Science’s Coryphaeus’: the leader of the band.
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Since the reign of Peter the Great, Russia, lacking any civic life worth the name, had been making do with networks of clients and patrons. Stalin, harnessing these networks and coming to dominate them, could only find, in what few institutions there were, a threat to his authority. They were the surviving trace of a liberal, democratic path not taken.
There were two significant redoubts, shielding bourgeois liberals from the regime. One of them, TsEKUBU, the Central Commission to Improve the Living Conditions of Scholars, had been created with Lenin’s blessing and on the Bolsheviks’ dollar. The commission, originally established to distribute the special ‘academic ration’ during the Civil War, had prospered along with its clientele during the easier years of the NEP. These days it was providing supplements to salary, rest and recreational facilities, a Scholars’ Club in Moscow (a venue for concerts by the finest Russian artists), a couple of country estates, two health clubs, and a functioning church.12
It was a relatively easy business to replace TsEKUBU, a state-sponsored organisation, with another state-sponsored body, more geared to the times (VARNITSO, the All-Union Association of Scientific and Technical Workers for Active Participation in Socialist Construction in the USSR). More troublesome was Peter the Great’s own Academy of Sciences, an unabashedly liberal, Kadet-dominated organisation which, from the outset of the Soviet project, had been dealing as an equal with the government – and sometimes more as though the Bolsheviks governed only through the Academy’s patronage. At the Second Congress of Scientific Workers, held in February 1927, the Academy’s leading scholars were not only confident but demanding, attacking the Commissariat of Education for failing to provide research and higher education with sufficient money. Sergei Oldenburg in particular, Lenin’s familiar, treated the commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky with impatience bordering on contempt. For ten years, he had witnessed the commissariat’s ‘misfortunes’ and tolerated its failure to sort out adequate financing. Lunacharsky had better make it clear to the leadership that the situation, on the eve of the First Five-Year Plan, was now critical.
This was more than patrician noblesse oblige having a gallop: Oldenburg and the Academy were conscientiously fulfilling the deal struck with Lenin; they were working sincerely in the national interest. If the Education Commissariat couldn’t fund them properly, it was up to the government to find them an organisation that could. They assumed, in other words, that their relationship with the government was – or at least ought to be – an easy, collegiate one.
Lunacharsky had news for them:
The intelligentsia are waiting for an invitation from Soviet power for the most valuable elements of the aristocracy of the mind to enter the highest organs of government … But they must not be surprised if the Revolution, which has to defend itself against its enemies meticulously and ruthlessly, has also produced organs that look on such things from a completely different point of view.13
In April 1927 a group of leftist professors with connections to the highest echelons of the Bolshevik Party met to draft the outlines of what would soon become VARNITSO. They sent letters to the science section of the Education Commissariat, insisting that ‘the Academy of Sciences was a right-leaning organisation, concentrating too much power in its own hands’. Their letter campaign was a long one. A year later they were warning that the Academy opposed ‘Sovietisation’ and was developing contacts only with Western scientists hostile to socialism.14
The professors argued that new communist organisations should end the Academy’s dominance over Soviet science. That was a task-and-a-half: so far, communist replacements for the old institutions of bourgeois learning had been weedy affairs. One of the chief orders of business at the Communist Academy had been to convert scientists to Marxism, but the effort had hardly got off the ground. Even the Union of Scientific Workers, the least controversial of organisations, abstaining almost completely from the promulgation of Marxist science, boasted a membership comprising barely one in twenty scientists. Societies of materialist scientists were as numerous as mushrooms after a spring rain, but about as long-lived – they never boasted more than a few hundred members in total.
VARNITSO’s birthplace was the Timiryazev Biological Institute, a major producer of Marxist popular science. Its leading light was Boris Zavadovsky, the Marxist biologist who had attacked Nikolai Koltsov so vehemently for his eugenic views. Over the years Zavadovsky’s political concerns had come to dominate his scientific interests, and he was highly critical of science writers who left Marxist ideology out of their work. Through VARNITSO, Zavadovsky’s classic Bolshevik impatience developed into classic Bolshevik vindictiveness, as he set the organisation to unseat an older generation of tenured academics.
Joining him as founders of VARNITSO were his elder brother Mikhail (head of the Biology Department at Moscow State University) and some of the most aggressive Bolshevisers in science, including Alexei Bakh, a biochemist who a year before had been elected a member of the Academy of Sciences. Bakh was chosen to lead the organis
ation because of his impressive CV of practical achievements, particularly in the bread, tobacco and tea industries.
VARNITSO was unashamedly a lobbying group, fighting tooth-and-nail for money and support. By the end of 1932, it boasted more than 11,000 members. It represented the intellectual as well as the political ambitions of a new generation – young people who found their careers blocked by academics left over from before the Revolution.
VARNITSO’s strategy was brutal: to end the collegiate relationship between the state and its scientists. In letters to Stalin and other Politburo members, VARNITSO used the revolutionary rhetoric of class war and international intrigue, arguing that science and technology were instruments in a struggle between two world systems – capitalism and socialism. They attracted attention. More than that, they exerted influence: for the next two decades, Stalin’s own pronouncements on science might have been lifted wholesale from some letter or other from VARNITSO.
On paper, VARNITSO’s purposes were straightforward. Dedicated to the welfare of scientists and scholars, it steadily replaced TsEKUBU as a lobbying channel for the science community. But VARNITSO also had a political agenda: to make it impossible for intellectuals to claim political neutrality. In April 1929 VARNITSO even challenged the secret police, the OGPU, to a competition in ‘exposing wreckage’.
In 1929, VARNITSO dispatched two experienced provocateurs to Nikolai Koltsov’s Institute of Experimental Biology – a bastion of pure research – to expose and force out its bourgeois element, which of course included Koltsov himself. They manufactured a series of scandals that all but ruined two of Koltsov’s researchers, Nikolai Belyaev and Boris Astaurov, and may well have been the cause of the bizarre arrest and internal exile of his brilliant colleague Sergei Chetverikov.