by S. A Smith
1 framework of NEP - the market, material incentives, and the alliance 1-
with the peasantry - but emphasized the primacy of building state industry and defending the proletariat. Bukharin, by contrast, argued that the preservation of the alliance with the peasantry was the overriding priority. Peasants should be allowed to prosper - thus his slogan 'Enrich yourselves', which so outraged the left - since the more efficient state sector would meet the rising demand for consumer goods, gradually squeezing out the private sector. Bukharin recognized that progress would be slow, likening his programme to'riding into socialism on a peasant nag', but the United Opposition was alarmed because they believed that this would allow 'kulak' forces to strengthen. So long as NEP appeared to be working, Stalin pursued a middle course, successfully exploiting divisions among his opponents. In 1926 he inclined to the right rather than to the left, opposing the Dnieprostroi dam on the grounds that it was like a peasant buying a gramophone
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when he should be repairing his plough. But as the perception gained ground that NEP was running into the sand, he switched course sharply, demanding by 1928 a pace of industrialization far more hectic than anything ever contemplated by the left. Since the country was falling ever further behind the advanced capitalist powers, the Stalin faction insisted that speed was of the essence and that a decisive breakthrough could come about only by breaking with NEP.
Although one cannot interpret the inner-party conflict as a naked struggle for power, the issue of power was nevertheless at its heart. Lenin, who had ruled by virtue of his charisma rather than formal position, bequeathed a structure of weak but bloated institutions that relied for direction on a strong leader. No one in the oligarchy enjoyed anything like his personal authority. The question of who should succeed him thus raised thorny issues about the institutionalization of power. Though hardly champions of socialist democracy, the left opposition stood for collective leadership, against the extreme concentration of power in the central organs of the party, and for tolerance of a range of opinion within the party. Yet they believed in the paramount importance of discipline and unity and were terrified of being seen as splitters. This disarmed them psychologically - no more pathetic evidence for which exists than Trotsky's admission to the Thirteenth Party Congress in Mayig24that'the party in the last analysis is always right.' Stalin ably traded on the widespread fear of disunity, building up a reputation as a champion of orthodoxy against assorted malcontents. By harping on Trotsky's differences with Lenin in the past, he attached himself to the growing cult of Lenin, notably with the publication in 1924 of his Foundations of Leninism, which set up Lenin as the touchstone of political rectitude. This became a key text in the education of the tens of thousands of new recruits who were easily persuaded that the 'anti-Leninism' of the opposition deprived them of the right to a fair hearing. Similarly, by nailing his colours to the mast of 'socialism in one country', Stalin opened up the positive perspective of backward Russia raising herself through her own efforts, without
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waiting for international revolution. Trotsky, against whom the new doctrine was targeted, never in fact denied that it was possible to begin socialist construction; but he saw international revolution as necessary in the longer term if Russia were not to be forced into autarchy and diplomatic isolation. Stalin characterized Trotsky's perspective of permanent revolution as one of 'permanent gloom' and 'permanent hopelessness'. He and his supporters, by contrast, presented themselves as optimistic, loyal and disciplined, 'doers' rather than whiners. This played to the latent nationalism in the burgeoning ranks of young party members, mostly working-class, who whilst parroting the language of class and internationalism, deeply resented the notion that Russia was inferior to the West.
Dear Comrade Leaders
I am writing you a letter because I want to tell you what impression is being made on us, the dark, undeveloped, backward people, by the case of comrade Zinoviev and other of our officials. Comrades, as a backward, dark fellow, I cannot imagine the construction of socialism without tight cohesion of our party and leadership. I fully understand what will happen if at the heart of the construction of socialism are quarrelling, lack of coordination, disunity. We will build nothing. And how will the bourgeoisie and the western countries look on us? They will make fun of us, they will listen open-mouthed, expecting the break-up of our soviet power. If there are quarrels this will once again make it easier for provocateurs and Mensheviks to spread their lying propaganda against soviet power. I am a young worker who was born in 1902 and who joined the Komsomol in 1923.
Letter from P. Ivanov, a worker, to the Central Committee Vyshchi Ol'chedaevskii works, Nemirch station, Mogilev district,
Podol'sk province
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This ideological and psychological context helps us to understand why Stalin came out on top in the inner-party conflict; but it hardly explains how an able but relatively inconspicuous 'organization man' could become one of the 20th century's most savage tyrants. To appreciate this, one must look to Stalin's personality and to his brilliant grasp of machine politics. Stalin, in contrast to Lenin and Trotsky, was born into poverty, into a family where his violent and drunken father was frequently absent. This early experience bred a deeply pessimistic outlook on life; he shared completely the view of Machiavelli -whom he had read - that 'men are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers'. Outshone intellectually by the likes of Trotsky and Kamenev, he made his mark by his immense capacity for detailed work. A first-rate tactician with an excellent memory, he was cool and calculating, averse to the histrionics to which Zinovievand Trotsky were prone. In the words of M. I. Riutin, leader of the last of the opposition groupings in the early 1930s, he was 'narrow-minded, sly, power-loving, vengeful, treacherous, envious, hypocritical, insolent, boastful, stubborn'. What this misses is the fact that he was also genial and unstuffy, with a capacity to make himself agreeable.
From April 1922 Stalin was the only member of the oligarchy who was simultaneously a full member of the Politburo, theOrgburo, and the Secretariat. Through control of the latter two organs, he was able to influence the agenda of the Politburo and to determine the appointment of personnel down to local district party secretaries. One of his first acts as general secretary was to order the latter to report to him personally by the fifth of each month. Gradually, he used his patronage to appoint supporters to key positions in the party-state apparatus and to break up the power bases of his opponents, including Zinoviev's stronghold in Leningrad and Uglanov's rightist base in Moscow. At each of the key turning-points in the inner-party struggle, with the exception of the battle against the'rightist deviation' in 1928, most lower-level party leaders swung behind Stalin. By 1929 the 'moustachioed one' had acquired absolute control over the party
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machine, turning the Secretariat into his personal chancery and revealing a positively byzantine capacity for intrigue and subterfuge.
Party and people
During the 1920s a new ruling elite began to emerge, defined by its privileges and powerful political connections. The key mechanism through which it was constituted was the 'nomenklatura' system, established in 1920, whereby the Central Committee (or the relevant provincial or district committee in the case of junior positions) reserved to itself the right to make key appointments in party and state administration. By 1922 the personnel assignment office of the Central Committee was responsible for over 10,000 appointments nation-wide. The emergent elite consisted of party officials at oblast' (provincial) level and above, senior state officials, and leading industrial managers. In £ 1927 there were about 3,000 to 4,000 higher party officials and about
g 100,000 at middle and lower levels. When one adds senior officials in
I
e the state apparatus, including industry and education, perhaps half a
jg million people - out of a working population of more than 86 million -
1 may be said to have formed
this elite. By a decision of the Twelfth Party
Conference in August 1922, responsible officials down to the level of
district party secretaries were guaranteed rations, housing, uniforms,
health care, and rest cures in the Crimea. Family members also enjoyed
these privileges. However, in contrast to their counterparts in capitalist
countries, members of the elite derived power and privilege from
tenure of office, rather than ownership of property and wealth, and they
enjoyed no security of tenure and were unable to bequeath their office
to their offspring.
Between 1921 and 1929 party membership roughly doubled, to reach over a million, in spite of a series of'purges' - a term that had not yet acquired a sinister ring - to remove hundreds of thousands of members for passivity, careerism, or drunkenness. The party succeeded in 'proletarianizing' itself, insofar as by 1927 nearly half its members were
lie
workers by social origin. Over 300,000 of these'workers', however, were actually occupied in white-collar or administrative positions. As this expansion took place, 'Old Bolsheviks' went into eclipse. In 1925 only 2,000 members had joined the party before 1905. Many of these were intellectuals, who had suffered imprisonment and internal exile or lived for periods abroad, whose values were very different from those of plebeian incomers. Most of the incomers had only primary education and little grasp of Marxist theory. In the mid-ig20s the party control commission found that 72% of party members in Voronezh were 'politically illiterate'. Though doubtless sincere, they understood building socialism largely as entailing the conscientious performance of tasks set down by the leadership. Moreover, as secret police reports regularly commented, not least of their motivations was the desire 'to get a higher-paying job and a good apartment'. Those plebeians promoted into administrative positions - and in Votskaia autonomous region (formerly part of Viatka province) they constituted no less than half the party membership - sawtheir promotion as proof that the proletariat was now the ruling class, although probably no more than 5% of the total workforce ever benefited from such upward mobility.
Meanwhile the'bureaucratization' of the party continued apace. In his last years, perhaps under the strain of illness, Lenin's writings took on a dark, pessimistic tone. 'We are being sucked into a foul, bureaucratic swamp.' Yet he continued to believe that the solution lay in promoting workers and in getting the Workers and Peasants' Inspectorate (Rabkrin)and the party control commission to wage war on inefficiency and inertia in the state and party respectively. These new agencies, however, rapidly succumbed to the disease they were meant to cure. In Tver' no less than 29 different sections of Rabkrin carried out an inspection of the local textile industry. The 1920s saw endless appeals to activists to expose corruption, incompetence, and capriciousness, but there was little awareness that'bureaucratism'was a systemic rather than an individual problem. At the same time, despite the proliferating division of labour, the ramified hierarchies, and the ever-lengthening
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trail of paperwork, the operation of power was not strictly 'bureaucratic' at all. For the system relied far more on personalized authority than on formal institutions and procedures. Middle-and lower-level officials, with little security of tenure or institutional protection against superiors, developed networks of clients to consolidate their influence in their particular sphere and to protect themselves against the centre. Behind the facade of bureaucratic hierarchy, power was frequently transacted through 'family influence', with local bosses, such as G. K. Ordzhonikidze in Tbilisi, Kirov in Baku, or F. I. Goloshchekin in Kazakhstan, presiding over extensive personal fiefdoms.
One key difference that marked the period of NEP out from both the civil war and the 1930s was the abandonment of terror as an instrument of political rule. The secret police was not eliminated, but the OGPU, £ which replaced the Cheka, confined itself to routine surveillance of the g population and to external state security. More importantly, a conscious e effort was made to broaden the scope of law. In 1922 a Criminal Code g was enacted, that drew to a surprising degree on elements of tsarist 1 jurisprudence. A centralized court system re-emerged and the office of procurator soon became the most powerful judicial agency. The practice of law was once again professionalized; but trained lawyers remained thin on the ground, so lay judges and assessors, poorly paid and dependent on the good will of officials, continued to be influential. Many of the values of the revolution, moreover, continued to influence judicial practice, so that criminals from the 'toiling classes' - especially juvenile offenders, among whom there was an explosion in crime -continued to be treated with marked leniency and with a strong emphasis on rehabilitation. Nevertheless there were clear limits to the institutionalization of a law-bound society: the judiciary failed to develop meaningful independence from the state and certainly failed to protect the individual against the state. Moreover, the Bolsheviks, in continuing to see law principally as a means of defending the state, unconsciously served as perpetuators of Russian tradition.
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The countryside remained as under-governed as in the tsarist period: indeed the ratio of police to population was actually lower than before 1917. Party control was secure only down to the level of the county executives of the Soviets, although during the 1920s rapid headway was made in bolstering party control of township executives. In the village Soviets the party's influence was negligible. Even by 1928 there was only one party organization for every 26 rural centres of population. Peasants took some interest in the village Soviets and township executives, since these influenced the allocation of taxes and land; but they were generally indifferent to the county Soviets: 'We have no objection to government; we need authority, but we don't care how it's organized.' Barely a quarter of members of county executives were peasants, compared with 44% who were 'employees', most of whom had formerly worked for the zemstvos. The members of the township executives and village Soviets, by contrast, consisted overwhelmingly of peasants, generally but not always drawn from the poorer strata. The 'youth who doesn't yet shave', with a record of service in the Red Army and limited primary education, was the archetypal representative of the rural Soviets. Despite efforts to increase female representation in the village Soviets, this only rose from 1% in 1922 to 12% by 1927. The personnel in the lower Soviets did not command much respect, partly because they were seen by older villagers as callow and ignorant of farming, partly because they compensated for their poor salaries with corruption and embezzlement. Complaints against them were legion. Nevertheless peasants also comment on the absence of 'nobs' in local government and on the fact that the Soviets were led by 'our people whom we can scold and have a cigarette with', which suggests that the boundary between state and society had become more porous since the tsarist period.
At the start of NEP the profound alienation of the peasants from the regime was reflected in the fact that only 22% of rural voters (and only 14% of women) took part in the soviet elections of 1922. The'Face to the Countryside' campaign of autumn 1924 sought to revitalize rural
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Soviets, exhorting them to be 'polite, attentive, listening to the voice of the peasantry', with the result that participation rose to 47% in 1926-7. In the unprecedentedly free election of 1925, communists were voted out of Soviets in some areas and there were widespread calls for the establishment of peasant unions. The increased assertiveness of the peasantry made the regime uneasy, fuelling anxiety about the kulak threat. It is foolhardy to generalize about the political attitudes of 100 million peasants, except to say that they were far from being a cowed mass. Moreover, in spite of its fears about kulaks, the regime encouraged them to speak out. With some certainty, one can say that enthusiastic supporters of the regime were in a minority, as were its implacable foes. The majority in between probably considered authority in any form oppressive and no doubt felt that the revolution had changed little in the way that government acte
d upon the governed. Nevertheless tension between peasants and government eased after 1923. A sample of 407 letters from peasants to Red Army soldiers, intercepted by military censors between 1924 and 1925, shows that almost two-thirds were positively disposed to the soviet government - probably a peak figure - but that virtually all were critical of local authorities. Analysis of letters sent to the Peasant Newspaper between 1924 and 1928 suggests that the key concerns - after taxation -were the price and quality of manufactures, fleecing by middlemen, exploitation by kulaks, the eight-hour day enjoyed by workers, and the better cultural provision in the towns. Many of these issues reflect a deep sense that peasants were second-class citizens in the new order. In 1926 for the first time more correspondents (28%) expressed dissatisfaction with soviet power than support (23%). The gist of most letters was that the majority of peasants live in great hardship ('unshod and unclothed', 'puffed up with hunger') due to taxes and rigged prices. Many forthrightly blamed the government. One letter from 100 poor peasants inveighed: 'Communists and commissars, you have all forgotten 1917. You parasites sit in your warm berths drinking our blood.' It appears that millions had begun to internalize the language of the regime, to take at face value its claims to be building socialism. By
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Esteemed Mikhail Ivanovich!
I send you greetings from the distant and poor Kirghiz autonomous oblast, greetings from a peasant woman from the Samara steppe. I am writing to you only because you also are a peasant and a worker and at present are the defender and mediator of the poor. Mikhail Ivanovich, we struggled, much blood was spilt, many innocent people perished. They fought for social equality. But where is it? I have seen in our proletarian country, alongside terrifying luxury, even more terrifying poverty. Once again I feel hatred in my breast, as I did in the past, but then I knew at whom to direct my hatred and in whose downfall to rejoice. Our financial director receives 140 rubles a month, plus a furnished apartment with lighting and heating. But the caretaker who has to stoke six boilers each day, cart 12 puds of fuel, carry water on her shoulders so that staff can wash their hands, she receives 12 rubles, has no work clothes, no day off, and no holidays. I have quarrelled with some who call themselves party members, but all they can say in answer to my questions is that it's impossible to make everyone equal. There are some who are clever and some who are fools. But I heard all that under Nicholas. When I was a child I would spend sleepless nights wanting to express my thoughts to that dear old man, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, but I didn't have the courage to write to him and in any case it was dangerous. Now I am 34 and have three children and am almost an invalid, but am still as anxious as before.