Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The appointed hour passed, however, and the OGPU failed to show. Cristian Rakovski, the recently disgraced Soviet envoy to France and ardent Trotsky supporter, burst into the Beloborodov apartment with news of a crowd that had massed at the Kazan Railway Station, hung a portrait of Trotsky on the rail carriage, and defiantly chanted (“Long live Trotsky!”). Finally, the OGPU called the apartment to say the departure would be delayed for two days. The secret police had comically miscalculated (informing Trotsky of the correct date and time of his departure). It fell to the shop-minding Stanisław Kosior to send a telegram to Stalin’s train (en route to Siberia) to report that on January 16, a crowd of 3,000 had gathered at the train station in Moscow and that they had had to postpone Trotsky’s banishment for two days because his wife had taken ill (Sedova did have a fever).97 Kosior further told Stalin that “the crowd attempted to detain the train, shouting, ‘Down with the gendarmes!’ ‘Beat the Jews,’ ‘Down with the fascists.’” Nineteen people were detained. “They beat several OGPU operatives,” Kosior wrote, as if the armed secret police had come under threat. One demonstrator, according to Kosior, had learned of the two-day postponement and summoned the crowd to reassemble on January 18. This seems to have smartened up the OGPU, for agents showed up at the Beloborodov apartment the very next morning (January 17). Tricked, Trotsky refused to budge, but the OGPU forced his fur coat and hat on over his pajamas and slippers and whisked him to the Yaroslavl Station.98 Kosior added in his ciphered telegram to Stalin that “we had to lift him and forcibly carry him because he refused to go on his own, and locked himself in his room, so it was necessary to smash down the door.”99

  The whole Trotsky business had left a nasty imprint on Stalin’s character. Who really appreciated what he had gone through in the prolonged cock fight? The China policy fiasco had been a very close call. But notwithstanding the grief Trotsky had caused, several politburo members had been lukewarm about, or even opposed to, exiling Trotsky.100 To Kosior, Stalin wrote back laconically: “I received the cipher about the antics of Trotsky and the Trotskyites.”101

  This time, Kosior and the OGPU had made sure the train station had been cleared utterly; machine-gun toting troops and armored cars lined all approaches. Even so, the moment did not pass in lockstep. “I can’t forget the days when I served under him at the front,” the top-level Chekist Georgi Prokofyev, in charge of the deportation and full of drink at midday, is said to have told a foreign correspondent with Soviet sympathies. “What a man! And how we loved him! He wrought miracles—miracles I tell you. . . . And always with words . . . each word a shell, a grenade.” But now, the once mighty leader had been reduced to a pathetic sight. Trotsky, according to the journalist, held aloft in the arms of a OGPU officer, “had the appearance of a patient taken from a hospital bed. Underneath the fur he had nothing on except pajamas and socks. . . . Trotsky was loaded like baggage aboard the train.”102 A single rail coach with him, his family members, and an OGPU convoy pulled out from Moscow—without the twenty crates of books and papers, many of them Trotsky’s copies of top secret politburo memoranda. Nearly thirty years earlier, a teenage Bronstein had glimpsed Moscow for the first time: from a prison railcar, on his way from a jail in Odessa to exile in Siberia. Now he had his last glimpse of Moscow, also from a prison rail transport.103 Trotsky soon arrived at the last station on the Central Asian rail line, Frunze (Bishkek), in Kyrgyzia; incredibly, the crates with his books and even his archive met up with him. A bus laden with the luggage hauled them the final 150 miles across snowy mountains, and arrived in Alma-Ata at 3:00 a.m. on January 25. He and family were billeted at the Hotel Seven Rivers on—what else—Gogol Street.104

  It was not only Trotsky: On January 20—the day Stalin sprung his ruminations about collectivization on Siberian higher-ups—Soviet newspapers carried a notice of the internal exile from Moscow of dozens of oppositionists, “bawlers and neurasthenics of the Left,” as Stalin liked to call them, whom he dispersed eastward (Uralsk, Semipalatinsk, Narym, Tobolsk, Barnaul), northward (Arkhangelsk), or southward (Astrakhan, Armenia).105 Radek, already in Tobolsk, Siberia, sent the first letter Trotsky received in Alma-Ata.106 Stalin did not initially prevent the intra-Trotskyite correspondence, since, thanks to secret-police perlustration, he could read it. Trotsky responded to Radek with some advice: “I strongly urge you to organize a proper way of life in order to preserve yourself. Whatever it takes. We are still of much, much use.”107 Trotsky in 1928 had no inkling that he would be the one to fill the enormous vacuum of information about Stalin, with writings that would profoundly shape all views of the dictator, or that Stalin would discover especially sinister “uses” of Trotsky. Trotsky occupied a vast space in Stalin’s psyche and, eventually, Stalin would enlarge Trotsky to the same scale in the Soviet political imagination, as the cause and incarnation of all that was evil. In the meantime, having just banished the longtime leader of the “bawlers and neurasthenics of the Left” inside the party, Stalin, in Siberia, immediately began forcing the party and the country to the left.

  COMMUNIST PARTY ON WATCH

  Stalin and his entourage wended their way through Siberia. After his startling speech in Novosibirsk on January 20, he set out the next day—the fourth anniversary of Lenin’s death, a state holiday—for Barnaul, a silver-mining town on the approaches to the Altai mountains that had been founded with serf labor to serve imperial Russia’s military needs. The severe continental climate brought hot, dry winds from Asian deserts in summer and freezing, damp winds from the Arctic during the long winter, with snow drifts that could exceed human height. Ah, but the soil: black-earth or chestnut-brown, it rendered these lands a Russian peasant paradise.108 Barnaul officialdom turned out a sizable party to greet Stalin and Syrtsov on the platform on January 22. (The OGPU’s Zakovsky, overseeing Stalin’s local travels, arrived as well.) Wooden-basket sleds jammed the square in front of the rail station. The one earmarked for Stalin, “insulated with a bearskin and a greatcoat so the leader did not freeze,” as one eyewitness recalled, was pulled by a horse named Marat (for the French revolutionary), and driven by a local OGPU commandant who would go on to become a prize-winning executioner.109 Stalin yielded to the requests for a group photograph, but there would be no banquet. In a speech, he allowed that “one of the causes” for the grain procurement crisis was that “the discussion [with the opposition] diverted our attention, then the easy victory at the congress, the holiday moods of those comrades who went their way home after the congress.” But he was not there to indulge excuses and roundly dismissed popular local reasons for the shortfall—severe snowstorms, lack of manufactured goods for sale, a supposedly smaller harvest—insisting “the cause is in ourselves, in our organizations.” “We’re late, comrades,” he admonished the officials. “Some functionaries are even surprised: ‘How’s that,’ they say, ‘we sent a lot of grain out and, over there in Moscow, they howl.’ . . . No excuses and retreats from the targets can be permitted! . . . Exert pressure on this in Bolshevik style (applause).”110

  After Stalin, Syrtsov reinforced the message, stating that the share of “middle peasants” in grain marketings for January 1928 as compared with a year earlier had declined from 60 to 30 percent. In other words, it was not the kulaks alone hoarding grain. That was why Stalin wanted to send a message to the middle peasants by arresting kulaks—holding grain would not be tolerated.111 The next day, at Rubtsovsk, another county seat, to which Semipalatinsk officials had also been summoned, Stalin’s appearance provoked loud applause, to which he replied: “Excellent folk, you Siberians, you are able to clap your hands in concert, but you are not able to work!”112 After the gathering, Stalin did partake of some homemade brandy, the pretext evidently being the severe frosts, according to one participant, who added that despite “a minor blizzard” Stalin “was willing to go on foot” back to his special heavily guarded train, where he spent the night.113

  The Soviet dictator had traveled not to engage in fac
t-finding but to explain the rationale for the coercive measures and ensure their implementation, and yet the trip was proving to be a revelation. He was learning, for example, that the kulak seemed far stronger than even he had understood. Never mind that peasant wealth was cyclical and that very few households remained well-off through generations so as to form a distinct capitalist class; at any given moment, there were kulaks. “The offensive of capital in the Siberian countryside,” one of the better-off agricultural regions, had been an obsession of the Trotskyites. Syrtsov had dismissed such talk as “hysterical bawling,” but the counterstudy he had commissioned showed farm machinery and credit were in the hands of the well-off.114 Now Stalin heard firsthand testimony confirming this point. Moreover, instead of combating such developments, he also learned the party in Siberia seemed contaminated by them, a point that also had been a preoccupation of the Left opposition. Lev Sosnovsky, a Left oppositionist journalist exiled to Barnaul, wrote to Trotsky in Kazakhstan of Stalin’s secret visit to Siberia (in a letter that would be smuggled out and published in the foreign emigre press, becoming the sole public acknowledgment of Stalin’s travels). Sosnovsky concluded that the Siberian party apparatus was “not up to the task of the new approach” (application of coercive measures against peasants).115 Half of Siberia’s Communists had joined the party since 1924, during the New Economic Policy, and one third were still engaged in agriculture, an eye-popping proportion; the Siberian party leadership even viewed industrialization as intended to serve the needs of agriculture, and wanted to prioritize farm implements, grain storage, food processing.116 Oddly enough, having exiled the Trotskyites, Stalin was discovering that his problem was not the small numbers of oppositionists. It was the party as a whole.117

  Already the Siberian apparatus was infamous for the bottle. “Drunkenness has become an everyday phenomenon, they get drunk with prostitutes, and take off in their vehicles, even members of the bureaus of party cells,” Zakovsky had told a meeting of the party cell inside the Siberian OGPU, noting that his bosses in Moscow had made this point to him. Zakovsky was himself a lover of the dolce vita, juggling multiple mistresses, rarely far from a bottle, and concluded, “It’s OK to drink, but only in our narrow circle of Chekists and not in a public place” (presumably including driving around in easily identifiable, scarce vehicles with hookers in view).118 Drunkenness, however, was not what Stalin scolded them for. “Is it that you are afraid to disturb the tranquility of the kulak gentry?” he asked menacingly of Siberian officials.119 Many Siberian functionaries, he had discovered, “live in the homes of kulaks, board and lodge with them,” because, they told him, “kulak homes are cleaner and they feed you better.”120 Rural party officials were aching to marry kulak daughters. Such anecdotes ignited Stalin’s class sensibilities: Soviet officialdom was becoming dependent materially, and hence, in his Marxist mind, politically, on the rural wealthy.

  Stalin expected that the supposedly widespread and increasing class polarization in the village would be galvanized by his measures. “If we give a signal to pressurize and to set upon the kulak, [the mass of peasants] will be more than enthusiastic about it,” he had privately told Syrtsov during his Siberia trip.121 And superficially, his coercive measures did appear successful. Already on January 24, Siberia’s first public trial under Article 107 (of three kulaks) took place in Barnaul county, and received extensive newspaper coverage the next day.122 In perhaps the most sensational case, the kulak Teplov in Rubtsovsk county, a septuagenarian patriarch of a large family, was said to possess 3 homes, 5 barns, 50 horses, 23 cows, 108 sheep, and 12 pigs, while “hoarding” 242 tons of grain. “Why should I sell grain to Soviet power when they do not sell me machines,” he was quoted as saying. “If they would sell me a nice tractor that would be another matter.” Teplov was sentenced to 11 months and lost 213 tons of his grain; much of the rest rotted.123 All told, nearly 1,400 kulaks in Siberia would be subjected to trials in January and February 1928. Newspaper accounts invariably claimed that courtrooms were jammed with peasant observers.124 From those convicted the authorities would manage to seize a mere 12,000 tons of grain (under 1 percent of that year’s regional grain procurements), but that information was not publicly divulged.125 Meanwhile, the Siberian procuracy was dragging its feet, refusing to approve a majority of Zakovsky’s arrest warrants for individuals on watch lists—former tsarist officers, former Whites from the civil war—under Article 58 (counterrevolution), which brought significantly harsher penalties than for speculation.126 While Stalin was still in Western Siberia, On the Leninist Path, the local party organization’s journal, acknowledged not just a “lack of enthusiasm” but a “flood of protests” by members of the legal apparatus even against the party directive to extend Article 107 to grain growers as a violation of Soviet law. Stalin was quoted as responding that “laws written by Bolsheviks cannot be used against Soviet power.”127

  Stalin had far bigger ambitions that application of Article 107, of course. He continued to tiptoe around the fate of the NEP. When asked, he insisted it would continue, much to everyone’s relief. But interlocutors failed to comprehend that he had shifted back to the NEP’s original formulation as a temporary retreat combined with a socialist offensive. The same issue (January 31, 1928) of On the Leninist Path that published the disagreements over the application of Article 107 wrote that “the small-scale, dispersed, individual farm is by its very nature reactionary. On this basis further development of the country’s productive force, which is indispensable for us, is impossible.” The editorial concluded: “Countryside—forward to large-scale collective farming.”128 This may have been the USSR’s first editorial about the momentous turnabout about to unfold.

  But if the Siberian party could not even manage to seize grain from kulaks, how could it implement wholesale socialist transformation of the countryside? Siberia’s party hierarchs did put on a vast show of mobilization, reporting an improbable 12,000 meetings of “poor peasants” held between January and March 1928 (supposedly encompassing 382,600 attendees).129 All this culminated in the first ever Siberian conference of “poor peasants,” which opened March 1, 1928, in Novosibirsk, with 102 delegates and Union-wide coverage. “We need to clarify for everyone in the village,” one delegate was quoted stating in Pravda, “that the kulak is an evil horder of grain and an enemy of the state.”130 On the front lines, however, in Siberia’s county-level party organizations, apparatchiks ordered that new “troikas” set up to expedite grain procurement should operate solely on the party premises, without revealing their existence, “so as not to cause misinterpretations among the population and among a part of the lower party masses.”131 Stalin wanted wide publicity for the tough coercive measures; the party in rural districts wanted to hide.

  No one embodied the challenge of carrying out a new revolution more than Syrtsov. He had seen Stalin off after a party gathering in Omsk and returned to Western Siberia HQ at Novosibirsk, where on January 31 he reiterated to the Siberian party organization Stalin’s reassurances that the New Economic Policy was not being abrogated.132 Syrtsov was no liberalizer—he had spearheaded the bloody deportation of Cossacks from his native Ukraine during the civil war—but he viewed collectivization as solely for hapless poor peasants who individually just could not get on their feet. At a conference on rural issues the year before Stalin’s visit, Syrtsov had exhorted, “To the middle peasant, the strong farm, and the well off, we say: ‘Accumulate and good luck to you.’”133 Even after Stalin’s visit, Syrtsov voiced faith in the benefits for the state of individual peasant success. As he would tell the Siberian Communists at the next major regional party gathering in March 1928, “When a spider sucks blood from a fly, he also works hard.”134 Apologetics for the kulak, and from a Stalin protégé. Syrtsov was hardly alone. Another top official in Siberia, Roberts Eihe (b. 1890), an ethnic Latvian from a poor farming family who had made his early career in the civil war food procurement commissariat, had echoed Syrtsov’s views at a
regional party conference back in 1927 (“Those comrades who in their fear of the kulak think that by ravaging strong farms we will speed up socialist construction . . . are deeply mistaken”).135 Now, however, Eihe began parroting Stalin’s interpretation of pervasive “kulak sabotage.” Officials like Eihe—who not only possessed strong stomachs for bloodshed against their own people, but could shift with the new political winds—would rise higher still. In fact, Eihe would soon replace Syrtsov as Siberia’s party boss. Zakovsky, too, would further advance his brilliant career.136 Soaring ambition laced with animal fear would serve as a formidable instrument in Stalin’s kit. Still, it would take a lot more than opportunistic top officials to carry out a totalizing transformation of Soviet Eurasia.