Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Stalin’s China policy had not finished imploding. During the Party Congress in Moscow, on December 11, 1927, the Chinese Communists did finally form a soviet in Canton (Guangzhou); it lasted sixty hours before Guomindang forces annihilated its adherents. All told in 1927, the Chinese Communist party had lost perhaps 85 percent of its membership. “The revolution could not develop in Canton, Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankow, or any of those regions where industry was most developed, because there imperialism and the Chinese bourgeoisie held stronger positions,” reasoned the Soviet China expert Mikhail Fortus, who went by the name Pavel Mif. He called for a retreat to the remote northwest, where the Communists could gather forces for a subsequent assault on “imperialist strongholds.”297 Mao Zedong had been urging the need to build a rural base and peasant armies rather than try to seize the cities. But it was Chiang Kai-shek who drove the Communists, an urban movement, into the countryside. Soviet peasants listening to newspaper reports being read aloud of the catastrophic Communist defeat in China in December 1927, meanwhile, according to the OGPU, interpreted this to signify the defeat of Communists in Moscow. Wishful thinking.298

  The United opposition split. On December 10, Kamenev and the Zinovievites Yevdokimov and Bakayev repeated their written appeal for reinstatement, promising to disperse their faction and requesting release of oppositionists who had been arrested.299 But that same day, the Trotsky supporters Muralov and Rakovski, while announcing their agreement with the impossibility of forming a second party, maintained their right to continue to defend opposing views within the single party.300 Stalin decided not to accept the Zinovievites’ surrender. Instead of merely requiring that they remain silent, as he initially had demanded, now he ordered that they recant publicly and grovel for the rest of the week. On December 17, the expulsions of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others from the party, which had been voted back at the previous plenum, were confirmed.301 Two days later, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others, twenty-three people in total, signed a degrading petition to the congress—which they were not even allowed into the hall to present in person—renouncing their “wrong and anti-Leninist views.” Stalin again refused to reinstate them.302 Orjonikidize engaged in negotiations over the disposition of the highest-profile Trotskyites who sought to continue working in some capacity, but Stalin soon scattered them into internal exile.303 Whereas in the politburo back in mid-1924, Great Russians accounted for 46 percent, with a third having been Jews and the remaining three a Pole, Latvian, and Georgian, now the politburo became two-thirds Russian (and would retain a Russian majority thereafter).304 The talk around the congress was that “Moses had taken the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin took them out of the Central Committee.”305

  The day before the congress adjourned (December 18), the Soviet secret police celebrated their tenth anniversary with a parade of mounted troops and armored vehicles through Red Square, received by First Deputy Chairman Yagoda, the de facto chief, and a gala evening at the Bolshoi showcasing the revolution’s “sword and shield.” Workers of Moscow’s Dynamo factory had fashioned a huge metal sword that was displayed on stage, and workers at the ceremony asked that it remain unsheathed until “all that remains of the bourgeoisie is a memory.” On that morning, Pravda had declared war on “whoever does not stand on the path of proletarian revolution—the speculator, the saboteur, the bandit, the White Guardist, the spy, yesterday’s comrade, today’s most vile traitor and enemy.”306 At the Bolshoi, Voroshilov and Bukharin delivered speeches. Kaganovich observed that the “class struggle” was assuming new forms, especially economic pressure, and that NEP had produced classes hostile to the proletariat.307 The head of the OGPU, Wiaczesław Mezynski, still very ill, offered brief remarks. Photographs and stories of secret police exploits were splashed across the front pages of the newspapers for three days running. “If there is anything to be regretted now,” one old-time Chekist wrote, “it is not that we were too cruel, but that we were too lenient to our enemies.”308 Celebrants were distributed around the capital’s elite restaurants at the National, the Grand Hotel, and the Savoy, and at each venue Yagoda made a short appearance to be toasted as “the Great Chekist.”309 Orders of the Red Banner, the state’s highest award, were awarded not just to him but to nearly every upper member of the caste; about the only one overlooked was Artuzov, Yagoda’s bête noire, who lost control of counterintelligence.

  Stalin’s victory could scarcely have been more total, yet he indulged his feelings of victimization and self-pity. On December 19, at the inaugural plenum of the Central Committee newly confirmed by the congress, he again brought up the Lenin Testament call for his removal as general secretary. He allowed that there may have been reasons that the party had not heeded Lenin’s call previously: the opposition had existed. But no longer. “Never before has the opposition suffered such a defeat, for it is not only crushed, it is expelled from the party,” Stalin declared triumphantly. “Now we no longer see those bases whereby the plenum would have been thought correct in refusing to honor my request to relieve me of the duties of the general secretary. And moreover we have Lenin’s instructions, which we cannot not take into account and which, in my view, it is necessary to put into effect.” The orgburo functionary Alexander Dogadov cut in to suggest voting on Stalin’s proposal without discussion, perhaps protecting everyone from having to compete in their panegyrics. Voroshilov immediately recommended rejection of Stalin’s request. Rykov, who as head of the government chaired these meetings, implemented Dogadov’s proposal. Hands went up—Who was in favor of retaining Stalin as general secretary? Who was against?The vote in favor was unanimous, with a single abstention, unidentified.310

  Rykov had skillfully maneuvered to tamp down the eruption. But then Stalin made a new proposal: “Perhaps the Central Committee will consider it expedient to eliminate the institution of a general secretary. In the history of our party there was a time when that post did not exist.” Voroshilov again cut in. But Stalin answered with a quick history of the party before the introduction of a general secretary above the other secretaries serving the Central Committee. “I don’t know why it is necessary to preserve this dead institution,” he stated. “While at the top no special rights or special duties in practice are connected with the institution of the general secretary, in locales there are deformations and in all provinces there is a brawl because of this institution among comrades who are called secretaries, for example in the national Central Committees. A lot of general secretaries have been introduced and in locales they have special rights. Why do we need this?” He asked that the position be eliminated. “It’s easy to do, it is not in the party statute.”

  Again it fell to Rykov to manage the situation. He stated unequivocally that the Central Committee would keep its post of general secretary, which Lenin had created, and which Stalin had been granted by the votes of everyone, including oppositionists now expelled from the party. Rykov averred that Stalin had fully justified this appointment by his work, both before Lenin had died and after. This time the vote was unanimous. Rykov’s actions, like his remarks at the recent Ukrainian Party Congress, indicated that either he was supremely confident he could manage Stalin or that he understood the only option, even for titans like himself, was to stay in Stalin’s good graces and hope for the best. Or perhaps Rykov was no more discerning of Stalin than Kamenev had been when he had let slip the chance to remove him. Stalin’s menace was far more evident now. But Stalin’s menace was also fully enveloped within the regime’s vocabulary and worldview—capitalist encirclement, ubiquitous enemies, vigilance, mercilessness—which Rykov shared and himself had been enacting toward the opposition, while conciliating the peasantry, except for the kulaks.

  • • •

  NO ONE COMPELLED STALIN to submit his resignation time and time again. He had resigned so often the ritual could well have become tiresome for those subjected to it. Not including the private hints in the August 7, 1923, letter to Bukharin and Zinoviev, in connection with the
ir initial awkward disclosure of “the Ilich letter about the secretary” following the cave meeting, there had been clear resignation statements on six known occasions: on the eve of and then immediately after the 13th Party Congress in May 1924; in an August 19, 1926, letter to the Central Committee; in a December 27, 1926, letter to Rykov in the name of the Central Committee; and now again, on December 19, 1927. Of the three party congresses since the Lenin Testament had surfaced, Stalin had not resigned only at one (the 14th), which, however, had devolved into shouting matches over his “boundless power.” And now, at this first plenum after the 15th Congress, even after Rykov affirmed the existence of position of general secretary, Stalin was not done. “Comrades, during the first vote, concerning my release from the duties of the secretary, I did not vote, I forgot to vote,” he interjected. “I ask that you consider my vote against.”311

  What was this, the expression of a deep well of resentment? The voicing of his darkest fears, his removal by the Central Committee? A provocative test of the inner regime? An odd way that Stalin savored his triumph and the opposition’s expulsion? A gesture of false modesty by a man who treasured posing as the humble, albeit indispensable, servant of the party? It was perhaps all of the above—supremacy and siege, elation and self-pity, the paradoxes of Stalin’s power.

  Stalin had attained a position of power that would have exceeded anyone’s wildest dreams, except perhaps his own, but power for him entailed responsibility for advancing the Communist victory at home and abroad. No war had broken out in 1927, but rumors spread that this was solely because the Soviet regime had secretly made concessions: turning over grain, gold, horses, ports, coal mines, territory. (Some wags surmised the Western powers refrained from unseating the Soviet regime to give socialists around the world more time to see the full folly of their delusions.) The 15th Congress passed a resolution on industrialization calling, in classical Marxist terms, for production of the means of production, and in the meantime, imports of machinery not being produced in the USSR.312 How would this be financed? The secret police were reporting increased attacks, up to murder, against Soviet officials, while state grain acquisitions were failing. On December 12, 1927, the Left Communist Valerian Obolensky, known as Osinsky, had addressed a letter to Rykov and Stalin in reaction to Rykov’s congress report indicating the lack of a general crisis, only a partial crisis in grain collection. Osinsky, who worked in the Central Statistical Administration and knew agriculture well, called the grain collection process already “completely lost” for this year—stunning words—“even if procurement prices were to be raised. Such an increase is already a defeat, particularly since it could provoke a further withholding of grain in calculation of further price increases.” Osinsky had been urging Mikoyan and other top officials, time and again (January 1927, summer 1927, fall 1927), to raise procurement prices and lower prices of industrial goods for peasants. “I believe that the more fundamental causes of the falloff (so far by half) of our procurement campaign, a falloff that will develop into deep general difficulties, is the ratcheting up of our production to tempos, and in a direction, that do not correspond to the real possibilities of our country.”313 Osinsky’s letter implied that something drastic would have to be done about grain procurements, or industrialization would become a pipe dream.

  Sokolnikov, the former finance minister, again insisted that “American tempos” of industrialization were possible only by developing agriculture, and deemed it idiotic to evaluate peasant reserves of grain as an expression of some kind of kulak war against Soviet power. He called for using economic levers without a return to requisitioning.314 In the end, the 15th Party Congress had voted up a resolution at Stalin’s behest “on work in the countryside,” which called for “employing the whole power of economic organs, and relying, as before, upon the poor and middle peasant masses, to develop further the offensive against the kulaks and to adopt a number of new measures limiting the development of capitalism in the countryside and leading the peasant economy along the road to socialism.”315 What those “new measures” entailed remained unclear. But during the vote on the final resolution regarding the countryside, in the waning moments of the congress, an amendment appeared: “At the present time, the task of transformation and amalgamation of small individual farms into large-scale collective farms must be set as the party’s fundamental task in the countryside.” 316 Collectivization, at the present time? The transcript records “Noise in the hall,” when the amendment was read; the session chair noted that only twenty minutes remained until the close of the congress and asked delegates to remain seated. The amended resolution was said to have passed unanimously.317

  After the rebuff of his resignation, Stalin on December 21 celebrated his official forty-eighth birthday.318 Nearly half a century should have been more than ample for observers to figure him out, but he revealed himself no better than the dark, vast Siberian taiga forest. Even the great biographical scoop of the American YMCA director Jerome Davis was put in doubt: Stalin forbid its republication in the original Russian and, in December 1927, had a foreign commissariat functionary try to get the Associated Press to discredit the Davis interview as a fabrication.319 Still, in connection with the birthday milestone, Stalin’s top aide, Ivan Tovstukha, reworked the biographical material that had been collectively gathered in the central apparatus and, this time, managed to elicit Stalin’s assent to publish it—under just Tovstukha’s name—in the Granat Encyclopedia of some 250 revolutionaries in 1927. The Stalin material also came out as a stand-alone pamphlet in an initial print run of 50,000. Finally, a Stalin biography. It reverentially catalogued his passage through the revolutionary stations of the cross: his discovery of Marx, the organizing in the underground, the various early congresses, the bouts of exile and other political punishments. The text ran fourteen pages, in large, bold type.320

  CHAPTER 14

  A TRIP TO SIBERIA

  We cannot live like gypsies, without grain reserves.

  Stalin, Central Committee plenum, July 9, 19281

  Stalin was an ideological person. For him the idea was the main thing.

  Lazar Kaganovich2

  STALIN BOARDED a heavily guarded train bound for Siberia. It was Sunday, January 15, 1928.3 He rarely traveled, even domestically, other than to the Black Sea for relief in the sulfur baths from the terrible pain in his muscles and joints. Siberia, however, he knew well from before the 1917 revolution, having been deported there countless times by the tsarist regime, most recently during the Great War. Stalin had fought on the Boredom and Mosquito Front—that is, he had wallowed for years as a political exile in the alternately frozen or thawed swamps of the far north. His 1928 trip would keep him to Siberia’s southerly parts, however: Novosibirsk and the Altai breadbasket of Western Siberia, as well as Krasnoyarsk, in Eastern Siberia, where in early 1917 a tsarist draft board had rejected him, owing to the webbed toes on his left foot and his suppurated left elbow that did not bend properly. Now, eleven years later, he was returning to these remote parts as the country’s ruler, the general secretary of the Communist party. In Novosibirsk, at gatherings with the local higher-ups, Stalin would demand coercive measures to overcome a state grain procurement crisis. He would also declare, unexpectedly, the inescapability of pushing forward the collectivization of agriculture immediately. A few days later he would take a branch line to Barnaul, an administrative center of the richest Siberian grain-growing region, to meet with officials lower down. Compared with the 20 million motorcars in the United States, cars and trucks in the Soviet Union numbered perhaps 5,500, and Barnaul had not a single one. From the terminal, Stalin was ferried to the meeting in a primitive wooden-basket sled, a means of conveyance that suggested the enormity of what would be involved in remaking peasant life and state power across two continents.

  SELF-FULFILLING CRISIS

  Modern Russian power, in its Soviet guise, too, still rested upon wheat and rye. For all the dreams of modernity, b
y 1928 industry had barely regained 1913 tsarist levels even with the prolonged recuperation provided by the partially legalized markets of the New Economic Policy.4 By contrast, industry in Britain and Germany was 10 percent greater than in 1913; in France, 40 percent, in the United States, a whopping 75 percent.5 Russia had lost ground. At the same time, the NEP presupposed peasants’ willingness to sell their “surpluses”—that is, the grain beyond what they consumed as food or moonshine—not just to the private traders (NEPmen), but also to state procurement agents at state-set prices. With the agricultural year running from July to June and harvest gathering and state procurements commencing in summer, from July through December 1927 the Soviet state had secured just 5.4 million tons of grain. The target for that interval was 7.7 million tons, leaving a gaping shortfall that threatened Moscow and Leningrad, as well as the Red Army, with starvation in spring. Procurements for November and December 1927 were particularly alarming, just half the total compared with the previous year.6 Panicky reports arrived from as far as Soviet Uzbekistan, where cotton growers with little food were insisting on switching to crops that could feed themselves, and officials began seizing grain, all of it, from anyone who grew it.7 In Moscow, the authorities could scarcely afford major unrest—street demonstrations over a lack of bread had accompanied the downfall of the tsarist regime, and shortages had played a part in undermining the Provisional Government.