Back in Berlin, where distrust of the Soviets lingered, the consensus was that Germany needed Britain for its Versailles revisionism against France; Germany declined the Soviet offer.211 Rebuffed on the continental bloc, Chicherin, with the full backing of the politburo, proposed a bilateral Soviet-German alliance.212 The German side did not immediately reject the idea, given the mutual enmity and mutual claims against Poland, but on the latter score the Soviet side hesitated, at least as presented by Chicherin, who sought a security guarantee against an aggression by or from the territory of Poland but not a new Polish partition.213 The Soviets, for leverage, had not ignored France, which also recognized the USSR (October 1924), but conservatives in France voiced extreme disgust at the red flag flying over the reestablished embassy. Karl Radek, the Comintern official, published word of Soviet negotiations with France in German newspapers, but it did not move Berlin. Notwithstanding the Rapallo Treaty breakthrough, the German-Soviet dalliance resembled a marriage of convenience, in which each partner cheated on the other. Stalin was waxing on about how “the struggle between Britain and America for oil, for Canada, for markets, the struggle between the Anglo-American bloc and Japan for Eastern markets, the struggle between Britain and France for influence in Europe, and, last, the struggle between enslaved Germany and the dominant Entente—all these are commonly known facts that indicate that the successes capital has achieved are transient, that the process of capitalism’s ‘recovery’ contains within itself the germs of its inherent weakness and disintegration.” And German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann put out feelers for normalization with the Entente.214
Britain, prioritizing its empire, remained wary of committing significant resources to continental Europe and therefore was eager to integrate Germany politically and economically to remove the presumed basis for war, and perhaps even have Germany to manage the Soviet Union. Britain’s Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, unusually for a top London official, was sensitive to French security concerns, but keen to pry Germany away from the Soviet Union. Stresemann, for his part, remained keen to retain German-Soviet military cooperation, however. An agreement to open an aviation school was signed April 15, 1925, and ground broken in the Soviet city of Lipetsk (it would go into full operation within two years).215 In August 1925, Reichswehr officers observed Red Army maneuvers for the first time (they arrived disguised as German worker Communists). A group of Red Army officers, disguised as Bulgarians, reciprocated, going to Germany to observe fall maneuvers. “The German command made sure that we did not come into contact with soldiers,” Mikhail Tukhachevsky, head of the delegation, reported to Moscow on October 3, 1925, adding that “secret observation was established.” (German drivers for the Soviets, predictably, pretended not to know Russian when they did.) Tukhachevsky was particularly struck by how “discipline in the mass of soldiers is firm and profoundly inculcated. I did not observe officer’s rude treatment of soldiers, but I did by the unter-officers. . . . One notices the immense proportion of aristocrats among the officers in the field command and the general staff.”216 Still, right at this time, Stresemann’s Western feelers yielded results.
The Locarno Peace Pact consisted of a clutch of seven agreements negotiated at a resort on Lake Maggiore (October 5–16, 1925) between Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Germany recognized its borders in the west (the Rhineland frontier), effectively ceding Alsace-Lorraine to France, and agreed to vague arbitration over its borders to the east, effectively allowing for future revision. Germany was given a path to admission into the League of Nations, shedding its pariah status. “The gates of war are closed,” declared France’s foreign minister Aristide Briand (who had headed the government back during the siege of Verdun). But no comparable non-aggression pledges or mutual guarantees were issued for Germany’s relations with its smaller eastern neighbors. Polish foreign minister Józef Beck would complain that “Germany was officially asked to attack the east, in return for peace in the west.” The retired former head of state Józef Piłsudski observed that “every honest Pole spits when he hears this word [Locarno].”217 Still, all three principals (Briand, Stresemann, and Chamberlain) would be awarded Nobel Prizes. The Soviets, who had not been invited, were alarmed that Germany had apparently been drawn back into the western orbit as part of a presumed British-led anti-Soviet coalition. Chicherin did get Stresemann to promise that Germany would not participate in sanctions against the USSR or seek a frontier rapprochement with Poland.218 But suspicions about Germany’s motives lingered. The Soviet press wrote of “a united anti-Soviet imperialist bloc.”219
Locarno’s implications—the two capitalist blocs making agreements—threatened to upend Stalin’s theory of a pending Soviet windfall from an intracapitalist war. Was this a capitalist “stabilization”?220 Stalin tried to puzzle out Locarno’s significance in notes to himself for a speech he would deliver before the end of 1925. “They want to repeat the history of ‘guaranteed pacts’ that existed before the Franco-Prussian War,” he wrote. “Then and now, the grouping of forces for a new war is hidden under the phrase securing peace (guarantee of peace).” But in the old days, Stalin continued, Russia had been fodder for the imperialist cliques, while now “Russia cannot and will not be either a weapon, or a reserve, or cannonball fodder for bourgeois states.” He also stressed the games of British conservatives, whom he suspected of scheming to use Poland against the USSR.221 In other observations of 1925, Stalin characterized the international situation as analogous to the time right before the Great War.222 He refused, in other words, to accept the notion of an enduring capitalist stabilization. Despite the Locarno shock, Stalin persisted in foreseeing a fratricidal war between imperialist blocs, with the USSR as the potential beneficiary and revolutionary outbreaks as a potential consequence. Believing otherwise implied the necessity of deep Soviet concessions to the capitalist powers on core principles, up to granting domestic political pluralism. Either innate rivalry among the capitalist powers for markets and colonies led to fratricidal war or Leninism was wrong and the USSR in trouble.
A DUUMVIRATE
Stalin’s apparatus, along with Zinoviev’s in Leningrad, deluged the public domain with tendentious pamphlets undoing Trotsky’s heroics in the October coup and civil war and blackening his image (“For Leninism, Against Trotskyism”).223 Stalin had the wherewithal to make this line ubiquitous throughout the provincial press.224 Still, he had a way to go to extirpate Trotsky’s renown, especially internationally: in a February 1925 report intercepted by the OGPU, a British diplomat deemed Trotsky—after his sacking—“the most powerful figure in Russian Bolshevism” and even “the most significant individual in socialist revolutionary Europe.” A copy went to Stalin.225 But Trotsky was no longer Stalin’s sole target. Already in late 1924, Stalin had begun to move against his allies Kamenev and Zinoviev. He replaced a Kamenev protégé as Moscow party boss and Central Committee secretary with his own new loyalist, Nikolai Uglanov.226 Uglanov had originally worked under Zinoviev in Leningrad, but the two had clashed and Stalin had found Uglanov, promoting him from Nizhny Novgorod to the capital; in Moscow, Uglanov fended off Zinoviev’s blandishments.227 Most important, Nikolai Bukharin had been promoted to fill the politburo slot vacated by Lenin’s death, which kept the full (voting) members at seven—and Stalin became very solicitous of him. From August 1924, the prepolitburo gatherings of the triumvirate had been expanded to a “septet”: Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, and Kuibyshev, in addition to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin—that is, all members of the politburo except Trotsky, plus the head of the Central Control Commission (Kuibyshev).228 But Stalin was already working on a new configuration, an alliance with the thirty-six-year-old Bukharin as well as Rykov and Tomsky.229
Trotsky assisted Stalin’s scheme, inadvertently but decisively. In late 1924, from the spa town of Kislovodsk, recuperating from fevers again, he detonated another written bomb, “Lessons of October.”230 It recount
ed the opposition by Zinoviev and Kamenev to the 1917 coup, which Trotsky labeled “desertion” and “not at all accidental”—a phrase straight out of the Lenin dictation. (Stalin went unmentioned, as if he had not been around in 1917.) Trotsky, being himself, also could not resist demonstrating that at times he had corrected Lenin. Still, he scored a spectacular strike against the triumvirate. Stalin mobilized the full anti-Trotsky forces: at least thirty articles denouncing “Trotskyism” appeared in Pravda over two months, including those by Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, even Sokolnikov.231 In a single issue, Pravda printed a long dilatory attack by Kamenev and a concise, devastating one by Stalin.232 Krupskaya’s rebuttal praised Trotsky’s “colossal energy” but deemed him weak in “Marxist analysis” and inclined to “a purely ‘administrative’ and utterly superficial” approach to the party’s role, similarly echoing Lenin’s dictation.233 But the damage to Zinoviev and Kamenev was severe: most of the party mass had no idea about the pair’s opposition to the 1917 coup, and Trotsky joined it to the failure of the German coup in 1923, warning that such “cowardice” would be dangerous going forward.
Stalin’s shifting political alliance to undercut rivals—with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky; with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky against Zinoviev and Kamenev—hardly constituted evidence of special genius: it was no more than Personal Dictatorship 101. Nonetheless, his elementary tactics surprised his erstwhile partners. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Krupskaya, still living in the apartment she had shared with Lenin, had taken to meeting in a threesome on their own. At the same time, Stalin’s provocations of them were also evident: Molotov, at the party secretariat, stopped inviting Zinoviev supporters to the semiclosed party sessions without Trotsky, perhaps to induce the Leningraders to meet on their own, thereby giving the appearance of an illegal faction. Additionally, Trotsky later claimed, plausibly, that Stalin’s minions spread rumors that their boss was looking to reconcile with Trotsky, and had even sent emissaries to him in Abkhazia in March 1925. (The plane carrying the emissaries crashed.) “Stalin, without entangling himself,” Trotsky wrote, “was merely trying to sow illusions among the ‘Trotskyites,’ and panic among the Zinovievites.”234 And the coup de grâce? When Zinoviev and his Leningrad party organization supporters aggressively demanded Trotsky’s expulsion from the politburo, Central Committee, and even the party, Stalin would defend Trotsky against their attacks.235 As for Bukharin, having savaged Trotsky, he turned his fluent viciousness against Kamenev and Zinoviev with gusto. Wholly under Stalin’s patronage, Bukharin became half of an emerging duumvirate.
“ENRICH YOURSELVES”
Not Bukharin the ideologist but Grigory Sokolnikov the finance commissar made the New Economic Policy work. Sokolnikov did not strike the typical leather-clad Bolshevik pose. “An effeminate looking gentleman, he had the face of an Indian maharajah,” noted his wife Galina Serebryakova. “His refined gestures, clean aristocratic face with direct, proud nose, oblong dark eyes, tall, unusually contoured lips and wonderful ears—all his bearing of a well-developed and physically powerful person of the English peerage.”236 But Sokolnikov was tough. He campaigned to raise apparatchiks’ salaries and eliminate the cash envelopes (“bonuses”), special food packets, special fashion ateliers, the state-supplied dachas, personal automobiles, and all the rest. These perquisites became entrenched, even as the salaries would rise, but in his strenuous efforts to separate the state budget from apparatchiks’ personal finances, Sokolnikov lived what he preached. “He could not abide gifts from people unknown to him and steadfastly took nothing from his subordinates,” his wife maintained. “He saved Soviet power’s every kopeck, and not only did not spend the money given him for foreign travel, but, as a rule, returned the greater part of his advances.” Abroad he always traveled third class and stayed in the cheapest hotels.237
Sokolnikov drew lessons for the USSR from postwar European capitalist experience. In a speech delivered in July 1924, for example, he reasoned that in France and Germany the “bourgeoisie” had wielded inflation at the expense of workers and peasants to support privately owned industry. State-owned industry, he believed, was preferable, but nonetheless he warned that the interests of state industry might conflict with the interests of “the state as a political organization.” In other words, if state industry got its way, the resulting inflation would be paid for by the peasants, who could not turn over their money quickly and would see it devalued. Sokolnikov also deduced from European inflation that absent a stable currency, the Soviet state could be engulfed in political crisis, as had happened in France, to say nothing of Weimar Germany. Sokolnikov concluded that even if the Soviet state tried to use inflation to underwrite industry, it would be forced to retreat, just as “the bourgeoisie” in Europe had been.238 But many Communists remained incredulous that gold was a guarantor of value under socialism and that the USSR needed to accumulate reserves of capitalist currencies, even if they took comfort in the fact that the party controlled the “commanding heights” (heavy industry, railways, foreign trade).239 Soviet industrial trusts were struggling just to pay wage arrears, let alone invest in the future. “There is in the Soviet Union a very great shortage of capital,” a secret British diplomatic report observed in December 1924. “The need for re-equipment of the factories is great, but where are the resources to pay for this equipment?”240
Industrial production in 1925 on average was less than half of what it had been in 1913, and Sokolnikov’s opponents in the Soviet industrial lobby screamed that he was strangling the very “material base” the country needed to build socialism. Most prominently, the left economist Yevgeny Preobrazhensky presented a scientific paper titled “The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation,” which, building on Marx’s idea of primitive capitalist accumulation, argued for a stage of forced “expropriation of surplus product,” meaning pumping resources out of the countryside and artisanal labor at low prices.241 But Sokolnikov’s monetary reforms and stringent budgets had paid dividends—by 1924, a tax in money had replaced the tax in kind and the economy had been remonetized—but in state industry, costs were rising and labor productivity was not, while mismanagement and waste were rampant. State trusts were largely shielded from market discipline: perversely, those that performed better received lower budget allocations, while the worst could count on bailouts instead of bankruptcy.242 Sokolnikov’s hesitation was fully warranted. He pressed the point by writing books and articles characterizing the USSR system as “state capitalist” and arguing that capitalist methods were essential in a transition period for the benefit of the proletariat and that the country could revive economically only if reconnected to the world economy.243
What tripped up Sokolnikov, however, was that the harvest in 1924 had been poor, and in some regions famine had not ended. Foreign currency‒earning grain exports would be suspended entirely that hungry summer.244 The head of the government, Alexei Rykov, and the OGPU’s Yagoda toured the Volga valley accompanied by journalists. (“Comrade Yagoda,” the Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov remarked, “did it ever occur to you that without horns you simply do not look your part?” Everyone guffawed, Yagoda included.) Rykov addressed an enormous crowd on the central square of Saratov, his hometown, where twelve years earlier, under the old regime, he had been beaten during a May Day demonstration. “These very stones ran red with our blood,” he said. “In those days we dreamed of a Russia redeemed from the blight of tsarism. That dream is fulfilled. But to destroy absolutism was only part of our task. Our aim today is to build a truly free, socialist Russia.” The square erupted in applause. But as Rykov made the rounds of villages, peasants asked him, “What is a kulak? Can it be a muzhik who owns a horse, a cow, and some poultry?” Rykov tried to calm the peasants, but answered, “If we let kulaks thrive, we shall soon revert to the old system—a few rich peasants in each village and the rest destitute. Do you want those exploiters?”245 Of course, Rykov knew full well that the danger was incompetent, corrupt governance.
246 But the party debate about agricultural policy became consumed with arguments about class differentiation amid reports that kulaks had seized control over cooperatives and village soviets.247
The state, as in tsarist times, could not “see” all the way down to the self-governing villages. The peasant revolution had strengthened the communes, rechristened “land societies,” which the regime saw as survivals of a backward era. Under the commune system, livestock was usually held individually (by household), albeit often pastured in common, and the land was worked by household rather than collectively (except for some scything in meadows). But the commune as a collective bestowed the usage rights to the land, allocating each household a number of strips of varying size and location, which the commune periodically redistributed according to shifting household size and other considerations. Improving one’s assigned strips with manure or other means made little sense because they could be reallocated. In regions of black soils, the number of strips typically ran twenty to thirty per household; in areas of non-black earth, fifty to eighty. Some strips could be as narrow as seven to fifteen feet wide and a mere seventy feet long. They could also lie as far as ten miles or more away, and sometimes peasants declined to farm them. Some of the arable land was lost to access paths, while the redistributions could be time-consuming, requiring measurements in situ and volatile meetings. Soviet legislation tried to restrict redistributions as inefficient, but efforts to place villages under rural soviets often failed. Communes generated their own income—they collected the taxes—while rural soviets required subsidies from above (and spent the funds on administrative salaries).248 Peasants could quit the commune, Stolypin style, and in the northwest, Ukraine, or Belorussia, enclosed farms rather than communes predominated, but here, too, the party and soviet were just an occasional presence. In 1924, the party’s theoretical journal mockingly referred to the NEP as the new “Stolypin-Soviet” policy as well as a “kulak deviation.”249
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