What Stalin saw in the United States is not hard to grasp: America’s share of global production would soon reach a breathtaking one third. Consider Henry Ford’s Model T, whose supply could not keep pace with demand. When Ford had opened a new plant in Highland Park, he had taken advantage of mechanized conveyors to send the automobile frame along a line, along which each worker was assigned one simplified, repetitious assembly task to perform in a system known as mass production. It involved standardization of the core aspects of products and reorganized flow among shops, and allowed replacement of manual labor by machinery. At Ford’s River Rouge factory near Detroit, a finished car rolled off the assembly line every ten seconds, and the effects were felt throughout the economy and thousands of communities. River Rouge alone employed 68,000, making it the largest factory in the world, but more than that, its cars required millions of tons of steel alloys, as well as vast amounts of glass, rubber, textiles, and petroleum. Cars also needed roads and service stations. Altogether, nearly four million jobs were connected directly or indirectly to the automobile, in a labor force of 45 million workers. U.S. production and business organization mesmerized the world.79 And it was only half the story. Already in 1925, one of every six Americans nationally had a car, and one of every two in Los Angeles, a result of the fact that standardization enabled a drop in the price of the Model T to $290, from $850. Ford had further expanded the market for his cars by paying his own workers $5 per day, approximately twice the country’s average manufacturing wage. “The necessary, precedent condition of mass production,” Ford wrote, “is a capacity, latent or developed, of mass consumption, the ability to absorb large production. The two go together, and in the latter may be traced the reasons for the former.”80 In the 1920s, average household income in the United States rose by 25 percent. Eleven million families owned their own homes by the middle of the decade. Stalin understood little of the transcendent might of this consumer republic. And the benefits for the USSR of American industrial modernity remained elusive.
GRAVE DIGGER OF THE REVOLUTION
With Stalin in Moscow that August 1926, people from every imaginable sphere queued on Old Square: local party bosses, party Central Control Commission members, the head of the central consumer cooperative, functionaries from the labor and trade commissariats, the Soviet envoy to Persia, an editor from Bolshevik, the acting head of the Communist Youth International, the deputy war commissar, even Filipp Ksenofontov, the original author of Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism.”81 And on and on it went, until in late August, through late September, Stalin returned to his beloved Sochi. There he expressed dismay about the delays in receiving newspaper reports from Britain on the miners’ strike. In Moscow, a British delegation was about to arrive, and on August 27, Stalin telegrammed that the striking British miners be supplied a substantial sum, as much as 3 million rubles.82 Molotov informed Stalin on September 5 that the USSR had dispatched 3 million rubles, which came out of the wages of Soviet workers at state trusts, as a purported act of solidarity, and fed the anti-Communist uproar in Britain.83 But Stalin would not be intimidated by “finance capital.”
Trotsky at this time jotted down some reflections. He wrote that “the slogan of party unity, in the hands of the ruling faction, increasingly becomes an instrument of ideological terror,” suppressing internal criticism. More than that, he detected an explicit strategy of “complete destruction of that nucleus which until recently was known as the Leninist old guard, and its replacement by the one-man leadership of Stalin relying on his group of comrades who always agree with him.” Trotsky foresaw that “one-man rule in the party, which Stalin and his more narrow group call ‘party unity,’ demands not just the destruction and removal of the current United opposition, but the gradual removal from the leadership of the more authoritative and influential representatives of the current ruling faction. It is utterly clear that Tomsky, Rykov, Bukharin—by their past, by their authority, and so on—cannot and are incapable of playing the role, under Stalin, played by Uglanov, Kaganovich, Petrovsky, and others.” Trotsky predicted a coming phase in which Kaganovich and the rest would go after Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky. He even predicted that “opportunistic elements in the party would open fire on Stalin, as too infected by ‘left’ prejudices and hindering of their quicker, more open ascent.”84 Remarkably, Trotsky proved able, almost uniquely, to discern the direction of the political dynamic, but more remarkably, he failed to understand Stalin as the autonomous driver of a personal dictatorship, seeing him as a mere instrument for larger social forces in a bureaucratic aggrandizement.
Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had belatedly formed what they called the United opposition, and by early October 1926 were gathering once more at Kamenev’s Kremlin apartment, to discuss strategy, now with Zinoviev expelled from the politburo. Trotsky continued to question Zinoviev about his previously vicious attacks on “Trotskyism,” which had generated enduring bad blood.85 But the threesome, looking at the correlation of forces, decided to offer Stalin a truce, promising to desist from oppositional activity.86 He dictated the terms: they were to affirm that all Central Committee decisions were binding, publicly repudiate all factional activity, and disavow their supporters among foreign Communists (Ruth Fischer, Arkadi Maslow, Boris Souvarine). Pravda published their joint statement, signed also by Sokolnikov and Pyatakov, on October 17.87 The very next day, however, Max Eastman happened to publish the full Lenin Testament in the New York Times, a bombshell that, the USSR excepted, was reprinted in newspapers worldwide.88 On October 19, Stalin resigned yet again, this time in writing. “A year and a half’s joint work in the politburo with comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev after the withdrawal, and then the death, of Lenin have made utterly clear to me the impossibility of honest and sincere joint political work with these comrades in the confines of one narrow collegium,” he wrote in a note to the upcoming Central Committee plenum. “In view of that I ask you to consider me to have left the politburo.” He added that because a non-politburo member could not head the secretariat and orgburo, he should be considered to have left those posts as well. He asked for a two-month holiday, after which he wanted a posting to godforsaken Turukhansk, Siberia, where he had been stuck in prerevolutionary exile, or remote Yakutia, or maybe abroad.89
Stalin gave a pretty good impression of feeling sorry for himself. From his point of view, the New York Times Testament publication reinforced his jaundiced view of the oppositionists as traitorous enemies. Of course, neither his politburo majority—including those Trotsky had privately predicted would soon be eclipsed—nor his Central Committee majority accepted his written request to resign. On the contrary, on October 22 Pravda published Stalin’s “theses” denouncing the opposition, just in time for the 15th party conference.90 The next day he had the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission meeting to finalize the party conference’s agenda, insert a “special report” on the opposition to be delivered by himself: the truce, not a week old, was dead.91
The 15th party conference opened on October 26 (it lasted until November 3) and was attended by 194 voting delegates, plus 640 non-voting, a substantial audience. It was now that Trotsky, belatedly, denounced Stalin’s “socialism in one country” as a “betrayal” of the world revolution and guarantee of capitalist restoration in Russia.92 Zinoviev, too, erupted on this theme. “The theory of final victory in one country is wrong,” he stated. “We will win final victory because revolution in other countries is inevitable.”93 (Of course, Stalin had said final victory was impossible in one country.) Krupskaya kept silent, evidently abandoning the opposition cause. On November 1, Stalin delivered his report, rehearsing the entire history of the opposition from his viewpoint, and mocking the supposed musicality of Trotsky’s writings. “Leninism as a ‘muscular feeling in physical labor,’” Stalin quoted, dripping with sarcasm. “New, original, profound, no? Did you understand any of it? (Laughter.) All that is very beautiful, musical an
d, if you want, even grand. It is only missing a small thing: the simple and human touch of Leninism.”94
Trotsky rose, turned to the Georgian, pointed his finger and exclaimed, “The first secretary poses his candidacy to the post of grave digger of the revolution!” Stalin flushed with anger and fled the room, slamming the door. The session broke up in uproar.
At Trotsky’s apartment in the Cavalry Building, his supporters, arriving before him, expressed apprehension at his outburst. Pyatakov: “Why, oh why, did Lev Davidovich say that? Stalin will never forgive him unto the third and fourth generation!”95 Trotsky had gotten under Stalin’s skin, but whatever satisfaction he might have savored was short-lived; the next day, when the party conference resumed, Stalin had the votes to have Trotsky expelled from the politburo. Kamenev was removed as a candidate member of the politburo, and Stalin put Zinoviev’s sacking as Comintern chief on the agenda for the next meeting of that body’s executive. Zinoviev and Kamenev turned on Trotsky for having raised Stalin’s ire. They all tried to defend themselves against the dictator’s calumnies, but they were relentlessly interrupted. Yuri Larin pointed to what he called “one of the most dramatic episodes of our revolution, . . . the revolution is outgrowing some of its leaders.”96 Bukharin’s speech was especially vicious, even by his standards, sarcastically quoting Trotsky’s “grave digger of the revolution” phrase to turn the tables.97 Stalin was so delighted with Bukharin’s frothing remarks that he interjected, “Well done, Bukharin. Well done, well done. He does not argue with them, he slashes!”98
Ah, the sweet satisfaction of violent recriminations. Stalin had the conference’s final word, on November 3, and ridiculed Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky at length, eliciting peals of laughter.99 In the meantime, a new electoral law of November 1926 deprived still more kulaks and private traders of the right to vote, in a sharpening tilt against the NEP, and several speakers at the party conference warned of a war on the horizon.
PARSING THE STRATEGIC SITUATION
Nothing whatsoever guaranteed Soviet security and, notwithstanding the regime’s pugnacious rhetoric and often aggressive actions, it felt vulnerable. Soviet theories behind a likely casus belli varied, from Moscow’s refusals to pay back tsarist-era loans or supply sufficient raw materials to a burning Western desire to continue the breakup of Russia, separating Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Because a supply blockade could choke the Soviet Union, rumors circulated that the imperialists would not even need to launch an attack, but merely blackmail the regime into concessions.100 A real war, though, could not be excluded and the OGPU reported it could take the form of an allied Polish-Romanian aggression, provoked into attack and supported by Britain and France, which would likely draw in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, too—the full “limitrophe.”101 Chicherin repeatedly warned the Baltic states that willingly serving as pawns of the Western powers in an anti-Soviet coalition would one day result in loss of their independence. He warned Poland similarly.102 The OGPU was also convinced hostile foreign powers planned to rally disaffected elements inside Soviet territory—after all, the Entente had used proxies before (the Whites during Russia’s civil war).
It was no secret that even without British prodding, the dictatorship in Warsaw coveted those parts of historic Ukraine and Belorussia it did not yet control.103 Stalin read secret report after secret report about Polish infiltration of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belorussia and preparations for sabotage operations on Soviet territory. He had instituted a much-publicized Polish national region inside Belorussia to blunt anti-Soviet sentiments among the Soviet Union’s ethnic Poles, but whether that would help at all remained uncertain.104 To test Piłsudski, in August 1926, the Soviets revived the talks started earlier in the year for a non-aggression pact, but negotiations went nowhere. Poland had planned parallel balancing agreements with Moscow and Berlin, but did not even launch talks with Germany. Rumors were rife of a Polish invasion of Lithuania, where a leftist government had emptied the prisons of political prisoners, including Communists, and on September 28, 1926, signed a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union, adding to the outcries of “Bolshevism.” Never mind that the previous rightist Lithuania Christian Democrat government had launched the negotiations with Moscow. The Soviet-Lithuanian pact had an anti-Polish edge to it.105 Over on the USSR’s eastern flank, Soviet military intelligence continued to beat the drums about a likely renewed military intervention by Japan. Japan had quit their civil war‒era military occupation of Soviet territory later than any of the other interventionist powers. It had annexed Korea and eyed Manchuria and even Mongolia, the Soviet satellite, as its sphere of influence. In August 1926, Tokyo refused Soviet offers of a neutrality pact. The chief of the Siberian OGPU, Henriks Štubis (b. 1894), an ethnic Latvian who used the name Leonid Zakovsky, reported to Mezynski that “Russian White-Guardist circles in China have become significantly enlivened,” which, to him, testified not to the emigres’ dynamics but to Japan’s plans for a northern aggression. Zakovsky recommended preparing partisan warfare units on the Soviet side of the border to counter a Japanese military occupation.106
Britain, however, was the greater preoccupation, as always. The British military attache was throwing banquets at its Moscow embassy for the Red Army brass, as the OGPU reported to Stalin, using hospitality to take advantage of “our chattiness, loose their tongues . . . our comrades often get drunk at these banquets.” Inebriated Soviet officials talked of secret assignments carried out in China, which incited the already hypersuspicious British like the proverbial red flag before a bull.107 In London, the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest catalogued Bolshevik intrigues in Turkey, Afghanistan, China, Persia, and the jewel in the crown, India.108 On December 3, 1926, the Manchester Guardian, a British newspaper, making use of leaked information, exposed the clandestine German-Soviet military cooperation in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Two days later, the German Social Democrat newspaper republished the report.109 An uproar ensued in the Reichstag, where Social Democrats denounced the illegal activities of the German army. Chicherin happened to be in Berlin on medical leave and he and Ambassador Krestinsky called on German Chancellor Wilhelm Marx on December 6 to smooth matters over. Pravda belatedly acknowledged the scandal on December 16, blaming the leak on “the German Social Democratic lackeys of the Entente.” The Soviet newspaper confirmed that the Germans, on the basis of concessions (leases), had helped build facilities on Soviet territory for the production of airplanes, poison gas, and ammunition, but reasserted a Soviet right to defense.110 Britain internally contemplated severing diplomatic relations, which the Foreign Office opposed for now on pragmatic grounds: such an action would fail to alter Soviet behavior and encourage those in Berlin who wanted an “eastern orientation.” Still, British-Soviet relations were on a knife’s edge. “The Soviet to all intents and purposes—short of direct armed conflict—is at war with the British empire,” one British Foreign Office official wrote on December 10, 1926. “Whether by interference in the strikes at home or by fomenting the anti-British forces in China, in fact, by her action all the world over, from Riga to Java, the Soviet power has as its main objective the destruction of British Power.”111
A week later the military in Lithuania overthrew the democratically elected government—a left coalition of Social Democrats, Peasant Popular Union, and small parties of ethnic minority Germans, Poles, and Jews. The putschists installed a rightist dictatorship of Antanas Smetona, whose Lithuanian National Union had a membership of 2,000 countrywide and a parliamentary representation of three seats. The Christian Democrats, in the elections that had brought the leftist coalition to power, had failed for the first time to obtain a majority and supported the putsch. Martial law was declared and hundreds of Lithuanian Communists swept up in arrests. Lithuanian-Polish enmity now had to compete with anti-Communist solidarity.
When the head of Soviet military intelligence, Jan Berzin, summarized the international
position of the USSR as of the end of 1926, he acknowledged an increase in tensions but deemed an anti-Soviet “military action in 1927 unlikely.”112 But beyond cultivating friendly relations with Turkey, Persia, and China, Berzin’s recommendations were almost wholly reactive: hindering Polish-German settlement of Danzig and Upper Silesia, subverting a Polish-Baltic alliance, keeping Germany from passing over to the West, aggravating the tensions between Britain-France and Germany and between Britain and France themselves, as well as between the United States and Japan.113 Communist boilerplate about the “fragility” of capitalist stabilization, about the gathering revolutionary movement in Europe and the colonial world, was face to face with hard reality. Soviet military expenditures in fiscal 1926–27 reached a mere 41 percent of the 1913 level.114 The Red Army essentially had no tanks, other than the ancient Western-made ones it had captured from the Whites during the civil war.115 Red Army soldiers rode bicycles in the holiday parades across Red Square and during war games. One third of the conscripts did not even have uniforms.116 Neither did the country even have a comprehensive war plan covering the various contingencies in 1926, according to Voroshilov.117 On December 26, 1926, Deputy Defense Commissar Mikhail Tukhachevsky, as part of the work toward producing a war plan, underscored that in the event of hostilities, “Our miserly combat resources for mobilization would barely last through the first stage of combat.” Tukhachevsky was jockeying to be named head of the state planning commission’s defense sector and given to dramatization. Still, he was correct. “Our situation would only deteriorate, particularly in the event of a blockade,” he continued. “Neither the Red Army nor the country is ready for war.”118
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