Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Sokolnikov insisted that the chief instrument of struggle against the “kulak danger” had to be economic—progressive taxation—but the Bolsheviks needed more grain, immediately. The politburo was compelled to approve grain imports, costing vital hard currency. Even then, in several provinces, including in the Volga valley visited by Rykov, peasants would still be consuming food surrogates into 1925. Herds were increasing in size, consumption was going up, and sown acreage finally attained the 1913 level, but yields per acre were substantially lower, and grain marketings overall seemed to be declining.250 Agricultural prices rose precipitously, from 102 kopecks per pud (36 pounds) of rye to 206 kopecks, and reports circulated of kulaks’ buying up and holding grain stocks in anticipation of further price rises. Pravda blamed private capital for “disorganizing” the internal grain market.251 The regime was forced to spend more budget revenue on higher wages for the workers at state factories so they could buy bread. At the same time, the imports threatened Sokolnikov’s strong currency and budget discipline: the grain imports would push the country back into a trade deficit. Agriculture’s “backwardness” took the blame for multiple dilemmas of unfortunate weather, poor governance, and policy errors.

  Stalin’s position was a Lenin-style combination of flexible tactics and unshakable core beliefs. He urged party officials to earn the trust of the peasant, kulaks excepted, following to the letter the late Lenin’s dicta regarding the NEP. He also asserted that a capitalist path of development would impoverish Soviet peasants, producing an underclass of wage slaves condemned to toil on latifundia, and that private traders would gouge the peasants, so he stressed mass peasant membership in agricultural and trade cooperatives, also true to Lenin’s vision of the NEP.252 But on November 7, 1924, the revolution’s seventh anniversary, Stalin visited the Moscow factory Dynamo and offered a glimpse into his deeper thinking. “I wish for the workers of Dynamo, and the workers of all Russia,” he wrote in the visitors’ book, “that our industry expands, in order that the number of proletarians in Russia in the near term climbs to 20-30 million, that collective agriculture flourishes in villages and subordinates to its influence private farming.” Stalin’s words that day—a leftist manifesto—were not published until several years later.253 In January 1925, this time in a public setting, Stalin did reveal something of his otherwise closely held views. “[The peasantry] is at our side, we are living with it, we are building a new life together with it, whether that’s good or bad,” he said at a meeting of the Moscow party organization. “This ally, you know yourselves, is not a very strong one, the peasantry is not as reliable an ally as the proletariat of the developed capitalist countries.” But Stalin had also been relentlessly accusing Trotsky of underestimating the peasantry, and in the speech characterized “Trotskyism” as the “disbelief in the forces of our revolution, disbelief in the alliance [smychka] between workers and peasants,” which was indispensable to the success of the NEP and the revolution’s ultimate triumph.254 Attacks on Trotsky, in other words, translated into strong support for the NEP.

  Such was the background to the 14th party conference in April 1925, when, continuing to adhere to Sokolnikov’s advice on the need for fiscal discipline and currency stability, while also indulging Bukharin’s insistence on conciliation on the peasant question, Stalin oversaw a doubling down on the NEP’s concessions. The Central Committee reduced the agricultural tax and cost of farm machinery, expanded the rights to lease land and hire labor, enhanced loan programs, and softened the restrictions on small-scale trade.255 These measures, it was hoped, would bring in a bumper harvest both to feed the country and, via exports, to finance a higher tempo of industrialization.256

  Stalin relished demonstrating his superior leadership skills with people, not least because the others at the top viewed him as inferior. Once, for instance, the politburo discussed uniting the commissariats of foreign and domestic trade and appointing as the single head Alexander Tsyurupa, Lenin’s former deputy, so Kamenev went to talk to him. “He waved his hand, went white and became so obviously resentful that I ditched the conversation,” Kamenev, giving up, wrote to Stalin. But Stalin answered: “I also spoke with him (he himself asked). Outwardly he protested against his candidacy, but his eyes were smiling. I told him that, in that light, he is agreed, obviously. He stayed silent. I think he’ll do.”257 On matters of international political economy, too, Stalin revealed himself as a quick study and adept. The Soviet Union operated in a capitalist financial world, which, for better or worse, had seen the reintroduction of a quasi-gold standard and the institutionalization of convertible currency reserves, but hardly anyone in the Central Committee grasped these issues.258 Stalin would invariably take the floor to explain matters, employing his canonical style (first point, second point, third point). In deliberations about prices, for example, he illuminated why trade margins were still operative even though this was socialist trade. He also reinforced Sokolnikov’s point about the causal link between monetary emissions and inflation, and admonished that expenses had to be held in check, which meant enduring high levels of unemployment and lower rates of economic expansion, just as the capitalists did for the same reasons.259 But it was Bukharin who, with Stalin’s blessing, seized the spotlight to explain this deepening of the NEP.

  On April 17, 1925, in a memorable speech to a meeting of the Moscow party active, Bukharin chastised those who were dismissive of the village, for “nothing is more harmful than the lack of understanding that our industry depends on the peasant market,” that is, on peasant demand and ability to pay for manufactured goods. But, he lamented, “the well-off upper stratum of the peasantry and the middle peasant who strives to become well-off are now afraid to accumulate. The situation is created such that a peasant is afraid to mount a metal roof over his house so as not to be called a kulak; if he purchases machinery he does so in a way that the Communists do not see. Higher technology becomes conspiratorial.” Poor peasants, meanwhile, complained that Soviet power hindered their hiring by the better-off peasants. (Most peasants who hired labor themselves worked; they were not rentier landlords.) Party attitudes were holding down production on which the state’s well-being and industrialization hopes rested. Bukharin dismissed the fantasy of collective farms, because the peasants were just not joining them. “That we should in all ways propagandize among the peasants formation of collective farms is true, but it is not true when people maintain that there is a highway to the movement of the peasant mass toward the path of socialism,” he stated. Rather, the answer was to benefit from economic incentives. “It is necessary to say to the entire peasantry, to all its strata: ‘Enrich yourselves, accumulate, develop your farms,’” he told the party activists. “Only idiots can say that we should always have the poor; now we need to conduct policy in such a way that the poor would vanish.”260

  Bukharin’s typically inflammatory rhetoric notwithstanding, he was merely drawing the logical conclusions of the regime’s own policy: Did the Communists want a smaller harvest? Should peasants be encouraged to produce less just to avoid appearing to be kulaks? Fury at Bukharin’s aggressive logic, however, exploded. Also, it was now that furious critiques were belatedly launched against Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” demagoguing Stalin’s arguments as antiworld revolution, a rare taste of his own medicine.261 The combination of Bukharin’s incautious speech and Stalin’s deliberately misconstrued article afforded a significant opportunity for critics of the new duumvirate. Zinoviev, in May 1925, stated that “the worst thing that can happen to a revolutionary party is to lose its [revolutionary] perspective.”262 He was acutely aware of the rising discontent over disparities of wealth and privilege based upon his knowledge of Leningrad, where workers repeatedly engaged in slowdowns and strikes, and in that context a doubling down on the NEP would be perceived as, and indeed was becoming, a wager on the kulaks.263 He viewed Bukharin’s advocacy as unwittingly paving the way for the very capitalist restoration predicted by emigr
e critics when they said the Bolsheviks would be forced to make ever greater concessions to capitalism. Zinoviev would state that 14 percent of the peasantry produced 60 percent of the grain, while earning half a billion rubles.264 Behind closed doors, in June 1925, Stalin stated that “the slogan ‘get rich’ is not our slogan,” adding, “our slogan is socialist accumulation.”265 Bukharin had to publicly repudiate his summons of enrichment, over and over, even as the opposition continued to bash him with it.

  But all the questions about the New Economic Policy remained. Lenin himself had warned of the dangers of a self-inflicted capitalist restoration in the “peasant Brest-Litovsk,” but whereas the original Brest-Litovsk had been overturned with Germany’s defeat in the war on the western front, it remained unclear what, if anything, would overturn the NEP. How long was the retreat? Lenin’s statements were highly ambiguous (“seriously, and for a long time” “a long period, measured in years,” “not less than a decade, and probably more,” “25 years is too pessimistic”).266 The only clarity was that the NEP had not been intended to last forever. In the meantime, was it leading to socialism or full restoration of capitalism? And how was the NEP facilitating the imperative to industrialize? Leftists such as Preobrazhensky insisted that the NEP would never produce the “surplus” necessary to fund industrialization; therefore, why indulge the kulak?267 Stalin himself wrote in Pravda in May 1925 that “we need 15-20 million industrial proletarians,” at a time when the country had perhaps 4 million.268 Was this feasible? It was all well and good to talk about wielding the contradictions among the imperialists, but how was socialism going to survive without modern machine industry? If kulak farms were to be harassed and contained, how would petty-peasant farming serve to build up the country, in conditions of capitalist encirclement? How would NEP Russia become socialist Russia? “The main thing now is not at all to ignite the class struggle in the village,” Stalin said, contra Zinoviev’s line, in a summary of the 14th party conference in May 1925, while adding emptily that “the leadership of the working class is the guarantee that the construction proceeds along the path to socialism.”269

  Police, party, and journalistic channels continued to report deep resentment in villages of kulaks, while largely ignoring the anger at officials.270 The regime directed its own ire at private traders, disparaged as “NEPmen.” The vast majority of privateers were small-fry hawkers of what they themselves had planted or fabricated (or of their possessions), but OGPU operatives periodically made a show of swooping in on the bazaars and throwing a dragnet. “There was a very fine line between permissible profits and illegal speculation,” wrote one eyewitness of the arrests, a process known as skimming the NEP. “The cook knows how to skim the fish soup but I doubt whether all the NEPmen understood which they were: the scum or the fish.”271 A few NEPmen did achieve scale, using their wealth to open restaurants, billiard houses, bathhouses, recreational facilities, in other words, points of public congregation, where people traded news, rumor, and ideas, and a few exercised influence over the strategic rail network, paying bribes to underpaid officials. There was even a private airline based in Ukraine, one of only three airlines in the country, which served Kharkov (the capital), Rostov, Odessa, Kiev, and Moscow.272 But no NEPman could rise and remain above the others without the complicity of the authorities, especially the OGPU, which commandeered the choice rooms in those restaurants.273 Outside the thick ideological soup, the Soviet Union’s greatest challenge was neither kulaks nor NEPmen, but the “Enrich yourselves” behavior of officials engaged in shakedowns and massive embezzlement.274

  TESTAMENT REPUDIATED

  Stalin had an additional worry: the damned Lenin dictation, which Trotsky’s supporters had labeled the Testament. Someone had passed a copy to the writer Max Eastman, who knew some Russian, having married Yelena Krylenko, sister of Nikolai (lately, deputy justice commissar). In spring 1925, Eastman published Since Lenin Died, which retailed Trotsky’s analysis of a bureaucratic deformation under Stalin, carried excerpts from Lenin’s purported dictation, and made reference to the warm private letter Krupskaya had sent to Trotsky immediately following Lenin’s death. Because Cristian Rakovski, the Soviet envoy to France (a form of exile), had read Eastman’s manuscript, the American took it as Trotsky’s approval. In Moscow that May, Trotsky had tried to explain himself and claimed he had had no contact with Eastman for more than a year and a half and had never passed him any secret documents. But Eastman’s book was being cited in the “bourgeois” press and spurring questions among Communists abroad.275 Stalin’s apparatus made a Russian translation, and he wrote a long letter on June 17, 1925, citing many specific passages as “slander” against Lenin and the party, demanding that Trotsky refute them in print. Trotsky was summoned before the politburo the next day and ordered to denounce Eastman’s book. Stalin rejected Trotsky’s first draft response, which was published in France, after being leaked by the Comintern operative and Stalin loyalist Manuilsky, in order to blacken Trotsky with more leaking.

  Stalin personally edited Trotsky’s final text.276 The long note appeared in English in the Sunday Worker (July 19) and then in Russian in the Soviet party’s main theoretical journal. “In certain parts of his short book Eastman says that the Central Committee ‘concealed’ a number of extremely important documents from the party that had been written by Lenin in the last period of his life,” Trotsky’s text stated. “This cannot be called anything other than slander of the Central Committee of our party.” Trotsky’s text further averred that Lenin, contrary to Eastman’s assertions, had not intended these documents for publication, and that they merely offered “advice of an organizational nature,” and even that “Lenin did not leave behind any ‘Testament,’ and the very nature of his relations to the party, like the nature of the party itself, exclude such a ‘Testament.’”277 Trotsky’s text also stated that the Lenin document had not been concealed but “examined by the 13th Party Congress in the most attentive way.”278 Trotsky concluded that Eastman’s “little book could only serve the vilest enemies of Communism and the revolution, and constitutes, in that sense, an objective counterrevolutionary weapon.”279 Trotsky’s supporters, who had been circulating the Testament underground at personal risk, were dumbfounded. “He has made himself despicable,” one commented on what he saw as the lies that Trotsky signed his name to.280 But the politburo had voted on the wording, and Trotsky was subject to party discipline.281

  Krupskaya, as Lenin’s widow, was also summoned to repudiate Eastman, and her remarks were published in the Sunday Worker (August 2, 1925) and in the party theoretical journal as well.282 “All delegates of the congress familiarized themselves with the letters, just as Lenin had wanted,” her text averred. “They are being called a ‘testament’ incorrectly, since Lenin’s Testament in the true sense of the word is much more extensive—it includes his last articles and touches on the foundations of party and soviet work.” She condemned how the “enemies of the Russian Communist party are trying to use the ‘Testament’ to discredit the current leaders of the party, to discredit the party itself.” She also repudiated Eastman’s use of her January 1924 private letter to Trotsky: “This letter in no way should be interpreted as it was interpreted by Max Eastman. One cannot conclude from this letter that Lenin considered Trotsky as his deputy.”283 There is no record of Stalin’s reaction.284 But if he imagined this gift from his enemies had driven a stake through the Testament, he was mistaken. It would never die.

  VOROSHILOV’S ASCENT

  Stalin’s theory of geopolitics presupposed a robust Red Army, but this instrument gave the regime trouble. Even before Frunze’s promotion to commissar, he had headed a military commission, which by September 1925 pushed through a reform that combined the existing (and inadequate) territorial militia system with a regular peacetime army, improved living conditions and supply, and increased the army’s party membership and Communist Youth League support groups.285 Frunze envisioned wholesale replaceme
nt of former tsarist officers with Red commanders (such as himself), and rapid industrialization to transform the military’s material base, which remained painfully below the level of 1916 (during the Brusilov offensive), even as Western military production had advanced. In conditions of the NEP, however, Frunze barely succeeded in retaining dedicated military factories: Red militarism was not merely a dirty word but expensive.286 The intrigues around former tsarist officers, meanwhile, had not subsided, even though their number had been trimmed from the peak of 75,000 (including noncoms) to fewer than 2,000.287 Former tsarist officers dominated military education institutions, including the General Staff Academy, while no more than about 6 percent of the Red Army belonged to the Communist party.288 Even Trotsky, the person most responsible for their mass recruitment, in a 1925 publication divided former tsarist officers into a minority who had consciously chosen to fight the Whites and an “unsteadfast, convictionless and cowardly” majority who had sided with Bolshevism but might yet turn back the other way.289 It is hard to know which threatened the army more: the primitive material base or the paranoid class politics.