Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The decimated Chinese party now had to prepare for suicidal mass insurrections.232 The Soviet politburo—which no longer included Zinoviev, Kamenev, or Trotsky—quietly directed the Comintern to smuggle $300,000 in hard currency to the Chinese Communists, and Stalin ordered a shipment of 15,000 guns and 10 million cartridges.233 As Mao Zedong (b. 1893) observed at the Hankow session presided over by Lominadze, “power comes from the barrel of a gun.” But the Guomindang, thanks to Stalin, still had far more of them.

  THEATER OF THE ABSURD

  Shortages had become endemic and the rift in the understanding of socialism between the masses, for whom it meant freedom, abundance, and social justice, and the party regime, for whom it meant tighter political control and sacrifices for industrialization, filled police surveillance reports. “We need butter, not socialism,” workers at Leningrad’s Putilov factory demanded on September 6.234 Two days later, a joint session of the politburo and Central Control Commission presidium was held in connection with the opposition’s plan to submit its own “platform” to the upcoming Party Congress. Trotsky and Zinoviev were summoned to the politburo from which they had been expelled. Zinoviev pointed out that at the party plenum, when Kamenev had suggested they would introduce a platform, no one had objected but now it was denounced as a criminal act. After Zinoviev and his former minion Uglanov got into a shouting match and Stalin interrupted again, Zinoviev said to him, “Everything bad that you could do to us you’ve already done.” Molotov bitingly asked Zinoviev if he and Kamenev had been “brave in October 1917?” Zinoviev reminded them that not just Trotsky but Bukharin had opposed Brest-Litovsk in 1918, to which Kaganovich interjected, “Bukharin will not repeat his mistakes.” Nikolai Muralov, the Trotsky supporter, called the resolution condemning the opposition for its platform a feuilleton and challenged them to allow all party members to read the platform and decide for themselves. “Mothers come [to party meetings] with babies and the sound of the reader is interrupted by the sound of the baby sucking at the breast,” he noted. “Babies with their mother’s milk suck in this hatred of the opposition.” Bukharin blamed the victims: “I consider that it is the party that is subjected to systematic attacks and aggression by the opposition.” Zinoviev: “You are not the party.” Bukharin: “Thieves always shout, ‘Catch the thief!’ Zinoviev is always doing this. (Commotion in the hall. Chairman rings the bell. Inaudible exclamation from Zinoviev.)”235

  Trotsky showed that he, too, could be vicious. When the Stalin loyalist Avel Yenukidze was given the floor, Trotsky interrupted to point out that in 1917 Yenukidze “had been arguing against the Bolsheviks when I pulled you into the party.” After Trotsky persisted, Yenukidze exploded: “Look, I have been in the party since its formation and was a Bolshevik 14 years earlier than you.” Later in the meeting, when Rudzutaks took the floor, Trotsky interrupted to point out that behind his back Stalin expressed a low opinion of his administrative abilities. “You saw that in your dreams,” Stalin cut in. Rudzutaks responded: “I know you, comrade Trotsky. You specialize in slandering people. . . . You have forgotten the famous telephone that Stalin allegedly installed in your apartment. You have been like a little boy or a school pupil telling lies [about wiretapping] and refused to allow a technical inspection.” Trotsky: “That the telephones are eavesdropped is a fact.” When Bukharin spoke, Trotsky interrupted as well, stating that Bukharin had wanted to arrest Lenin during the 1918 Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany. “Wonderful,” Bukharin responded. “You say that that time was ideal, that during the Brest Treaty there was wide discussion and freedom of factions. And we consider that a crime.”236 Trotsky got the floor and went after Stalin, too, bringing up civil war episodes. “Lenin and I twice removed him from the Red Army when he conducted an incorrect policy,” Trotsky stated. “We removed him from Tsaritsyn, then from the southern front, where he conducted an incorrect policy.” When Stalin interrupted, Trotsky referred to a document he possessed from Lenin: “Lenin writes that Stalin is wrong to speak against the supreme commander, he carps, is capricious. This happened!” Stalin interrupted again. “Comrade Stalin, do not interrupt, you will have the last word, as always.” Stalin: “And why not.”237

  When Stalin took the floor, he denied he had been twice removed from the front, alleging it was Trotsky who had been recalled, prompting Trotsky to interrupt him. Stalin: “You speak untruths, because you are a pathetic coward, afraid of the truth.” Trotsky: “You put yourself in a laughable situation.” When Trotsky pointed out that because the party had made and kept him the head of the Red Army during the civil war, Stalin was effectively slandering the party. “You’re a pathetic person,” Stalin said again, “bereft of an elemental feeling of truth, a coward and bankrupt, impudent and despicable, allowing yourself to speak things that utterly do not correspond to reality.” Trotsky: “That’s Stalin in entirety: rude and disloyal. Who is it, a leader or a huckster.” Stalin’s allotted time ran out, and Trotsky proposed he be given five more minutes. Stalin: “Comrade Trotsky demands equality between the Central Committee, which carries out the decisions of the party, and the opposition, which undermines these decisions. A strange business! In the name of what organization do you have the right to speak so insolently with the party?” When Zinoviev responded that before a congress party members had the right to speak, Stalin threatened to “cleave” them from the party. Zinoviev: “Don’t cleave, don’t threaten please.” Stalin: “They say that under Lenin the regime was different, that under Lenin oppositionists were not thrown out to other locales, not exiled and so on. You have a weak memory, comrades from the opposition. Don’t you recall that Lenin suggested exiling Trotsky to Ukraine? Comrade Zinoviev, is this true or not? Why are you silent?” Zinoviev: “I am not under interrogation. (Laughter, noise, the bell of the session chairman.)”238

  And then, out it leapt again. Trotsky: “And you hide Lenin’s Testament? Lenin in his Testament revealed everything about Stalin. There is nothing to add or subtract.” Stalin: “You lie if you assert that anyone is concealing the Testament of Lenin. You know well that it is known to all the party. You know also, as does the party, that Lenin’s Testament demolishes you, the current leader of the opposition. . . . You are pathetic, without any sense of truth, a coward, a bankrupt, insolent and impudent, who allows himself to speak of things utterly at variance with reality.”239

  One wonders why Stalin subjected himself to this exchange by summoning Trotsky and Zinoviev to the politburo. The politburo resolution, once again, called the opposition platform an effort “to create a Trotskyite party, in place of the Leninist party.”240 To Zinoviev’s repeated requests to publish their platform, Stalin’s answer was patently feeble: “We are not prepared to turn the party into a discussion club.”241

  The next day, September 9, 1927, Stalin received a delegation of American worker representatives. They wanted to know whether Lenin had revised Marxism in some way, whether the Communist party controlled the Soviet government and trade unions, how they knew whether the Communists had mass support in the absence of party competition. “The delegation apparently does not object to the proletariat of the USSR depriving the bourgeoisie and the landlords of their factories and workshops, of their land and railroads, banks and mines (laughter), but it seems to me that the delegation is somewhat surprised that the proletariat did not limit itself to this, but went further and deprived the bourgeoisie of political rights,” Stalin responded, challenging them: “Does the bourgeoisie in Western countries, where they are in power, show the slightest magnanimity towards the working class? Do they not drive genuine revolutionary parties of the working class underground? Why should the proletariat of the USSR be called upon to show magnanimity towards their class enemy? You must be logical.” The Americans also asked about the differences between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin answered that the differences were not personal and had been outlined in publications.242

  On September 12, Trotsky departed for a rest in the
Caucasus, but that very evening Stalin sprung a nasty surprise on him. The opposition had decided to distribute their platform for the upcoming Party Congress without permission and a few of them secretly had it typed out with carbon copies, but OGPU informants and provocateurs had infiltrated the group and, on the night of September 12–13, raided the “underground printing press.”243 One of those involved had been an officer under Baron Wrangel, a “White Guard” connection with military officer status, which facilitated insinuations of a planned putsch.244 Another of those caught in the “printing press” scandal conveniently “confessed” that his intention had been a military coup, along the lines of Piłsudski in Poland. Stalin had the central apparatus distribute multiple copies of these OGPU materials on September 22 for a meeting of the politburo and the Central Control Commission, after which the “confessions” were sent to all Central Committee members, the Comintern executive committee, and provincial party secretaries.245 Some members of the Central Committee would remain unconvinced about accusations of a military coup, despite arrests having been made.246 Moreover, as Mezynski and then even Stalin would admit, the White Guard officer was the OGPU informant.247

  Trotsky interrupted his southern retreat and returned to Moscow to combat the provocation, but what awaited him was a Comintern executive session on September 27, at which the Stalin-appointed goons of all the foreign Communist parties verbally eviscerated and then expelled him from that body. Bukharin, without irony, said to Trotsky’s face: “For you there is no Communist International, there is Stalin, or at most Stalin and Bukharin, and the rest are hirelings.” Stalin summarized that “the speakers today have spoken so well, especially comrade Bukharin, that there is nothing for me to add,” to which Trotsky interjected, “You’re lying.” Stalin: “Keep your strong words to yourself. You are discrediting yourself with this abuse. You’re a Menshevik!” Only Voja Vujović, the Yugoslav who headed the Communist Youth International, sided with Trotsky, and he, too, was expelled.248 In late September, Pravda reported on a case of unmasked “monarchist-terrorists” directed by British and Latvian intelligence services: here was the new meme.249 Soviet military advisers, led by Vasily Blyukher, returned from China, having had a firsthand look at what could happen to a supposedly revolutionary struggle that had been bungled—seizure by a military figure, like Chiang Kai-shek.250 After Chinese Communist army units had begun to conduct guerrilla actions against the Guomindang, Stalin formally shifted policy away from supporting the “bourgeois” phase of the revolution. Pravda in an editorial (September 30, 1927) welcomed the establishment of a “revolutionary army of Chinese workers and peasants.” This looked like an unacknowledged embrace of the defeated opposition line.251 What effect it might have in China, if any, remained to be seen.

  FRANCO-SOVIET RIFT

  Sergei Witte, as tsarist finance minister, had financed Russia’s 1890s industrial boom (Western machinery imports) by means of foreign borrowing (long-term loans), which he paid for on the backs of the peasantry (grain exports), and which was undergirded by a political alliance with France (the main supplier of credits), but in 1918 the Bolsheviks had repudiated tsarist-era debts, making propaganda out of necessity (an inability to pay).252 Subsequently, in nearly every negotiation with the capitalist powers, the need to make good on those debts came up. From 1926, Moscow had entered secret negotiations with Paris offering to pay an indemnity of 60 million gold francs (approximately $12 million) each year for sixty-two consecutive years, in exchange for $250 million in credits now. France’s government was keen on bondholder compensation, sale of French capital goods, and imports of Soviet oil, but not on using taxpayer money to finance a Communist regime. French conservatives raised hell. After the French coalition government fell for unrelated reasons, its successor added a demand for compensation of French owners of property in Russia that had been nationalized. In April 1927, French counterintelligence, in a widely reported sensation, rolled up more than 100 Soviet military intelligence agents whose handlers had relied on French Communists, who, of course, were under close police surveillance. “Documents found,” the French authorities stated, “show that there is in existence a vast espionage organization, far greater than any discovered since the war.”253 Such was the fraught state of play when scandal erupted over the Soviet envoy to Paris, Cristian Rakovski, who had written a short book on the statesman Prince Klemens von Metternich but had obtained the ambassadorship, a form of exile, for supporting Trotsky.254

  While back in Moscow for consultations in August 1927, Rakovski had signed an opposition declaration that summoned “every honest proletarian of a capitalist country” to “work actively for the defeat of his government” and “every foreign soldier who does not wish to serve the slave masters of his country to cross over to the Red Army.”255 Usually, ambassadors do not publicly call for mass treason among their hosts. But the act went well beyond Rakovski’s personal foibles to the heart of the Soviet foreign policy’s pretzel logic—simultaneously participating in and working to overthrow the capitalist world order.256

  Rakovski quickly disavowed the applicability to France of his summons to treason (it still applied everywhere else), and promised a mutual “non-interference” pact, but French opponents of rapprochement fulminated. “Does a house guest promise not to steal the silverware?” the press asked.257 In September 1927, trying to rescue the situation, the Soviets went so far as to propose a full-fledged non-aggression pact, just shy of an alliance, and even informed the Soviet public of the offer to pay large sums to private French holders of tsarist bonds. “We buy the possibility of peaceful economic relations with one of the capitalist countries in Europe, and France sells us this possibility,” Pravda explained.258 But nothing worked. Rakovski was declared persona non grata and, in mid-October, he got in his car and drove back to the USSR.259 Moscow had vigorously supported its representative while he was in Paris, but at home promptly expelled him from the party for Trotskyism. “The French expelled me from Paris for having signed a declaration of the opposition,” Rakovski, wearing a smart Western sports jacket, explained to the French writer Pierre Naville. “Stalin expelled me from the foreign affairs commissariat for having signed the same declaration. But in both cases they let me keep the jacket.”260 (Upon return, Soviet diplomats were required to hand over all goods acquired while abroad, except clothing.) The protracted Franco-Soviet negotiations collapsed. France stopped short of severing diplomatic relations, unlike Britain, and a replacement Soviet ambassador would arrive in Paris, but prospects remained dim for a credit agreement, let alone a Franco-Soviet pact.

  FINAL FACE-TO-FACE

  The nasty September 1927 politburo confrontation was repeated at a joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission that took place October 21 to 23. Trotsky, in response to a proposed resolution to expel him as well as Zinoviev from the Central Committee, quoted Lenin’s Testament, “Remove Stalin, who may carry the party to a split and to ruin.” Stalin loyalists shouted him down: “Liar,” “Traitor,” Scum,” and of course “Grave Digger of the Revolution.” Trotsky stretched out one arm and read his text through the insults. “First a word about the so-called Trotskyism,” he said. “The falsification factory is working at full steam and around the clock to construct ‘Trotskyism.’” He added: “The rudeness and disloyalty about which Lenin wrote are no longer simply personal qualities; they have become the hallmark of the leading faction, they have become its policy and its regime.”261 He was right. When Trotsky revealed that the former Wrangel officer associated with the opposition “printing press” was in fact an OGPU agent, someone shouted, “This is outside the meeting agenda.” Kaganovich called out, “Menshevik! Counterrevolutionary!” The chairman of the session rang and rang the bell.262 One person threw a doorstop volume of economic statistics at Trotsky; another flung a glass of water (just as the right-wing Purishkevich had done at liberal constitutionalist Miliukov in the tsarist Duma). The stenographer recorded t
he following: “Renewed whistling. A constantly increasing commotion. Nothing can be heard. The chairman calls for order. More whistling. Shouts of ‘Get down from the dais.’ The chairman adjourns the session. Comrade Trotsky continues to read his speech, but not a single word can be heard. The members of the plenum quit their seats and begin to file out of the hall.”263

  Stalin had prepared thoroughly. He opened his speech on October 23 with his by now customary self-pity: the opposition was cursing him. “Anyway what is Stalin, Stalin is a little person. Take Lenin. Who does not know that the opposition, headed by Trotsky, during the August bloc, conducted a hooligan campaign against Lenin.” He then read Trotsky’s infamous private letter from 1913 to Karlo Chkheidze denouncing Lenin. “Such language, what language, pay attention, comrades. This is Trotsky writing. And he’s writing about Lenin. Can one be surprised that Trotsky, who so unceremoniously treats of the great Lenin, whose boot he is not worthy of, could now vainly curse one of the many pupils of Lenin—comrade Stalin.”

  Mezynski had spoken about the opposition’s criminal activity, citing the testimony of the arrested Wrangel officer as well as non-party intelligentsia about the opposition’s illegal printing press and their “bloc” with the anti-Soviet elements, and Stalin referred back to Mezynski: “Why was it necessary to have comrade Mezynski speak about White Guards, with whom some workers of the illegal antiparty printing press were associated? In order to dispel the lie and slander that the opposition is spreading in its antiparty leaflets on this question. . . . What are the takeaways of comrade Mezynski’s report? The opposition, in organizing an illegal printing press, tied itself to the bourgeois intelligentsia, and a part of this intelligentsia, in turn, proved to be connected with the White Guards contemplating a military plot.”