Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The day after Stalin began his holiday, a new law on counterrevolutionary crimes was incorporated into the RSFSR criminal code. Counterrevolutionary offenses were already sweepingly and vaguely defined but now they were expanded. Merely trying to “weaken,” not overthrow, the Soviet system became counterrevolution; “terrorist acts” against regime personnel or representatives of the workers’ movement were placed on a par with an armed uprising, incurring the death penalty; and the penalty for failure to report foreknowledge of a counterrevolutionary crime was raised from one to ten years.191 This was Stalin’s initiative, spurred by exposure of the OGPU double game to entrap emigres, known as the Trust, and a resulting attempt on June 3 by double agents who were forced by emigres to set off a bomb in Moscow at a OGPU dormitory (at Lesser Lubyanka, 3/6), which failed.192 But on June 7, a compartmentalized emigre terrorist outfit that was unknown to the OGPU did manage to detonate a bomb in Leningrad’s central party club at Moika Canal, 59, wounding at least twenty-six people; one died of the wounds. The three terrorists involved managed to get back to Finland.193 An even more spectacular terrorist act occurred that very same day on the platform of the Warsaw train station: a journalist for a Belorussian-language newspaper in independent Lithuania, Boris Koverda, shot the Soviet envoy to Poland, Pyotr Voikov. Émigre monarchists had had their eye on Voikov because he had been the chairman of the Ural soviet that had murdered the Romanovs.194 But how the nineteen-year-old son of an anti-Communist emigre evaded the plethora of uniformed and plainclothes police at the station remains mysterious; indeed, how Koverda knew Voikov would be at the station that morning remains mysterious as well.195 (Voikov was there to see off the Soviet diplomatic personnel passing through on their way to Moscow after their eviction from London.) The thirty-nine-year-old Voikov died an hour later in a Polish military hospital.

  For Stalin, the suspicious assassination on Polish territory followed hard upon the British raid in London, the British-initiated break in relations, and the blowup in China, where Soviet policy was geared to denying a foothold to the imperialists. “I feel the hand of England,” he wrote on the back of a ciphered telegram from Molotov on June 8 regarding Voikov’s murder. “They want to provoke (us into) a conflict with Poland. They want to repeat Sarajevo.” Stalin recommended staging one or two trials of English spies, and in the meantime ordered that “all the prominent monarchists in our prisons and concentration camps should immediately be declared hostages,” with “five or ten” to be shot, accompanied by announcements in the press.196 Molotov had Stalin’s directive formulated as a politburo decree. That day the OGPU received additional extrajudicial powers, including the reintroduction of emergency tribunals, known as troikas, to expedite cases (formally approved only in some provinces to aid counterinsurgency operations).197 Molotov wrote back on June 9: “A few comrades hesitated over the necessity of publishing the government communique” on retaliatory repressions, “but now everyone agrees that it was time.”198 On the night of June 9–10, some twenty nobles, who had recently been arrested as part of a monarchist “organization,” were accused of plotting “terrorist acts” against Soviet leaders and executed without trial. Five were said to be agents of British intelligence.199 Party organizations mobilized meetings at hundreds of factories to affirm the executions, and workers were quoted approvingly: “Finally the Cheka got down to business.”200

  “My personal opinion,” Stalin wrote from Sochi in a telegram to Mezynski: “the agents of London here are buried deeper than it seems, and they will still surface.” He wanted Artuzov, of counterintelligence, to publicize the arrests so as to smash the efforts of the British to recruit agents and to entice Soviet youth into the OGPU.201 In July, Pravda would report the executions of a group of “terrorist-White Guards” supposedly under the direction of a British spy in Leningrad.202 In Siberia, where not a single espionage case had been initiated in the second half of 1926, many were launched in 1927.203 Mezynski secretly reported to the politburo that the OGPU had conducted 20,000 house-to-house searches and arrested more than 9,000 people Union-wide.204 “A big black cloud, fear is suspended over the whole society and paralyzing everything,” a Swedish diplomat reported to Stockholm.205 Stalin’s mind and the country’s political atmosphere were melding.

  EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

  Persistent war rumors incited runs on shops, hoarding, and boasts of refusals to fight or sabotage in the event of conflict that were fixed in the OGPU political mood reports, echoes of the regime’s deepest fears.206 Chicherin returned to Moscow from his extended medical holiday in Europe around June 15. “Everybody in Moscow was talking war,” he would tell the American foreign correspondent and Soviet sympathizer Louis Fischer. “I tried to dissuade them. ‘Nobody is planning to attack us,’ I insisted. Then a colleague enlightened me. He said, ‘Shh. We know that. But we need this against Trotsky.’”207 Chicherin’s efforts to defuse international tensions are understandable, but the war scare emerged directly out of the inbuilt structural paranoia of the revolution (capitalist encirclement) combined with the regime’s defiant foreign policy.208 Relations with the enemy (the capitalist powers) could never amount to more than expediency; internal critics, whatever their professed intentions, broadcast disunity, weakened an encircled USSR, and incited external enemies. And party officials, not all sufficiently schooled in Marxism-Leninism, were susceptible to siren songs.

  When Stalin wrote to Molotov from Sochi (June 17) that “in order to strengthen the rear, we must restrain the opposition immediately,” he was not merely self-serving and not cynical.209 The struggle with Trotsky was now even more a matter of state security for him, even as it continued to be obsessively personal. After reviewing the transcript of a punitive Central Control Commission session, Stalin angrily wrote to Molotov (June 23) that “Zinoviev and Trotsky, not the commission members, did the interrogating and the accusing. It is odd that some of the commission members did not show. Where’s Sergo? Where has he gone and why is he hiding? Shame on him. . . . Will Trotsky and Zinoviev really be handed this ‘transcript’ to distribute! That’s all we need.”210

  Orjonikidze, in fact, had been present: Trotsky had directed a long soliloquy partly at him. “I say that you are set on a course for the bureaucrat, for the functionary, but not for the masses,” he stated, through repeated interruptions. “The organization operates as a vast internal mutual support structure, mutual protection.”211 Orjonikidze nonetheless hesitated to bring down the hammer. He remarked of Zinoviev and Kamenev, “they have brought a good deal of benefit to our party.”212 The votes for and against expulsion were more or less evenly divided. Orjonikidze, Kalinin, and even Voroshilov argued that the matter of expulsion of opposition members from the Central Committee should be deferred to the upcoming Party Congress. Stalin insisted that his vote be counted in absentia, while Molotov got Kalinin to switch sides, providing the margin for expulsion.213 Orjonikidze, however, would substitute a reprimand instead. Trotsky told him all the same that “the extirpation of the opposition was only a matter of time.”214

  Stalin found time to exchange letters from Sochi with a young schoolteacher, Serafim Pokrovsky (b. 1905), who had entered into a written argument with the dictator over whether party policy in 1917 had favored an alliance with the whole peasantry or just the poor peasantry. “When I began this correspondence with you I thought I was dealing with a man who was seeking the truth,” the dictator wrote testily on June 23, 1927, accusing the teacher of impudence. “One must possess the effrontery of an ignoramus and the self-complacency of a narrow-minded equilibrist to turn things upside down as unceremoniously as you do, esteemed Pokrovsky. I think the time has come to stop corresponding with you. I. Stalin.”215 Stalin hated to be contradicted on matters of theory.

  The China debacle had the potential to dominate the upcoming 15th Party Congress, which is why Stalin pushed for expulsion beforehand. On June 27, Trotsky wrote to the Central Committee: “This is the worst crisis s
ince the revolution.”216 Supporters of Stalin’s line clung to the left-wing Guomindang faction in Wuhan, where Communists held two portfolios (agriculture, labor), but that same day, Stalin wrote to Molotov, “I am afraid that Wuhan will lose its nerve and come under Nanjing” (i.e., Chiang Kai-shek). Still, Stalin held out hope: “We must insist adamantly on Wuhan not submitting to Nanjing while there is still an opportunity to insist. Losing Wuhan as a separate center means losing at least some center for the revolutionary movement, losing the possibility of free assembly and rallies for the workers, losing the possibility of the open existence of the Communist party, losing the possibility of an open revolutionary press—in a word, losing the possibility of openly organizing the proletariat and the revolution.” He proposed that Wuhan be bribed. “I assure you, it is worth giving Wuhan an extra 3–5 million.”217 But Molotov, uncharacteristically, had become panicky. “A single vote will wind up being decisive,” he wrote to Stalin on July 4. “I’m increasingly wondering whether you may need to come back to M[oscow] ahead of schedule.” Molotov tattled to Stalin that Voroshilov, the definition of a Stalin loyalist, “is going so far as to express sweeping disparagement of ‘your leadership over the past two years.’”218

  Stalin had appointed the provincial party bosses who composed two thirds of the voting members of the Central Committee, but that body could still act against him if he manifestly failed to safeguard the revolution.219 And yet he showed a lack of alarm. “I’m sick and lying in bed so I’ll be brief,” he wrote to Molotov from Sochi sometime in early July 1927. “I could come for the plenum if it’s necessary and if you postpone it.” Then the left Guomindang Wuhan government disarmed the workers in its midst, which caught out Stalin a second time. Still, he continued to pose as nonplussed, writing on July 8, “We used the Wuhan leadership as much as possible. Now it’s time to discard them.” Was he delusional? “I am not afraid of the situation in the group [his faction]. Why—I’ll explain when I come.” But the next day, perhaps with the news sinking in, Stalin flashed anger, accusing Molotov and Bukharin of deceiving him (not providing the full bad news about Wuhan) and Voroshilov of seizing a pretext to stop sending defense commissariat funds to Wuhan. “I hear that some people are in a repentant mood regarding our policy in China,” he wrote on July 11. “When I come, I will try to prove that our policy was and remains the only correct policy.” By July 15, even as the Wuhan regime, too, unleashed a terror against the Communists, Stalin refused to admit mistakes. To do so would in effect be acknowledging that the demonized opposition had a point, that their policy views went beyond personal hatred for him and were not tantamount to treason. Stalin was contemplating making Trotsky disappear by sending him abroad to Japan, evidently as ambassador. But this would have handed Trotsky an opportunity to capitalize on Stalin’s failures in Asia policy and the dictator quickly forgot the idea.220 Still, Stalin was desperate to rid himself of his longtime nemesis.

  ABOUT-FACE

  Voroshilov in spring 1927 had reported grimly that existing Soviet industry just could not meet the needs of the Red Army even in rifles or machine guns, let alone advanced weapons.221 But knowing that fact hardly required a security clearance.222 “How can we compete with” the imperialists, one Red Army conscript was overheard to say, according to a secret police report. “They have battleships, planes, cannons, and we have nothing.”223 Small wonder that in July 1927, with Stalin still in Sochi, Unszlicht traveled yet again to Berlin to try to win an agreement for joint industrial production, telling the Germans the USSR expected to be attacked by Poland and Romania. The Soviet proposals had grown to staggering scale, and the Germans were wary. The break in British-Soviet relations had sparked an internal debate in the German foreign ministry over, as one participant wrote, “whether Germany’s ties with Russia are worth enough to our present and future political interests so that it pays to assume the political expenses and risks involved in maintaining them.” Some Germans sensed desperation. “The Soviet government is reckoning with a catastrophe in the near future,” a usually sympathetic Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, Germany’s ambassador to Moscow, reported.224 Berlin demurred on Unszlicht’s proposals. Germany had emerged as one of the USSR’s two top trading partners (the other being Britain), a circumstance analogous to tsarist times, but this was far below Soviet desiderata, and politically, Moscow proved unable to pry Berlin from London and Paris. The Soviets could not afford to see bilateral relations with Germany come wholly unglued, too, however.225 And Stalin, even now, would not give up on German help for Soviet military industry. Still, the party press lashed out at Germany.

  Stalin returned from holiday early, reaching Moscow on Saturday, July 23.226 The plenum was scheduled to open six days later. On its eve, July 28, Pravda published a long-winded attack by Stalin on the opposition at this time of peril. “It is hardly open to doubt that the basic question of the present is the question of the threat of a new imperialist war,” he noted. “It is not a matter of some undefined and intangible ‘danger’ of a new war. It is a matter of a real and genuine threat of a new war in general and of a war against the USSR in particular . . . there is a struggle for consumer markets, for capital export markets, for seas and dry routes to these markets, for a new division of the world.” What held the imperialists back, he averred, was fear of mutual weakening, in the face of the revolutionary possibilities represented by the Soviet Union and the international proletariat. “Soviet people will never forget the rape, looting, and military incursions that our country suffered just a few years ago thanks to the kindness of English capital,” Stalin continued. “But the English bourgeoisie does not love to fight with its own hands. It always preferred to conduct a war with others’ hands,” finding useful idiots to “pull its chestnuts out of the fire.” Accordingly, he concluded, “our mission is to strengthen the rear and cleanse it of dross, including ‘nobleman’ terrorists and incendiaries who set fire to our mills and factories, because the defense of our country is impossible without a strong, revolutionary rear.” The British, Stalin asserted, were subsidizing an anti-Soviet underground, in Ukraine and the Caucasus, Leningrad and Moscow, financing “bands of spies and terrorists, who blow up bridges, set fire to factories, and commit acts of terrorism against USSR ambassadors.”227 That was the context in which to view the opposition.

  At the plenum, Molotov accused Trotsky and Kamenev of disorganizing the country’s rear while the external enemy marshaled troops, and stated that such people “should be imprisoned.” Voroshilov gave the sharpest speech, turning at one point to Zinoviev to state, “You know absolutely nothing.” Trotsky immediately reacted: “This is the one correct thing you can say about yourself.” Trotsky accused Voroshilov of having participated in the demotion of military men who were superior to himself (Primakov, Putna). Voroshilov replied that Trotsky had executed Communists during the civil war. Trotsky: Voroshilov “lies like a dishonorable scoundrel.” Voroshilov: “You are the scoundrel and the self-styled enemy of our party.”228 And so it went, for days on end. Thirteen members of the Central Committee submitted an “opposition platform” they wanted discussed at the upcoming 15th Party Congress, but Adolf Joffe and others in the opposition objected that the document had been issued without consultation among themselves, behavior resembling the very “apparatus” Trotsky had long criticized.229 Despite Stalin’s vehement insistence that Zinoviev and Trotsky be expelled for factional activity, the plenum accepted the proposal of Orjonikidze, head of the party Central Control Commission, whereby the pair were allowed to declare their loyalty and remain.

  China policy remained the greatest thorn in Stalin’s side. In late July, Pravda had stated, “The slogan of [forming] soviets is correct now.”230 The Comintern now authorized a series of armed actions in China, what would be called the autumn harvest uprisings. Trotsky’s critique that Stalin had assumed the bourgeoisie in China could lead a revolution when it was counterrevolutionary stung. In his speech to the joint plenum, Stalin had
denied that he had instructed the Chinese Communists to kowtow to the Guomindang or to restrain the peasants from agrarian struggle.231 During the Moscow plenum, on August 7, the Chinese Communists met in emergency session in Hankow; Stalin had dispatched the Georgian Communist and Youth League functionary Beso Lominadze to rescue the situation. Bukharin had wired instructions to criticize the Chinese Communist leadership for “opportunistic mistakes.” The whole thing was a terrible muddle: the outgoing Chinese Central Committee was accused of failing to anticipate the Guomindang betrayal in a bloc within that these same Chinese Communists had detested but been forced into by Moscow; the Chinese Communists who had not been allowed by Moscow to form soviets were accused themselves of having disarmed the workers and peasants. Strangest of all, the Chinese Communists’ annihilation by the Guomindang was said to have accelerated the bourgeois-democratic stage of the Chinese revolution.