Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The published stenogram carried only the bare bones of Sokolnikov’s speech, but the unpublished version contains the details. Of the tendentious characterizations of Zinoviev and Kamenev in official resolutions and the party press, he said, “since when did you start throwing around such accusatory expressions?” Sokolnikov was interrupted repeatedly—“Give us facts!”—but he persisted, stating he could not imagine the politburo without Kamenev and Zinoviev, and demanding the politburo, not the secretariat, run the country. He further stated that Stalin, as general secretary, should not concurrently sit in the politburo. “I have absolutely no feelings of hostility, personal or political, toward Comrade Stalin—absolutely none,” Sokolnikov stated. “I must say this because people are claiming that our relationship is dictated by personal hostility. It is not, and I do not doubt that for the entire party, the work of Comrade Stalin brings the most enormous benefit.” Against accusations that talk of changing the general secretary amounted to a coup, Sokolnikov stated matter-of-factly, “Could it be that at the congress we cannot discuss a question that any provincial party organization can discuss: namely who will be the secretary?” Sokolnikov concluded with a challenge: if “comrade Stalin” wants to enjoy “the kind of trust comrade Lenin had,” then “Win that trust, comrade Stalin!”336

  Stalin’s power—its extent and legitimacy—dominated much of the rest of the congress. Voroshilov stated that “it is clear either nature or fate allows Comrade Stalin to formulate questions more successfully than any other member of the politburo. Comrade Stalin—and I confirm this—is the principal member of the politburo.”337 Zinoviev spoke again, and invoked the Testament. “Without Vladimir Ilich it became clear to everyone that the secretariat of the Central Committee would acquire absolutely decisive significance,” he stated, in the language of the letters he had sent to Stalin from the cave meeting. “Everyone thought, how could we do things . . . so that we had a well-known balance of forces and did not commit big political mistakes. . . . At that time, some kind of personal confrontations ripened—and rather sharp confrontations—with comrade Stalin.”338 This allowed Stalin to quip, “And I did not know that in our party to this day there are cave people!”

  Sycophants leapt to dismiss talk of a Stalin personal dictatorship.339 “Now—about that ‘boundless power’ of the secretariat and the general secretary,” said Sergei Gusev, whom Stalin named to head the central apparatus department overseeing newspapers. “Look what experience says about this. Was there abuse of this power or not? Prove even one fact of abuse of this power. Who put forward such a fact of abuse? We, the members of the Central Control Commission at the meetings of the politburo systematically watch over the work of the politburo secretariat and, in part, the work of the general secretary. Did we see abuse of this ‘boundless power’? No, we did not see such abuses of power.”340 When a delegate from Leningrad complained of the pervasiveness of denunciations, such that “a friend cannot tell his closest friend the thoughts in his soul,” Gusev shot back: “Lenin taught us that every party member should be a Chekist, that is, should observe and denounce. . . . If we suffer from anything, it is not denunciations but non-denunciations.”341

  Momentous policy issues were also broached. Stalin’s report invoked “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalists, a phrase that had been born with the regime itself, but whereas some figures, such as Litvinov, deputy foreign affairs commissar, took it to connote joint efforts toward the prevention of any war—socialism as peace for all—Stalin maintained that because international conflicts were at bottom economic, he expected, indeed hoped, the capitalist powers would clash among themselves. The congress resolution alluded to only “a certain period of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the world of the bourgeoisie and the world of the proletariat.”342 Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was hemorrhaging gold to import machinery and food and support the exchange rate of the chervonets, policies that were unsustainable; Stalin played both sides, echoing Skolonikov’s insistence on “a positive trade balance, restraint in the pace of industrialization and the importance of avoiding inflation,” but accusing the finance commissariat of trying to keep the Soviet Union in economic dependence on the West.343 Stalin’s corrections to Bukharin’s text for the congress stressed a vague coming technical rearmament of agriculture with machines and mysterious “all-encompassing support” among peasants for collectivized agriculture. Stalin’s version was approved at the congress.344 The congress also resolved to create, somehow, a world-class military industry.345

  Stalin’s concluding speech, on December 23, was priceless, asserting that Zinoviev and Kamenev “demand the blood of comrade Bukharin,” but “we shall not give you that blood.” He continued: “We did not agree with Zinoviev and Kamenev because we knew that a policy of cutting off members was fraught with great dangers for the party, that the method of cutting off, the method of bloodletting—and they were asking for blood—is dangerous and contagious. Today one person is cut off, tomorrow another, the next day a third—but what will remain of the party? (Appaluse)”346

  A resolution condemned the Leningrad delegation for “the attempts to undermine the unity of our Leninist party.”347 Congress delegates supported Stalin not only because he had appointed them, ward-boss style, and they could recognize his commanding power, but also because back home they had a common foe—“oppositionists” (i.e., rivals to themselves)—and Stalin proactively helped them solidify their power locally.348 In the elections to a new Central Committee, there were 217 votes against Kamenev, 224 against Zinoviev, 87 against Stalin, and 83 against Bukharin.349 Trotsky was not on the slate. He would never attend another Party Congress. Beforehand, some of his supporters had been advocating a bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Stalin—after all, Zinoviev and Kamenev now admitted that the “Trotskyites” had been right all along—but other Trotsky loyalists urged keeping a distance from either side. Trotsky had met secretly with Zinoviev and Kamenev, but nothing resulted.350 Hearsay accounts have Stalin, just prior to the congress, seeking the assistance of Trotsky’s faction to destroy Zinoviev.351 If true, it was not because Stalin needed Trotsky’s help, but to sow further discord among the oppositionists. At the congress Stalin loyalists (Mikoyan, Yaroslavsky) praised Trotsky against Zinoviev and Kamenev. Trotsky, for his part, said nothing when Zinoviev invoked Lenin’s Testament. Sitting in the congress presidium, he kept silent even when addressed directly. Over the nearly two weeks of sessions, he made a single intervention. Most remarkably, Trotsky failed to react to Kamenev’s bold, courageous denunciation of Stalin’s personal dictatorship. “The explosion was absolutely unexpected by me,” Trotsky would write. “During the congress, I waited in uncertainty, because the whole situation had changed. It appeared absolutely unclear to me.”352

  AND NOW, ONE

  In January 1926, Voroshilov, without having served as a candidate politburo member, became a full member, the only military man under Stalin ever to do so. Molotov and Kalinin were promoted to full membership as well, raising the voting members to nine. Kamenev was demoted to candidate member, joining Dzierzynski and three Stalin protégés (Rudzutaks, Petrovsky, Uglanov). Stalin removed Sokolnikov as a candidate politburo member and finance commissar. Sokolnikov’s wife, Serebryakova, observed that “Stalin did not once and for all break relations with Sokolnikov. They saw each other less often.”353 Sokolnikov’s policies of tight money and accumulation of gold reserves were formally reconfirmed at a politburo meeting, but without him to fight tooth and nail against the industrial lobby, monetary emissions appear to have jumped.354 Kamenev was named commissar of trade over his vehement objections (“I do not know this stuff,” he wrote to the Central Committee), payback for his volcanic speech.355 Zinoviev’s machine in Leningrad presented a bigger challenge, and Stalin sent in an expansive commission led by Molotov and Voroshilov, as well as squads of Communist Youth League activists. Raucous party meetings were held at Leningrad’s universities and big factories. “
Yesterday I was at the Three Angle Factory, a collective of 2,200,” Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s appointee to take over the Leningrad party, wrote to his close friend Orjonikidze on January 16, still using the letterhead of the Azerbaijan party. “There was an incredible fracas, such as I had not seen since the October [1917] days. I did not even imagine that a meeting like that of party members was possible. At times it got to the point of real smashing of faces. I’m telling you, I’m not exaggerating.”356 To ensure passage of the anti-Zinoviev resolutions, Molotov spewed threats: “son-of-a-bitch, saboteur, counterrevolutionary, I’ll turn you into dust, I’ll force you before the Central Control Commission.”357

  Kirov begged Stalin to allow him to return to Baku, but he was indispensable to Stalin in Leningrad.358 During his first year there, Kirov would go out to almost every single Leningrad factory—more than 180 total—admit he was weak in theory, and win people over with his simplicity and directness. “I discovered for the first time that Kirov was a wonderful orator,” one eyewitness wrote, adding that Kirov’s oratory “was not distinguished by particular depth, but it was full of allegory, metaphors, comparisons, folk sayings. I sensed that he spoke sincerely.”359

  Kamenev clung to a compromise from Stalin’s side, telling a March 18, 1926, politburo meeting, “At the congress, when I used the phrase that Stalin cannot unite around his person the Bolshevik general staff and when the congress noisily protested this and gave Stalin a standing ovation, I could have cut off this ovation if I had said that I was only repeating the words of Ilich.” Stalin interjected: “Why did you not say it?” Kamenev: “Because I did not want to employ such methods.”360 And to think this was the Bolshevik who in 1904 had given Stalin a copy of Machiavelli in Russian translation. Kamenev was almost as much a gift to Stalin as Trotsky, and even more than Zinoviev.

  To sow additional discord Stalin went so far as to meet one on one with Trotsky, even as the calumnies continued to rain down on Trotsky in the party press under Stalin’s control.361 Kamenev, in parallel, invited Trotsky to a private meeting in his Kremlin apartment with Zinoviev, their first such gathering in three years, and flattered him: “It is enough for you and Zinoviev to appear on the same platform, and the party will find its true Central Committee.”362 They found common cause mimicking Stalin’s accent and body movements, and wrote nearly apologetic statements to each other. But a Trotsky supporter recalled objecting, “How could we sit at the same table with the bureaucrats who had hunted and slandered us, who had murdered the principles and ideas of the party?”363 Trotsky, for his part, traveling incognito (he shaved his goatee), picked up and left for two months of medical treatment in Berlin.364 Many years later, commenting on the machinations of early 1926, he would quote one of his supporters: “Neither with Stalin nor with Zinoviev; Stalin will cheat, and Zinoviev will run.”365

  Stalin traveled to liberated Leningrad himself, and on April 12 delivered a report to the local party on a recent Central Committee plenum. The journalist Pyotr Boldovkin, known as Chagin, was summoned to Kirov’s apartment, where he found Stalin, too. Chagin handed over the proofs of Stalin’s speech he was working on and made to depart, but Kirov and his wife, Maria Markus, invited him to stay for supper, along with the others. Chagin recalled that Kirov said, “‘It would be hard without Lenin, of course, but we have the party, the Central Committee, the politburo and they will lead the country along the Leninist path.’ Stalin paced the room and said, ‘Yes, this is true—the party, the CC, the politburo. But consider, the people understand little in this. For centuries the people in Russia were under a tsar. The Russian people are tsarist. For many centuries the Russian people, especially the Russian peasants, have been accustomed to one person being at the head. And now there should be one.’”366

  MENACING TURNS

  Three years of clandestine military cooperation with Germany had done little to boost Soviet weapons production, but in yet another push for a breakthrough, Józef Unszlicht, the deputy military commissar for armaments and a German-speaking Pole, led a delegation to Berlin in spring 1926 seeking a vast expansion of joint German-Soviet production on Soviet territory: tanks, heavy artillery, machine guns, precision optics, field telephones, radios.367 But at a grand reception on March 30, 1926, at the Soviet embassy on Unter den Linden, attended by the German chancellor, foreign minister, and army commander in chief, the German government seemed hesitant, according to the Soviet report, wanting “to reduce their role to that of intermediaries between private German companies and Soviet organizations.”368 German private companies, in turn, preferred to sell weapons, not help potential competitors manufacture them. Herbert von Dirksen, a German foreign ministry official, warned his government that Moscow viewed enhanced military cooperation as “the most persuasive evidence of our wish to continue our relationship with them.”369 But even though the German establishment had become less hopeful about the degree of Versailles Peace revisionism the British would allow, the German government still did not want a deal with Moscow that could be perceived as anti-British, while the continuing illiberal nature of the regime in Moscow, despite the NEP, aroused antipathy in Germany.370 Still, the German nightmare was losing the East without winning the West, and a compromise emerged: the German-Soviet Neutrality and Non-Aggression Pact of April 24, 1926, also known as the Treaty of Berlin, which affirmed the earlier Rapallo agreement: the two states pledged neutrality in the event one was subject to an unprovoked attack by a third party. It sounded like something, but amounted to little, essentially a pledge by Germany not to grant transit rights to another power hostile to the USSR.371 As long as Germany entertained hopes of Western rapprochement, the USSR was a means to that end.372

  Stalin had not excluded a deal with Britain, even though he saw it as the bulwark of the global imperialist order, but the global political economy got in the way of resumed trade negotiations. Europe’s collective decision to return to gold at the pre-Great War sterling-gold parity meant a return to the sterling-dollar exchange rate ($4.86), which made British exports expensive. An overvalued currency led to balance-of-payment deficits and an outflow of gold, which tamped down domestic economic activity. Critics saw this as sacrificing industry on the altar of gold, but the obvious solution, devaluation of the pound, was viewed in London’s financial district as tantamount to filing for bankruptcy or inflicting fraud on creditors. Winston Churchill, chancellor of the exchequer, had wondered why the Bank of England governor “shows himself perfectly happy in the spectacle of Britain possessing the finest credit in the world simultaneously with a million and a quarter unemployed,” and claimed he “would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content.”373 (This provides insight into the debates inside the Soviet Union between Sokolnikov, backed by Stalin, and the industrial lobby of Pyatakov.) The gold standard and fiscal austerity hit British mining especially hard. The Great War had hindered exports and allowed other countries to develop their domestic coal industries, while Germany was exporting “free” coal to pay its Versailles Treaty obligations, leading to a drop in world prices at a time when British productivity was declining at overworked seams. A major structural adjustment to remove excess capacity was unavoidable, but British miners and their families constituted perhaps 10 percent of Britain’s population, and their pay had already fallen. Some mine owners were ready to compromise, others were eager to abolish the national bargaining framework hammered out in the Great War and impose terms; the Conservative Tory government ended up colluding with the more intransigent owners and, on May 1, 1926, around 1 million miners were locked out. Dealt an unwinnable hand, British miners decided to fight rather than settle.374 In solidarity, more than a million and a half other British workers launched the first (and only) general strike in British history on May 3, which disrupted the entire economy, including food production and distribution.375 On May 4, the politburo resolved to support the British workers financially, with a notice published in the press.376 Zinoviev, in Pravda, enthu
sed about “great events” in Britain.377 But the general strike fizzled, and though the miners’ strike would drag on for months, it would end with the wage cuts in place. The Soviet Union had gone out on a limb and in the bargain risked dashing hopes for resuming talks toward an improved bilateral trade deal.

  Events in Poland were the most directly menacing. Its parliamentary system saw a parade of no less than fourteen different cabinets up to May 1926, when the zloty, the Polish currency, collapsed.378 The Soviet-German Treaty of Berlin, despite its modesty, raised the nightmare scenario in Warsaw of a return to partitioning at the hands of powerful neighbors. With Dzierzynski away, finishing up a holiday in early May and about to travel to Ukraine for a month—he instructed Yagoda in Moscow to keep an eye on the lowly emigre Alexander Guchkov, the former war minister in the Provisional Government—the retired Polish marshal Józef Piłsudski, a private citizen, left his home on the morning of May 12, rendezvoused with troops loyal to him, and marched on nearby Warsaw.379 The marshal expected his show of force and peacock-feather prestige to compel the president to dismiss the week-old center right government; instead, the president arrived to confront Piłsudski on the bridge into Warsaw. The intended bloodless coup degenerated into skirmishes. Piłsudski, unnerved, lucked out: on May 13, the commander of government forces, rather than press his tactical victories to decisive conclusion, waited for reinforcements, a blunder made fatal when Piłsudski’s former associates in the Socialist Party—not the army he relied upon—conspired with railroad workers to stymie troops loyal to the right-wing government from arriving while shepherding through reinforcements loyal to Piłsudski. On May 14, the president and prime minister stepped down. Piłsudski had been dismissive of the idea of enacting a coup. “If I were to break the law, I would be opening the door to all sorts of adventurers to make coups and putsches,” he had told a journalist some years back, in remarks that were published on May 27.380 Now he was master of Poland again. The Assembly elected him president, but he declined, instead reigning as commander in chief and war minister. Political parties, trade unions, and the press endured as Poland’s semidemocracy became a soft dictatorship.