Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Stalin turned to the Testament, reminding everyone that it had been read out to the delegates at the Party Congress, and that Trotsky had published a repudiation of Eastman’s claim that the Testament had been concealed. He read from Trotsky’s own 1925 repudiation: “Clear, it would seem? Trotsky wrote this.” Stalin then read aloud the damning Testament passages about Zinoviev and Kamenev and Trotsky. “Clear, it seems.” He commented that “in reality, Lenin in his ‘testament’ accuses Trotsky of ‘non-Bolshevism,’ and in connection with Kamenev and Zinoviev during October says that their mistake was not an ‘accident.’ What does this mean? It means that politically one can trust neither Trotsky . . . nor Kamenev and Zinoviev.” Then Stalin read the Testament passage about himself. “This is completely true. Yes, I’m rude, comrades, in connection with those who rudely and treacherously destroy and split the party. I did not and do not hide this.” Stalin’s rudeness was in service to the cause. His rudeness was zeal. As for the Testament’s call for his removal, “At the first Central Committee plenum after the 13th Party Congress I asked to be released from my duties as general secretary. The congress itself discussed this question. Each delegation discussed this question, and all delegations, unanimously, including Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, obliged Stalin to remain at this post. What could I do? Desert my post? That is not in my nature. I have never deserted any post, and I have no right to do so. When the party imposes an obligation upon me, I must obey. One year later, I again submitted my resignation to the plenum, but again they obliged me to remain.”264 Yes they had: as ever, the loyal, humble servant. When Stalin asked if the time had not come to acquiesce to the many comrades demanding the expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the Central Committee, those present erupted in ovation. Pravda would publish Trotsky’s speech, in garbled form. The same day it would also publish Stalin’s, including the passages he had read aloud about himself from Lenin’s Testament.265

  Stalin and Trotsky’s first direct confrontation at a party forum had been exactly four years earlier; October 23, 1927, would turn out to be the last time they saw each other. The next day, handed a copy of the “transcript” with the right to make corrections or additions, as per party policy, Trotsky complained: “The minutes do not show . . . a glass was thrown at me from the presidium. . . . They do not show that one of the participants tried to drag me off the podium by my arm. . . . While I was speaking Comrade Yaroslavsky threw a book of statistics at me . . . employing methods that cannot be called anything but those of fascist hooligans.”266

  Hundreds of regime personnel, from regional party bosses to military men and ambassadors abroad, were shown the transcripts of such meetings. These officials, in turn, were to discuss the contents with subordinates, for the transcripts were meant to be didactic. But what could officials trying to clothe and feed the workers, coax the peasants to sell grain, or defend Soviet interests abroad make of the substance of these top-level meetings? Who was running the country? Of course, whatever thoughts officials might have had, given the webs of mutual surveillance and the hyper-suspicious atmosphere Stalin increasingly accentuated, they had to be careful not to express them. The plenum, meanwhile, had approved resolutions at Stalin’s behest calling for “a more decisive offensive against the kulak” as well as “the possibility of a transition to a further, more systematic and persistent restriction on the kulak and private trader.”267 The 1926–27 harvest had come in lower than 1925–26 by several million tons as a result of poor weather, which caused crop failures in some regions. Worse, that October 1927 saw a sharp drop in grain procurements to less than half the amount taken in by this time the previous year. Peasants were diverting grain to fodder for livestock and dairy farming, both of which yielded higher prices, but they were also hoarding grain stocks amid the uncertainty of the war scare. They had enough money on hand to pay their taxes and to wait for agricultural prices to rise. Without more grain, the regime faced possible starvation in the northern cities and in the Red Army by spring. The main journal for trade predicted in October 1927 that “a regulated distribution, rationing, extended to the entire population” might be necessary.268

  TENTH ANNIVERSARY: PRETEXT FOR REPRESSION

  Stalin had advanced the theory that because the opposition’s actions demonstrated internal disunity and weakness, they were objectively traitors, willy-nilly inviting foreign intervention, but now a new and sinister twist was added. On November 1, 1927, Molotov, in Pravda, called the opposition’s “persecution” of Stalin a mask for malicious attacks against the party. “To exacerbate the struggle by personal attacks and denunciations against individuals,” he wrote, with no sense of irony, “may serve as a direct incitement to criminal terroristic designs against party leaders.” This article might have been the first denunciation of the party opposition as would-be assassins. Further channeling Stalin, Molotov added on November 5, also in Pravda, that “a certain Left SR odor exudes from the opposition cesspit.”269 The Left SRs, in the Bolshevik narrative, were coup plotters.

  That same day, as the revolution’s tenth anniversary approached, Stalin received an eighty-person delegation of sympathetic foreigners from multiple countries, only to have them question him about Soviet secret police powers. He defended the OGPU as “more or less equivalent to the Committee of Public Safety created during the Great French Revolution,” in words carried by Pravda, and suggested that the foreign bourgeoisie was engaged in slandering the Soviet secret police. “From the point of view of the internal situation, the state of the revolution is secure and unwavering, so we could get by without the OGPU,” he allowed, but added that “we are a country surrounded by capitalist states. The internal enemies of our revolution are agents of the capitalists of all countries. The capitalist states offer a base and a rear for the internal enemies of our country. Battling against internal enemies, it turns out we are conducting a struggle against the counterrevolutionary elements of all countries. Judge for yourself whether we could get by without punitive organs along the lines of an OGPU in such conditions.” The foreigners were said to have applauded vigorously.270

  The political regime had tightened appreciably. When Kamenev and Rakovski attempted to address the Moscow party organization, they were shouted down. The orchestrated vote against them was reported as 2,500 to 1.271 That was the context in which, on November 7, 1927, the revolution’s tenth anniversary, Stalin and the rest of the leadership ascended the cube mausoleum at 10:00 a.m. for the annual parade. Film cameras were rolling as first the Red Army units and then workers from the biggest factories marched by in prearranged columns. Inner Moscow was an armed camp, in anticipation that the opposition would try to mount a counterdemonstration on and close by Red Square. Opposition marchers that day were not numerous, and Stalin and the OGPU had readied plainclothes operatives and others to pounce on any opposition banner or speech. A few oppositionists who marched in the ranks with their work collectives tried to hoist portraits of Trotsky as well as Lenin. Some of them briefly managed to disrupt the official proceedings on Red Square, in a corner of the large public space, with impromptu speeches and banners (“Down with the Kulak, the NEPman, and the Bureaucrat!”). But vigilantes guided by plainclothes OGPU officers pummeled and took them into custody.272 How many marchers knew what was happening remains uncertain. No non-regime newspapers existed to broadcast the opposition’s actions.273 Trotsky and Kamenev toured Moscow’s streets by motor car, but on a side street near Revolution Square, they were greeted by disapproving whistles; shots were fired into the air. Regime vigilantes smashed the vehicle’s windows.274 That night Stalin previewed Sergei Eisenstein’s film October about 1917, and forced him to remove the frames depicting Trotsky and to make alterations in the portrayal of Lenin (“Lenin’s liberalism is not timely”).275

  In China, the Guomindang picked this Red holiday to raid the Soviet consulate in Shanghai; a week later, the government in Nanjing would sever diplomatic relations. In Moscow, Stalin moved quickly to
capitalize on the opposition’s quixotic counterdemonstrations, which empowered him to press his repression of the party opposition over the objections of others in the inner regime. At a joint plenum of the Central Committee and party Control Commission on November 14, 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party for incitement to counterrevolution; Kamenev, Rakovski, and others were ejected from the Central Committee.276 The next day friends helped Trotsky move out of his Kremlin apartment, settling him in with a supporter just outside the Kremlin walls on nearby Granovsky.277 Beginning on November 16, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and others were evicted from the Kremlin. The citadel was soon completely closed to non-regime personnel, and tourism was discontinued.278

  Later that night, in the wee hours of the next morning, Adolf Joffe, the Soviet diplomat, shot himself. Joffe’s wife, Maria, who worked at the editorial offices of the newspaper Signal, took the call. He had been bedridden with polyneuritis contracted in Japan and although he had previously gone to Austria for medical treatment, more recently the politburo had refused his request to finance treatment in Germany; when Joffe offered to pay for the trip himself, Stalin still refused to let him go. Joffe had known Trotsky since 1910, had joined the Bolsheviks with him in summer 1917, and had signed the telegram, in Lenin’s name, appointing Trotsky war commissar. Joffe left a ten-page suicide note, the thrust of which was “Thermidor has begun,” which Maria Joffe passed through trusted intermediaries to Trotsky.279 “My death is the protest of a fighter who has been brought to such a state that he cannot in any way react to such a disgrace,” Joffe wrote, adding about Trotsky, “you were always right and you always retreated. . . . I always thought that you did not have enough Leninist immovable obstinacy, his readiness to remain even alone on the path he chose in the creation of a future majority, a future recognition of the correctness of the path.”280

  Funerals of comrades lost in the struggle had been a sacred ritual of the old revolutionary underground, but this was now under their own regime. Joffe’s interment took place on November 19, drawing a sizable crowd on a workday. Chicherin, Litvinov, and Karakhan of the foreign affairs commissariat, as well as Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Lashevich of the opposition accompanied the cortege to the Novodevichy Cemetery, a place of honor second only to the Kremlin Wall. “The composition of the funeral demonstration also made one stop and think, for there were no workers in it,” one eyewitness recalled. “The United opposition had no proletarian support.”281 Among the many eulogies, Trotsky spoke last, and briefly. “The struggle continues,” he stated. “Everyone remains at his post. Let nobody leave.” These words proved to be his last public speech in the Soviet Union. The crowd surrounded Trotsky, blocking his exit for a long time, trying to transform the funeral into a political demonstration. But they were dispersed.282 That same evening, in a letter from Rykov, Trotsky was relieved of his last official administrative post (chairman of the foreign concessions committee).283

  The next day, Rykov spoke at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of Ukraine and complained of the opposition’s usage of the terms “Stalin the Dictator,” “Stalinist methods.” “All this is an evil and vile slander against the entire party and against comrade Stalin,” Rykov stated, adding that in the politburo “not a single question is decided unilaterally by one member.”284 His statement was both true and false. In the politburo, which Rykov had joined the same day Stalin became general secretary, Rykov was a core member of a solid majority. But as he knew better than almost anyone, Stalin predecided a great deal outside the politburo—on Old Square, at his Kremlin apartment, at his Sochi dacha, over the phone with the OGPU.

  15TH PARTY CONGRESS (DECEMBER 2–19, 1927)

  The 15th Party Congress was the largest party forum yet with 1,669 delegates (898 voting). Trotsky and Zinoviev were not among them. The opposition lacked even a single voting delegate.285 After the ceremonial opening, Stalin delivered the main political report for only the second time as general secretary. At the mere announcement of his name the delegates erupted (“stormy, prolonged applause; an ovation of the entire hall, shouts of ‘Hurrah’”). “Our country, comrades, exists and develops in a condition of capitalist encirclement,” he began. “Its external position depends not only on its internal forces but also on the state of this capitalist encirclement, on the condition of the capitalist countries that encircle our country, on their strengths and weaknesses, on the strengths and weaknesses of the oppressed classes of the whole world.” Accordingly, he presented a detailed assessment of the world economy, trade, and external markets, and what he called the preparations for a new imperialist war to redivide global spoils. “We have all the signs of the most profound crisis and growing instability of world capitalism,” he concluded, calling the capitalist stabilization “more and more rotten,” and anticolonial movements and worker movements “growing.” Stalin then analyzed the USSR’s economic development, in industry and agriculture, the expansion of the working class, the rise in the country’s overall cultural level, concluding, “Soviet power is the most stable power of any in the world. (Stormy applause.)”286 After a break for lunch, Stalin returned to the dais and went into high dudgeon over the opposition. Altogether, he spoke for four hours.

  The day of Stalin’s report (December 3), Kamenev submitted a petition with the names of 121 oppositionists who were slated for expulsion but promised to abide by party decisions.287 Stalin mocked them and, as Zinoviev had once demanded of Trotsky, demanded of them: “They must renounce their anti-Bolshevik views openly and honestly, before the whole world. They must openly and honestly, before the whole world, brand the mistakes they committed, mistakes that became crimes before the party. Either that or they can leave the party. And if they don’t leave, we’ll kick them out!” Pandemonium.288 During the discussion, the few members of the opposition given the floor, such as Grigory Yevdokimov and Nikolai Muralov, were jeered relentlessly, then, after they left the dais, verbally smeared. “No confidence can be placed in these deceivers of the party,” intoned Kuzma Ryndin, a delegate from Chelyabinsk (and the future party boss there). “Enough of this mockery of the party: the party and the proletariat will not stand for it. . . . All those who want to prevent us from working—out of the party with them!” Filipp Goloshchokin stated: “If we pussyfoot around with the opposition, we’ll be cutting our own throats.” When Kamenev observed that opposition members had been imprisoned for their political views, Rykov responded, “despite the situation the opposition has tried to create, there are only a few in prison. I do not think I can give assurances that the prison population will not have to be increased somewhat in the near future. (Voices from the floor: ‘Correct!’).”289

  Kamenev had been allowed to attend as a non-voting delegate, and his remarks, again, were memorable, though utterly different from two years earlier when he had denied Stalin’s ability to unite the party. “Before us stands the question of choosing one of two roads,” Kamenev now explained, through near constant interruptions and accusations of Trotskyism, lying, and worse. “One of these roads is a second party. This road, under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is ruinous for the revolution. This is the road of political and class degeneration. This road is forbidden to us, excluded by the whole system of our views, by all the teachings of Lenin. . . . There remains, therefore, the second road . . . to submit completely and fully to the party. We choose this road for we are profoundly convinced that a correct Leninist policy can triumph in our party and through it, not outside the party and against it.”290 It turned out that Stalin had united the party after all: Kamenev’s abasement was the proof.

  In remarks on December 7 to close out the discussion of his report, Stalin triumphantly stated, “I have nothing of substance to say about the speeches of Yevdokimov and Muralov, as there was nothing of substance in them. The only thing to say about them is, Allah forgive them.” The delegates laughed and applauded. He labeled Kamenev’s capitulatory speech that of a Pha
risee. Stalin called the party a living organism: “The old, the obsolete falls off (applause), the new, grows and develops (applause). Some leave the stage. . . . New forces grow up, at the top and at lower levels, carrying the cause forward. . . . And if now some leaders fall off the cart of revolution, not wanting to sit firmly in the cart, then in that there’s nothing surprising. This will only free the party from those who get their legs crossed and prevent the party from moving forward.” To those who “fall off from the cart—then that way is their road! (Rousing applause. The whole congress stands and gives comrade Stalin an ovation).”291

  A resolution condemning the opposition was put to immediate vote and passed unanimously. Then the damnable Testament popped out, yet again.

  Stalin had challenged his critics, back in July 1926, to demand at the next Party Congress (which was now) that Lenin’s Testament be published. On December 9, Orjonikidze made a formal proposal to that effect, to reverse the decision of the 13th Party Congress. Rykov proposed that the full gamut of late Lenin dictation be published, not solely the part known as the Testament, and that the Testament be included in the 15th Party Congress proceedings. Rykov’s proposals passed unanimously.292 But the Testament did not appear in the published proceedings.293 Instead, Stalin had it issued during the congress as a separate bulletin “for members of the party only,” in a print run of 13,500, nine times the number of delegates. The method of distribution and the number of people who read a copy remain unclear.294

  Much was glossed over at the congress. Alarming reports were pouring in via secret police channels of a “goods famine” and widespread popular anger. “Queues for foodstuffs and material for clothing have become an everyday phenomenon (the Center, Belorussia, the Volga valley, the South Caucasus), along with crushes and fighting,” the OGPU reported. “There have been cases when women have fainted.” The police paid special attention to women in food lines, based on historical precedent, and overheard them lamenting it took an entire day to procure flour and that their husbands were coming home from work to find nothing to eat.295 To appease workers, the regime had announced a seven-hour workday, which did not sit well with peasants already starved for manufactured goods. “Even now there are no goods in shops and with a seven-hour working day there’ll be absolutely nothing,” one peasant stated, according to the December 1927 country mood report by the OGPU. One “kulak” was reported to have stated, “If the peasants were organized in some kind of organization and could say with one voice that we will not sell you grain at such a price, then the workers would sit with their goods and croak from starvation, then they’d forget about a seven-hour day.”296 The Bolshevik revolution was more and more looking like a triumphant debacle.