Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Suddenly, Stalin resigned again. On December 27, he wrote to Rykov, “I ask you to release me from the post of Central Committee general secretary. I affirm that I can no longer work at this post, that I am in no condition to work any longer at this post.”119 Precisely what prompted this latest fit of self-pity remains unclear. Just four days earlier, Stalin had written to Molotov, who was on holiday down south, “You don’t have to hurry back—you could easily remain another week (or even more). . . . Things are going pretty well for us here.”120 Stalin’s moods were becoming almost as difficult to parse as the intentions of the Soviet Union’s external enemies.

  STATE OF SIEGE

  Soviet grand strategy, absent a real military or a single alliance, amounted to a wing and a prayer (intracapitalist war). With the external situation apparently worsening, Voroshilov, in early January 1927, stated at a Moscow province party conference, in a speech carried by Pravda, “We must not forget that we stand on the brink of war, and that this war will be far from fun and games.”121 Rykov and Bukharin made similar speeches around this time, conveying that war could come within days, or by spring, or autumn.122 Such alarms sprang not from specific intelligence but deepening anxieties, combined with a tendency to group disparate events and attribute conspiratorial causes to them.123 “It becomes clearer every day,” a British diplomat in Moscow observed in early 1927, “that the panic that now exists, which is audible in every utterance of public men, and legible in every press leader, is not ‘faked,’ . . . but indeed represents the feelings and emotions of the Communist party and Soviet government.”124

  Not everything talked about in the Soviet Union related to capitalist encirclement. In mid-January 1927 through late March, Sergei Prokofyev returned from Parisian exile for an exhausting concert tour in Moscow, Leningrad, and his native Ukraine (Kharkov, Kiev, Odessa). He had left in 1918, married a Spanish singer, and become internationally acclaimed, though in Europe he never dazzled quite like Stravinsky. (Stravinsky thought Prokofyev Russia’s greatest composer, after himself.) Back in his homeland—Prokofyev had kept his Soviet passport—he heard a twenty-year-old Dmitry Shostokovich play his own First Piano Sonata at a young composers’ evening. The music scene in the USSR proved lively, intense, and Prokofyev’s opera Love for Three Oranges thrilled Soviet audiences. At the same time, his phone was tapped; he failed to obtain the release of an arrested cousin (a childhood playmate); and became worn down by rehearsals, performances, admirers, impresarios, and swindlers (“If that’s how things are,” he told a clothes cleaner, “perhaps you can tell me why the whole of Moscow isn’t ironing trousers for a living?”). Isaak Rabinovich, a stage designer, told Prokofyev that “Moscow looks absolutely disgraceful,” and, given how long full reconstruction would take, divulged a personal plan to paint “one street entirely in blue, another one that crosses it in two colors.” On the way out to Poland, even the Soviet customs official recognized Prokofyev, asking, “What is in the trunk, oranges?”125

  Stalin did not receive Prokofyev. Indeed, no musicians, actors, directors, dancers, writers, or painters are listed in the logbooks for his office in 1927. Certainly he had a strong interest in the arts, especially the music world, but only later would he acquire the authority to summon artists at will. For now he saw them when he went out to their performances. Stalin loved attending live theater, where an astonishing run of plays followed one after the other: The Forest and The Mandate by Alexander Ostrovsky and Nikolai Erdman, respectively, which Vesvolod Meyerhold produced; and Days of the Turbins by Mikhail Bulgakov, Stalin’s favorite playwright. Stalin also occasionally went to the famed cinema on the roof pavilion of the Nirnzee House, then the tallest building in Moscow, located at Bolshoi Gnezdnikov Lane, 10, up Tverskaya Street from the Kremlin.126 (Also seen there: Bulgakov and other luminaries in Moscow’s beau monde.) During Prokofyev’s tour, Stalin did find time to meet Konstantin Gerulaitis-Stepuro, an acquaintance from the prerevolutionary exile days of Turukhansk who did not belong to the party but came to Old Square during office hours on a “personal matter.” He was unemployed, a life trajectory that put Stalin’s ascent from the same frozen Siberian swamps into stark perspective.127

  Diverting activity was a luxury, however. Stalin knew that Britain was encouraging Germany to take control over Danzig and the Polish Corridor, compensating Poland with part of (or even all) of Lithuania.128 Germany was his great frustration. The German military brass, on the very day that the Manchester Guardian had exposed clandestine German-Soviet cooperation, gave final approval to sign an agreement in Moscow to open a secret joint tank school in Kazan. For Moscow, however, this fell far below hopes. Unszlicht, in a pessimistic overview, outlined for Stalin all dimensions of the cooperation—the aviation school (Lipetsk), the Tomko (a code name) chemical warfare testing facility (Samara), the Dreise machine guns, the Bersol company’s chemical devices, the Junkers airplane concession (Fili), and the tank school (Kazan)—but concluded that “our attempts to attract German investments in our military industry through RWM have failed.” Unszlicht recommended “continuing our joint work in the tank school and aviation school and in chemical warfare tests.”129 Others in the Soviet establishment clung to the exchanges. “Every comrade, without exception, who has come here for maneuvers or to attend the academies has found the display of the technological innovations of the Germany army very useful,” Krestinsky from Berlin argued to Litvinov on January 18, 1927. “What we are offering to the Germans does not cost us anything, because they pay for everything, while there is no problem finding in the depths of the USSR secret locations for their schools and other smaller military establishments.”130 The goal of strengthening the Red Army’s material base, however, remained elusive.131

  Soviet counterintelligence, meanwhile, intercepted a Japanese document titled “General Strategic Measures Against Russia,” which was translated into Russian on February 7. It called for sharpening “the racial, ideological and class struggle in the Soviet Union and especially the internal tensions in the Communist party,” and for unifying all Asian nations on Soviet territory against European Russia. As targets it listed non-Russian soldiers in the army, from whom secret information could be obtained about Soviet military plans and operations in the Far East. It also suggested inciting the states on the Soviet Union’s western and southern border to preempt the Soviets’ ability to shift troops eastward, and sabotaging the USSR’s transport and infrastructure, and telegraph and telephone connections.132

  Stalin was on edge. Maxim Litvinov had delivered remarks at a meeting of the foreign affairs commissariat collegium in mid-January 1927 that were roundly critical of Soviet international posture, and an informant secretly wrote to Stalin with details. Litvinov was said to have argued that “English policy toward us is hostile because we ourselves conduct a hostile policy toward them,” and that “England is a great power and in England’s foreign policy we play a relatively insignificant role.” Litvinov’s greatest heresy, as reported, consisted in asserting that “our interests in Europe do not conflict with English interests and it is a great mistake to see the ‘hand of England’ everywhere.” His case in point: the Piłsudski coup in Poland. This contravened Stalin’s entire worldview. Even in Asia, noted the informant, Litvinov deemed bilateral British-Soviet interests compatible, and dismissed Soviet policy toward Britain as self-defeating noise making and the Soviet military intelligence and foreign intelligence reports he saw as up to 99 percent Soviet disinformation or agents’ fantasy. “Comrade Litvinov kept emphasizing that he was stating his personal opinion, which is in contradiction to our official policy,” noted the informant, adding that the deputy foreign affairs commissar even warned that the USSR was blundering toward war.133 At a Central Committee plenum of February 12, 1927, Voroshilov presented on Soviet military preparedness; the politburo criticized his draft theses: “too little said on adaptation of all industry and the economy in general to the needs of war.”134 Litvinov delivered an assess
ment of the international situation. Stalin, who of course already knew what Litvinov had been saying, penciled a note to Molotov during the plenum about the advisability of making a corrective statement. Molotov responded that some ironic commentary might be in order, but advised to just let the matter pass. Rykov wrote that “Stalin should make, possibly, a cautious statement.”

  Litvinov, however, pressed the case, addressing a letter on February 15, 1927, to Stalin, with copies to all politburo members, in which the deputy foreign affairs commissar boldly asserted that the foreign affairs commissariat collegium agreed with his analysis “at least 95 percent, maybe 100, including Chicherin.” Litvinov acknowledged there was no threat of war from the East, only a certain vulnerability of the Soviet eastern rear in the event of war in the West, and that the Western threat emanated from Piłsudski, Poland’s ally Romania, and all the limitrophe states except Lithuania (Poland’s enemy). But he emphasized that Poland was an independent actor, not a plaything in the hands of the West, yet avowed that it might seek to take advantage of Soviet-Western hostilities. Therefore, Soviet policy should strive not just to prevent a Polish-Baltic alliance but also to avoid creating general conditions for war, such as an artificial British-Soviet conflict, which would also cost the USSR economically. Further, because France had great influence over Poland, Litvinov urged redoubling efforts to secure an agreement with Paris via concessions in the matter of repudiated imperial Russian debts. On additional pages that are not part of the original letter (at least as assembled in the archival file), Litvinov made further comments on Germany, underscoring the likelihood and adverse consequences of Germany’s moving away from its expedient flirtations with the USSR more closely toward the West. He copied his letter to some but not all members of the foreign affairs collegium (Boris Stomonyakov, Teodor Rotstein, Rakovski, Krestinsky). “I urge the politburo to discuss the above and to point out to the foreign affairs commissariat which conclusions are incorrect,” Litvinov brazenly concluded—as if he had himself just conducted an across-the-board policy review.

  Evidently white hot with fury, Stalin drafted a multipage memorandum for the politburo, dated February 19 and finalized four days later, entirely in red pencil. He began by pointing out that, contrary to Litvinov, he (Stalin) had refuted him at the plenum not in his own name but on behalf of the entire politburo, and that Litvinov’s assertion of 100 percent support in the foreign affairs collegium was contradicted by the remarks at the plenum by Lev Karakhan (to whom Litvinov had not sent his letter). On substance, Stalin reiterated that the number one enemy was the “English financial bourgeoisie and the conservative government,” which “was conducting a policy of encircling the USSR from the East (China, Afghanistan, Persia, Turkey) and from the West (the limitrophe states and so forth).” He mocked Litvinov’s assertion “that if relations deteriorate it is primarily the fault of our party press and our party orators, as if it had not been for these sins (extremism of the press and the orators) we would have a pact with England.” Britain vigorously worked against the USSR’s revolutionary forward policy in China, which, Stalin insisted, was essential for Soviet security and for world liberation. Stalin further argued that Litvinov misunderstood Soviet policy toward Germany, “lumping into one pile all bourgeois states and not differentiating between Germany and other ‘great powers.’” Stalin himself seemed to do just that, noting that the Central Committee was abundantly clear that Soviet economic development would spark inevitable conflict with the capitalist states. “We cannot harbor illusions about the possibility of establishing ‘good’ and ‘friendly’ relations with ‘all’ bourgeois states,” he wrote. “At some point serious conflict will arise with those bourgeois states that are known to be the most hostile toward us, and this inevitability cannot be obviated either by a moderate tone in the press or by the sagacious experience of diplomats.” A socialist state, Stalin concluded, “must conduct a socialist foreign policy,” which meant no shared interests “with the imperialist policies of so-called great powers,” only “exploiting the contradictions among the imperialists.”

  Unsurprisingly, the politburo, on February 24, approved its leader’s statement on Soviet foreign policy’s assumptions and aims, and resolved to compel the foreign affairs commissariat to follow Central Committee’s directives as well as to desist from pursuing the debate questioning the British as “the main enemy.” As if on cue, that same day the British foreign minister passed to Moscow a sharply worded note, replete with excerpts from Soviet leaders’ speeches, demanding the USSR immediately cease anti-British propaganda and military support for revolution abroad. Mirror-image “propaganda” comments on the Soviet Union could have been assembled from the speeches of British political figures, yet, as Litvinov warned, relations were on a knife’s edge. Still, the foreign affairs commissariat, following the thrashing by Stalin, responded to London with threats.135

  Stalin, apparently unintentionally, was driving the USSR into a state of siege. As it happened, the day after the British note, workers at several Leningrad factories went on strike, and the disaffected staged a demonstration on the city’s Vasilyev Island demanding freedom of speech and the press, and free elections to factory committees and soviets. Instead of seeing this as an expression of worker aspirations, the regime saw proletarians offering themselves up as accomplices to a foreign intervention by the international bourgeoisie.136 Amid a swirl of defeatist talk in society reported by the OGPU, Stalin began to try to tamp down the rumormongering. “War will not happen, neither in spring nor fall of this year,” he stated to the workers of the Moscow railroad shops, in words carried in Pravda (March 3, 1927). “There will be no war this year because our enemies are not ready for war, because our enemies fear the results of war more than anyone else, because the workers in the West do not want to fight against the USSR, and fighting without the workers is impossible, and finally because we are conducting a firm and unwavering policy of peace, and this hinders war with our country.”137 But reports he was getting continued to raise questions about the Soviet homefront. “In the event of external complications,” a top official of the central consumer cooperative wrote to Stalin and the politburo that spring, “we do not have a secure peasant rear.” His main point was that the current level of exports of agricultural products and raw materials—“less than half the prewar level”—could not pay for the necessary industrialization.138

  IMPLOSION

  Lenin had taught that capitalism would be weakened, perhaps fatally, if it could be cut off from its colonial and semicolonial territories, from which it extracted cheap labor, raw materials, and markets. He also deemed the colonial peoples a “strategic reserve” for the proletarian revolution in the advanced countries of Europe.139 Therefore, Soviet strategy would not rely solely or even primarily on Communists in Asia, but befriend the class enemy, bourgeois national parties, and restrain foreign Communists from forming soviets. When the Indian Communist Roy rebuked Lenin and demanded the formation of soviets in the colonial world, too, Lenin continued to insist that on the whole, workers in colonial settings were too few and too weak to seize power, but he conceded that soviets would be appropriate in some cases. Thus, both the prevention of soviets and their formation were fully Leninist.

  Stalin’s thinking on Asia evolved within the Leninist mold. He believed that Communist parties and workers in colonial settings should support consolidation of independent “revolutionary-democratic national” states against “imperialist forces,” a struggle analogous not to the Bolshevik revolution but to Russian events of 1905 and February 1917. “In October 1917 the international conditions were extraordinarily favorable for the Russian revolution,” he told the Indonesian Communists in 1926. “Such conditions do not exist now, for there is no imperialist war, there is no split between the imperialists. . . . Therefore, you must begin with revolutionary-democratic demands.”140 But Stalin also advised that the proposed colonial-world alliance with the bourgeoisie had to be a “re
volutionary bloc,” a joining of “the Communist party and the party of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.” His model was China.

  China in the 1920s was still rent by the chaos that ensued after the downfall of the emperor and creation of a republic in 1911. In Peking, the capital, a quasi-government was internationally recognized. But it was really just a local warlord, one of many holding regional power around the country. In the south, a rival capital in Canton (Guangzhou) had been established by the Nationalists or Guomindang, a movement that sought to appeal to the lower orders, but not on the basis of class; rather, the Guomindang was an umbrella supraclass Nationalist movement, which held significant appeal but was diffuse. At the same time, large numbers of Soviet advisers in the country helped transform a loose collection of militant intellectuals into the Chinese Communist party, which became linked to an urban labor movement at cotton mills, docks, power plants, railways and tramways, printing, and precision machine building that spread a political vocabulary and worldview of class alongside nationalism.141 When the Chinese Communists held their founding congress in July 1921 at a school for girls in the French concession of Shanghai, present were two Comintern officials, one special envoy of a leading Chinese Communist who could not attend, and twelve delegates, representing fifty-three party members in total.142 (Mao Zedong attended as a delegate from Hunan province in the interior.) By mid-1926, the Chinese Communist party had grown to perhaps 20,000. A mere 120 full-time apparatchiks were on the rolls as of July 1926, mostly in Shanghai, Canton, and Hunan.143 Still, within one year of July 1926 the party would triple in size to nearly 60,000.144 But Soviet advisers also helped transform the loose personal webs of the Guomindang into a similarly Leninist-style hierarchical, militarized party. The Guomindang had perhaps 5,000 more members than the Communists, and they were better educated: one fifth had been to a university. But membership in the Guomindang often amounted to a mere status marker: in answer to a questionnaire about their party-related activities, more than one third answered “nothing.” Another 50 percent claimed to have engaged in some propaganda work. Only 6 percent had participated in mass actions.145 The Communists were a party of activists. That said, neither party was a genuine mass party: China had nearly 500 million people.