Longer-term perspectives were even more troubling. Tsarist Russia had fed both England and Germany and grain exports had reached perhaps 9 million tons in 1913, but in 1927 they constituted a measly 2.2 million tons, delivering a lot less hard currency to finance machinery imports and industrialization. At the same time, Stalin received a table showing a drastic falloff in the percentage of the harvest being marketed since tsarist times, from 26 to 13 percent (of smaller harvests).8 As a result of the peasant revolution, some of the land that had been used for marketed production had been seized and was now occupied by subsistence farming, so that even if the harvests had been of comparable size, less grain would be marketed beyond village borders.9 To be sure, Soviet agricultural levels surpassed that of China or India. But the USSR competed with Britain, France, and Germany, and despite some improvement in implements and machines, credit, and marketing cooperatives, farming remained decidedly unmodern. Three quarters of all grain was sown by hand, nearly half reaped with sickles and scythes, and two fifths threshed with chains or similarly manual devices.10 Russian agriculture was just not advancing, while among the great powers, mechanization was well under way. How to boost overall grain production was a deep concern. After the peak harvest under the NEP of 1925–26 (77 million tons), the 1926–27 harvest had disappointed at around 73 million and the 1927–28 harvest would disappoint, too, also officially estimated at 73 million tons, but likely no more than 70 million.11 These were stubborn facts, and would have challenged any government in Russia, but Bolshevik actions had inexorably undermined the quasi-market of the NEP.12
Private industry in the USSR had been squeezed down to less than 10 percent of total output, and its share continued to fall, but the principal producers, state factories organized as giant trusts, had few incentives to reduce their unduly high production costs or even to manufacture saleable goods. A 1927 decree on trusts had stressed output quotas, not profits, as the guiding criteria, which compounded the already perverse incentives of greater subsidies for worse performance.13 The regime’s inability to resist the urge to finance desperately needed industrial expansion by the printing of money resulted in inflation, which, in turn, elicited further clumsy price controls, worsening the market’s operation. In other words, applying administrative measures to the economy only exacerbated imbalances and fed the inclination for more administrative measures, in a vicious loop.14 “If there is a choice between the industrialization program and equilibrium in the market, the market must give way,” Valerian Kuibyshev, head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, blustered to the party organization in his bailiwick in January 1928. He allowed that the market “could be one current, but a Communist and Bolshevik has always been and is able to swim against the current,” and concluded that “the will of the party can create miracles . . . and is creating and will create miracles despite all these market phenomena.”15 Just a few weeks later, Kuibyshev proclaimed at the presidium of the Supreme Council of the Economy that “the will of the state has smashed the [market] conjuncture.”16 Such idiotic boasts unwittingly exposed the self-inflicted dimensions of the sharply lower state grain procurements.
Some peasants were holding their grain out of fear of a new famine, but experts mostly attributed the diminished marketings to lower per capita production, higher per capita peasant consumption, and above all the gap in prices between grain (low) and peasant-desired manufactured goods (high), those infamous scissors, in Trotsky’s metaphor, whose blades opened in opposite directions.17 Paying peasants substantially higher prices for grain and ruthlessly restricting monetary emissions would have closed the blades, but the former measure would have necessitated charging workers higher prices for bread, while also hurting industrialization (domestic grain purchases at higher prices would reduce earnings from exports); the latter measure would have entailed scaling back ambitions for industrial expansion.18 Stalin was loathe to make these kinds of political concessions to the peasantry again, given that after doing so the regime was again in the same place. Instead, in 1927, the politburo had mandated a substantial reduction in prices for manufactures, whose implementation Stalin referred to as “beating down the markup, reducing the markup, breaking the resistance of the cooperatives and other trading agencies at all costs.”19 Some years before that maneuver had worked, when there had been unused industrial capacity to revive, but now, even at the higher prices, demand had been going unmet because of limited supply, and the price reduction—in summer, no less, when workers went on holiday and production normally suffered—reinforced the trend toward bare store shelves.20 “In some districts,” the secret police reported in a December 1927 survey of the country’s political mood, “the peasants come to the cooperative every day inquiring whether goods have arrived.”21 True, throughout January 1928 textile factories in the Moscow region operated on Saturdays, too, to produce manufactures for grain-growing regions, but the goods famine persisted.22
Rumors of pending war also contributed to the peasant reluctance to part with their grain; the Siberian party organization demanded a halt to “the dim-witted agitation in the press” about imminent foreign invasion.23 On top of everything else, party officials had been distracted. November 7, 1927, brought the revolution’s tenth anniversary, a prolonged drinking bender, then came the elections to and the sessions of the 15th Party Congress through much of December. “Nobody in authority bothers about the purchase of grain,” a German espionage agent, posing as a journalist, wrote of rural officials in Siberia. “All the party bosses, the authorities, are in Moscow for the party congress, for the jubilee celebrations, for the soviet sittings and other things, and the lower party bosses, the youth organizations and the village correspondents have only the anniversary of the revolution in their heads.”24 But right after the congress, the politburo held a special session devoted exclusively to grain procurement.25 And Pravda began to bang the gong. Suddenly, as a reporter in Moscow for the London Times picked up (January 3, 1928), public discussion had broken out on “the most drastic measures to pump the grain from the peasants.”
Stalin ratcheted up the pressure on two tracks. One was the secret police, which had been granted the prerogative of imposing sentences outside judicial channels. On January 4, OGPU deputy chief Yagoda directed all regional secret police branches “to arrest immediately the biggest private grain traders . . . conduct the investigations quickly, persuasively. Send the cases to Special Boards. Communicate immediately the resulting influence on the market.”26 Stalin wanted overt secret police involvement minimized (“Cease publication of communiques regarding our operations in grain collection,” OGPU chief Wiaczesław Mezynski directed Vsevolod Balytsky, head of the OGPU in Ukraine, in January 1928).27 The other track involved the party apparatus: four sharply worded secret circulars were dispatched to all major party organizations over the course of a single month, beginning on December 14 (during the Party Congress).28 The circulars moved up the deadline to remit rural tax payments to February 15, 1928 (from April 1), and insurance payments to January 15 (from January 31), changes that the authorities compelled the peasants to affirm at mass meetings.29 But peasants met their cash obligations by selling meat, dairy, or hides, whose prices were predominantly market driven and high because of demand. Grain, which was readily stored, they held back.30 Internal secret police reports warned of “a strengthening of kulak agitation”—that is, discussions among peasants about holding out until spring in anticipation of better prices.31
Politburo members, mindful of possible spring famine and urban unrest if food supplies failed, as well as harm to industrialization without grain to export, had cautiously consented to Stalin’s insistence on “emergency measures.” His third secret party circular, sent on January 6, 1928, acknowledged that “despite two firm directives of the Central Committee to strengthen grain procurement, no breakthrough has occurred,” and announced the formation of a Central Committee commission for grain headed by himself, which afforded him not just de fac
to but de jure authority to implement the emergency measures he deemed necessary. With this extra authority, Stalin drove the extension of the antispeculation law wielded by the OGPU against private traders—Article 107 of the criminal code—to grain growers for “not releasing goods for the market.”32 Mere non-sale of privately grown grain became subject to up to three years imprisonment and confiscation of property. Hundreds of publicized arrests took place in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, with published reports of sizable storehouses of “hoarded” grain being discovered.33 In those locales, Stalin relied upon trusted lieutenants such as Kaganovich, party boss in Ukraine, and Andrei Andreyev, another protégé, whom Stalin had just named party boss of the sprawling North Caucasus territory. But even they required him to exert pressure (Andreyev, newly arrived, wrote to his wife in January 1928 that “now, in earnest, I have to issue directives to restrain the zealots,” not exactly Stalin’s message).34 Stalin dispatched Mikoyan to the North Caucasus, but together with Ukraine, these regions were far behind producing their usual two thirds of the country’s marketed grain, and so Stalin looked to the Urals and Siberia as what he called “the last reserves.” On January 9, the politburo resolved to send out his two top associates, Vyacheslav Molotov, who was directed to the Urals, and Sergo Orjonikidze, who was commanded to Siberia. On January 12, however, Orjonikidze was said to have taken ill and his trip was canceled.35 The next day Stalin summoned officials in agriculture, supply, and trade.36 He decided to go to Siberia himself.37
Stalin would not be the only person in motion that January 1928. In a nasty jolt, a former top aide in the innermost sanctum at Old Square, Boris Bazhanov, fled the country, conniving to escape (January 1) just when border guards were still feeling the effects of the New Year’s celebration, and becoming the first major Soviet defector. Bazhanov had gotten reassigned out of Old Square after failing to return borrowed imported sports equipment; he then fathered illegitimate children with two different mistresses, one of whom he took abroad as his “wife” at state expense. He had contemplated trying to sneak across into Romania, Finland, or Poland before conniving to get himself reassigned to Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan, a few miles from the more porous border with Iran. Just twenty-seven years old, Bazhanov carried out secret politburo documents to prove his bona fides. Whether he had help from foreign intelligence services in the act of crossing remains unclear, but once in Persia he was evidently helped over the mountains to India, whence he sailed to Marseilles, leaving behind his mistress, who was caught trying to cross the Soviet-Iran border separately.38 Bazhanov had joined the party as a teenager in his native Ukraine, and managed to leap into the orgburo at age twenty-two. His embarrassing betrayal, kept secret from the Soviet public, showed that the dream of a radiant future was not only the wellspring of the system’s strength but also its principal vulnerability: people could become white-hot with anger at their earlier illusions. Already, from January 2, Georgy Arutyunov, known as Agabekov, an ethnic Armenian and the chief of the Eastern Department of Soviet intelligence, headed a manhunt on foreign soil (until Agabekov himself defected).39 Bazhanov would sit for extensive debriefings by French intelligence, generating hundreds of pages of material on clandestine Soviet machinations to undermine the Western powers and on Stalin’s opaque regime, telling the French, for instance, that Stalin is “extremely cunning, with an unbelievable power of dissimulation and, above all, very spiteful.”40 Soon, Bazhanov published an expose in French, writing that Stalin “possessed in a high degree the gift for silence, and in this respect was unique in a country where everybody talks far too much.”41
Mostly, Bazhanov got Stalin wrong, such as when he asserted that the Soviet leader “read nothing and was interested in nothing” and “had only one passion, absolute and devouring: lust for power.”42 Stalin lived for the revolution and Russian state power, which is what impelled him to return to Siberia. His own power was vastly extended beyond Old Square by the telegraph, telephone, newspaper, radio, and Communist ideology, but those levers barely reached into villages. Nor did that power extend abroad. The Soviet refusal to relinquish internationalizing the revolution by supporting worker and national liberation movements abroad ensured that the core tenet of Leninist foreign relations—intercourse with the enemy—had become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the challenge persisted of somehow obtaining advanced industrial technology from the capitalist powers. Further complicating the Soviet position, global market prices for wheat in 1927–28 cratered, a deflation that also affected other Soviet export commodities (timber, oil, sugar). At the same time, rising tariffs abroad magnified the punch to the gut.43 Here was the short straw that the unsentimental global political economy allocated to all primary goods producers: to obtain the hard currency it needed to buy machines, the Soviet Union would have to sell its commodities at a loss.44 Moreover, despite some successes in securing short-term and some medium-term credits to purchase equipment and cover trade deficits from the Austrian and German governments, the Soviets had failed to obtain long-term financing from Paris, London, or even Berlin. Stalin could not abide the fact that the Soviet regime found itself crawling to the international bourgeoisie, rather than relying on the international proletariat, for a lifeline. Just as the peasants were refusing to sell their grain, foreign capitalists, at a minimum, could aim at the Red regime’s demise by refusing to sell their advanced technology.
Stalin lived immersed in the grim OGPU summaries of the country’s political mood, which his worldview shaped in a feedback loop, and which brimmed with antiregime quotations from eavesdropped conversations and other reminders that the USSR was encircled by hostile forces and honeycombed with internal enemies.45 Soviet borderlands were suspect: in Ukraine, the North and South Caucasus, Belorussia, and the Far East, the police wrote, “We have some elements on which the foreign counterrevolution could rely at a moment of external complications.”46 Tsarist-era specialists in industry and the military were suspect: “The collapse of Soviet power is inescapable as a system built on sand,” former Major General Nikolai Pnevsky, a nobleman and tsarist-era air force chief of staff serving in the Red Army quartermaster directorate, stated in relation to Britain’s rupture of diplomatic relations according to a police informant, adding: “This break is a prelude to war, which should, in light of the low level of USSR military technology and internal political and economic difficulties caused by a war, finish off Bolshevism once and for all.”47 Villages were suspect: “I have talked with many peasants, and I can say straight out that in the event of a conflict with foreign states, a significant stratum of peasants will not defend Soviet power with any enthusiasm, and this is also reported in the army,” Mikhail Kalinin, who posed as the country’s peasant elder, told the politburo.48 The Russian emigre press contained leaked information about the secret inner workings of the Soviet regime.49 For Stalin, his inner circle, too, had become suspect. Without consulting them, and with only the vaguest notion of how it would unfold, he embarked in 1928 upon the greatest gamble of his political life.
EARTH-SHATTERING SPEECH
Stalin was coming. Siberia’s party boss, Sergei Syrtsov, sped out on a lightning inspection of the Western Siberian breadbasket—Barnaul, Biysk, Rubtsovsk—to ensure that officials were prepared to receive the general secretary.50 As a veteran of Stalin’s inner apparatus in Moscow, where he had passed through a master school of intrigue, Syrtsov had been only in his thirty-third year two years earlier when Stalin had handed him Siberia (in place of the Zinoviev supporter Mikhail Lashevish). On January 17, 1928, just hours before Stalin’s arrival, Syrtsov directed the Siberian party to approve a concrete plan for implementation of the Central Committee’s directive to employ Article 107 against grain “hoarders”: the Siberian secret police would arrest a quota of between four and ten kulaks from each local grain-producing district for “holding large grain reserves and using the bread shortages to speculate and raise prices.” “Start the operation immediately!” ordered Siberian OGPU boss Za
kovsky.51 On January 18, some sixty top Siberian officials, representing the local party bureau as well as local grain procurement personnel, found themselves in the presence of Stalin and his phalanx of aides, as well as advance officials he had sent.52 He told them Siberia had had a bumper harvest and laid down an obligation of just over 1 million tons of grain for shipment to the Center, leaving a mere 400,000 tons for Siberia’s own needs.53 He also demanded that they specify by name who would be responsible in each county for implementation, and ensure that the railroads could cope—no excuses.54 As expected, Stalin further insisted that Article 107 be applied to anyone refusing to sell grain stocks. Syrtsov unveiled Siberia’s already-launched antihoarding operation (from the day before).55 Stalin embraced this gift, while softening its appearance, shifting implementation of the measure from the political police to the procuracy, which was to explain the policy in the local press, follow the law (v zakonnom poriadke), and prepare public trials of kulaks with simplified procedures in order to induce the rest of the peasants to market grain.56
Stalin’s aides had assembled a collection of brochures and other materials published in recent years by the Siberian party organization on the village locally, which he read on the long train ride.57 At cities en route, he had demanded fresh newspapers and noted, for example, that the Ural Worker, published in Sverdlovsk, contained “not one word” on grain procurements; farther on, in Tyumen, he found that the local Red Banner had a great deal on grain procurements—in Ukraine. The January 1928 OGPU political mood report for Siberia would brim with what was labeled kulak agitation (“You want to recreate 1920, take grain from the lads with force, but you won’t succeed, we’ll sell a cow, we’ll sell two, but grain we won’t give”). Anti-Soviet leaflets were appended to the extensive report.58 In Novosibirsk, Stalin sat down and read the entire run of January issues of Soviet Siberia and found that only very recently had the region’s flagship newspaper begun to pay attention to procurements. He concluded that the Siberia party was “not conducting a class line.”59 Still, thanks to Syrtsov’s fleet-footed preemptive action, Stalin seems to have come away with a positive impression of that January 18 Novosibirsk meeting.60 In a ciphered telegram (January 19, 8:00 a.m.) to Stanisław Kosior, a Central Committee secretary who was helping mind the shop back on Old Square (and who had once been party boss in Siberia), Stalin wrote: “The main impression of the gathering: nightmarishly late with procurement, very hard to get back what has been lost, can only get back what has been lost via beastly pressure and skill in leadership, the functionaries are prepared to get down to business in order to fix the situation.”61
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