As Stalin traveled from Barnaul and Rubtsovsk up to Omsk, and then pivoted eastward to Krasnoyarsk (at Syrtsov’s suggestion, but in Eihe’s company), his telegrams to Moscow continued to indicate progress on the immediate aim (“The procurement has livened up. A serious breakthrough should begin in late January or early February”). But rather than citing the serious attitude of local officialdom, as before, he stressed how he had “wound everyone up, the way it’s supposed to be done.”137 In Krasnoyarsk very late on the evening of January 31 he met party higher-ups summoned from around Eastern Siberia—in the district secret police facility. Stalin exhorted them on grain procurements, but also expressly linked the imperative “to curb the kulak” to the circumstance of “capitalist encirclement,” and observed that “the future war could break out suddenly, it will be long and demand immense forces.” The meeting concluded around 6:00 a.m. on February 1. Stalin telegrammed Mikoyan (still in the North Caucasus) to increase the grain targets for February in Siberia from 235,000 to 325,000 tons. “This will spur procurements,” he wrote. “And now it is necessary.”138 On February 2, Stalin set out in the direction of Moscow.139 The next day, Krasnoyarsk newspapers summoned the populace to “strike the kulak.”140 Before he was back in the capital, Siberia’s “grain troika” had raised their own February target to 400,000 tons. What to expect locally in Stalin’s absence, however, remained uncertain. The region’s February procurements turned out to be 1.5 times greater than January’s, but not 400,000 tons. March quotas would be set at 375,000 tons, but Siberia officials were confident of being able to deliver only 217,000 tons a month.141
Stalin arrived back in Moscow on February 6, 1928, after three weeks on the road. Back at Old Square he could follow the repercussions from his trip not just via party channels but also secret police reports. On February 10, for example, the OGPU submitted a political mood summary ominously noting that in Siberia “party members relate to the measures for strengthening grain procurements in many districts almost no differently from how the rest of the mass of peasants do.” Names were named, county by county, of those refusing to take part in the coercive turn, and some were quoted to the effect that the opposition was right: the Central Committee was leading the country to crisis.142 On February 13, Stalin dispatched yet another secret circular from Old Square to party organizations across the Union allowing that “we are exiting the crisis of grain procurement,” but asserting that the party “had neglected the struggle against the kulak and the kulak danger” and had turned out to be full of people who wanted “to live in peace with the kulak.” Ominously, he called them “Communists” in quotation marks. He demanded that they work “not for the sake of their jobs but for the sake of the revolution,” and that top party bosses “check and decisively purge the party, soviet, and cooperative organizations during the course of the procurement campaign, expel alien and hanger-on elements, and replace them with tested party and verified nonparty functionaries.”143 But if the party was so strongly under the influence of NEP capitalism and kulaks, where would the reliable cadres come from?
Still more confounding to the regime, rural conflict was turning out to be not class based but mostly generational and gender based; the regime indirectly admitted as much by complaining that what it called the middle and even poor peasants were “under the sway” of the kulaks.144 Fomenting major “class warfare” in the village looked like it would require forcing in outsiders. Already in connection with Stalin’s Siberia trip, about 100 worker-Communist militants from Moscow and Leningrad had been mobilized to Siberia to galvanize shakedowns of the kulak. Union-wide, Stalin soon mobilized into grain procurement some 4,000 urban party officials from the provincial and county level, “the staunchest and most experienced Bolsheviks,” as well as 26,000 “activists” from the lowest levels.145 Those sent in found some local counterparts, too. Oleg Barabashev, an Odessa-born Communist Youth League activist and journalist (b. 1904) who had been relocated from Leningrad to Siberia, wrote in the newspaper Siberia (which he edited) that “Stalin is right in saying that the party is ready for the slogan of dekulakization.” Barabashev meant the worker elements in the party. Observing a party cell meeting at a railroad junction near Omsk, he wrote of working-class fear in the face of shortages and price inflation, and of their yearning to see arrests of “kulak speculators.”146 Barabashev might have also pointed out a strong appetite for the heads of tsarist-era engineers and specialists who continued to enjoy conspicuous privilege and power. To indulge these resentments, for Stalin, proved irresistible, and his policy opponents proved unable to stop him.
RYKOV’S DILEMMA
Alexei Rykov, who ran the government on a day-to-day basis, did not travel out to a region to forcibly collect grain. (Neither did Tomsky or Bukharin.) Rykov regarded the NEP, for all its shortcomings, as preferable to what he viewed as the destabilizing alternative. Of peasant stock and an ethnic Russian from Saratov, where Stolypin had served as governor, Rykov (b. 1881) had never been other than a Bolshevik and occupied the position that Lenin had, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. (Uncannily, Rykov had failed to complete the same course of studies for a law degree at Kazan University as Lenin had.)147 Rykov was nearly Stalin’s age and a resident of the same building in the Kremlin, but the two did not really socialize. Rykov had never wavered during the infighting against the opposition, but although he had gone along with Stalin’s coercive measures to fill state grain coffers, he was taken aback at Stalin’s post-Siberia-trip inclination to maintain the “emergency-ism.”148 After all, Trotsky and the United opposition had just been eviscerated, was Stalin now going to implement their program?149 In arguing for repeal of the coercive measures, Rykov could point to Stalin’s own energetic actions, which had averted the immediate crisis: procurements for February would turn out to be the highest ever for a single month (1.9 million tons), allowing overall procurements for the 1927–28 harvest to leap ahead of the previous year’s. Rykov similarly fought the increasingly unrealistic industrialization goals pressed by Kuibyshev. On March 7, 1928, following a politburo meeting at which Molotov, a proxy for Stalin, attacked Rykov’s draft industrial-financial plan for 1927–28 as insufficiently ambitious, Rykov took a page out of Stalin’s book: he sent a letter of resignation to Stalin, Molotov, and Bukharin. Rykov asked to be reassigned to the Urals, the way Stalin had asked to be sent to godforsaken Turukhansk, Siberia, where he had once been an exile. The same day Rykov sent a second letter, to show he meant business.150
Stalin did not try to seize upon Rykov’s resignation to rid himself of an ostensible potential rival. Stalin relied greatly upon Rykov, particularly in managing the economy, no small assignment. Rather, just as Rykov had done for him, Stalin sought to mollify the government head. “One cannot pose the issue like that: we need to gather, have a little to drink, and talk heart to heart,” he wrote in response to Rykov’s resignation letter. “That’s how we’ll resolve all misunderstandings.” Not only Bukharin but even Molotov rejected the possibility of Rykov’s resignation. Rykov, it seems, had made his point.151 His authority was not going to be flouted on the big economic decisions, particularly regarding industry and the budget—or they could find themselves someone else to shoulder the immense responsibilities of the chief executive. Rykov’s political weaknesses were many, however, beginning with the circumstance that a crucial member of his voting bloc, Bukharin, was not a person of strong character or perspicacity, and ending with the fact that Stalin had many ways to watch over and checkmate Rykov, but Rykov, other than by threatening to resign, had no real levers over Stalin.
Despite the politburo’s decision-making power, none of its members had the wherewithal to ensure that Stalin was implementing its formal decisions (and not implementing others). Between meetings, Stalin had formal responsibility for most important matters, such as supervision of all party organizations and state bodies; in practice, his prerogatives were actually far wider, given the regime’s geograph
y of power, communications system, and hypersecrecy.152 Mikoyan relates an incident from the late 1920s when he fought Stalin over a course of action: the politburo backed Stalin’s position, yet the decision was never implemented, apparently because Stalin had changed his mind; the politburo, however, never repealed the formal decision.153 On another occasion, Stalin had chosen not to inform Rykov of riots in the Caucasus, which lasted several weeks, until after he had put them down.154 Stalin dominated all official channels and established informal sources of information, while his personal functionaries performed tasks often not formally specified.155 No one else could verify which materials had been received or gathered by the Central Committee yet not made available for politburo members or what instructions had been given to various agencies in the name of the Central Committee. Above all, Stalin alone had the means to secretly monitor the other top officials for their own “security” and to recruit their subordinates as informants, because he alone, in the name of the Central Committee, liaisoned with the OGPU.
A TOWN CALLED “MINE SHAFTS” (SHAKHTY)
The police connection detonated just three days after Rykov’s rejected resignation, on March 10, 1928, when Pravda, in an unsigned front-page editorial, trumpeted how the OGPU had unmasked a counterrevolutionary plot by “bourgeois specialists” trained in the time of the tsar who were said to be working on behalf of the prerevolutionary “capitalist” mine owners now living abroad, aiming to sabotage Soviet power and restore capitalism.156 Their alleged sabotage had occurred in a small mining settlement known as Shakhty, or “mine shafts,” population 33,000.157 But Shakhty’s collieries were adjacent to Ukraine’s strategic Donetsk basin and the “investigation” would embroil top economic officials in Ukraine and even Moscow as well as relations with Germany. Rykov, in an overview of the Shakhty case in Pravda (March 11), stood behind all the charges, but he also warned against excessive “specialist baiting.” He further wrote that “the question of the grain crisis has been taken off the agenda.” But for Stalin, Shakhty and the “emergency-ism” in the village were of a piece. He was unleashing a new topsy-turvy of class warfare to expand the regime’s social base and his own political leverage in order to accelerate industrialization and to collectivize agriculture. Shakhty’s origins had come to Stalin at Sochi, on the cliffs overlooking the Black Sea, the one place he managed to relax, in the company of fat packets of top secret documents and his male service personnel. One person Stalin saw there was the long-standing North Caucasus OGPU boss, Yefim Yevdokimov, who bore responsibility for the dictator’s security cocoon during the annual stays down south, a mouth-watering opportunity.
Yevdokimov was a phenomenon. He had been born (1891) in a small town in the Kazakh steppe with two churches and a mosque, where his peasant father served in the tsarist army, but had grown up in Chita, Siberia, where he completed five years of elementary school. He had gone on to become an anarchist syndicalist, then made the leap to Moscow, participating in the protracted revolutionary coup there in fall 1917. The next year, after the regime moved the capital to Moscow, Yevdokimov joined the Bolsheviks and the Red Army. In summer 1919, Dzierzynski named him head of all police Special Departments in the Red Army. Yevdokimov was soon dispatched to civil war Ukraine, where he distinguished himself in massacres of White Guards. At the banquet meeting upon his departure, Vsevolod Balytsky, Yevdokimov’s replacement, toasted him as the “Republic’s first secret department operative” and handed him his second Order of the Red Banner for “energetic combat against banditism.”158 Yevdokimov praised those present as a “well-organized machine,” calling himself merely “a lever of that machine, regulating its operation.” When transferred to the vast North Caucasus territory in 1923, Yevdokimov had taken with him to Rostov a brother band who worshipped him as a benevolent godfather or Cossack chieftain (ataman).159 Unlike at those desk jobs back at Lubyanka headquarters, in the North Caucasus the civil war had never ended and Yevdokimov’s life entailed relentless, atrocity-laden campaigns against “bandits” in the rugged mountains. After “mass operations” to confiscate some 20,000 rifles in Chechnya, a similar number in Ingushetia and Ossetia, and more than 12,000 in Karachaevo-Cherskesk and Balkaro-Kabarda, Yevdokimov had written to Yagoda that “the people are armed to the teeth and profoundly dark.”160 The North Caucasus trained a generation of GPU operatives, as well as rank-and-file border guards, in hellacious counterinsurgency techniques against civilians.
Yevdokimov had brought a gift to Stalin in Sochi back in summer 1927. Stalin “as usual, asked me how things were,” Yevdokimov would later recall at a big meeting in Moscow. “I told him in particular about this affair”—the tale of a “counterrevolutionary plot” in the city of Vladikavkaz. “He listened carefully and asked detailed questions. At the end of the conversation I said the following: ‘For me it is clear that we are dealing with people who are consciously undermining production, but it is not clear to me who their leader is. Either it is the general staffs [of foreign powers], in particular the Polish general staff, or it is the company that in the past owned these enterprises, and that has an interest in undermining production, i.e., the Belgian company.’” Stalin, according to Yevdokimov, “said to me, ‘When you finish your investigation, send the materials to the Central Committee’”—meaning bypass normal OGPU channels. “I returned, assembled the underworld gang [bratva]—I apologize for the expression—that is, the comrades [laughter], and I said, get moving.”161 Emboldened by his face-to-face sessions with Stalin, Yevdokimov compiled a photograph album with mug shots of seventy-nine civil war “White Guardists” who lived in the North Caucasus territory, which he sent to the local party boss requesting authorization to liquidate them, not because of anything they had done, but because of what they might do. It was “very important to annihilate them,” Yevdokimov wrote to the party boss, because they could serve as “a real force against us, in the event of an international conflict.”162 Yevdokimov’s photo-album approach to fast-track executions just in case constituted an innovation. He won a nearly unprecedented third Order of the Red Banner. Meanwhile, the city where Stalin had staged his own discovery of a counterrevolutionary plot by “class aliens” and executed nearly two dozen “spies” and “saboteurs” in 1918, Tsaritsyn, had since been renamed Stalingrad.
Yevdokimov’s concocted Vladikavkaz case fizzled, but he delivered to Stalin another case, the one from the coal town of Shakhty, which had originated in the atmosphere of the 1927 war scare, when the OGPU reexamined industrial mishaps with an eye toward possible sabotage. This time, some “confessions” were forthcoming.163 Shakhty case materials fell into Stalin’s hands not long after he had returned from his trip to Siberia and confirmed his suspicions that the kulaks were running wild and the rural Communist party was in bed with class enemies.164 On March 2, 1928, the same day he received a long report on Shakhty with a cover letter from Yagoda, the dictator received Yevdokimov, in Yagoda’s presence.165 On March 8, the politburo approved a public trial.166 The next day, a group of the politburo examined the draft indictments, which they completely rewrote (much of the document is crossed out), altering dates and other alleged facts. After the public announcement of the accusations, Nikolai Krylenko, the USSR procurator general, would be dispatched to Rostov, the third biggest city in the RSFSR, and Kharkov, the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, and given no more than a month to finish all work.167 The regime would settle upon fifty-three defendants, a majority of whom (thirty-five) were mining engineers educated before the revolution; others were mechanics or electricians. The trial was ordered transferred from the Donetsk coal region to Moscow for maximum effect.
Shakhty represented a jumble of fact, fabrication, and twisted laws. An investigation of Shakhty’s party organization found it inattentive to industry (its main assignment) and preoccupied with infighting between factions from the Don (ethnic Russian) and Kuban (ethnic Ukrainian), with the latter predominant.168 Still, by 1927–28 the Donetsk Coal Trust, headquarter
ed in Ukraine’s capital, had managed to extract 2.5 million tons of coal, exceeding the 1913 levels, an impressive recovery from the civil war collapse. While mechanized extraction accounted for 15.8 percent of coal output Union-wide, the proportion reached 45 percent in the Shakhty-Donetsk district. These were significant achievements, possible only thanks to skilled engineers and managers as well as workers. At the same time, expensive imported equipment was often used improperly, partly because it fit poorly with existing technology or because skilled installers and operators were lacking. The single-minded drive for coal output, alongside incompetent organization, meant that safety procedures were being violated, mines improperly laid and flooded, and explosions occurring. Some Shakhty defendants admitted lowering worker pay and raising work norms—which was regime policy—and there were links to the former mine owners: the Soviet regime had recruited them, in emigration, to lease their properties back and revive them. One accused mining engineer admitted having received “foreign funds” to blow up a mine, but the mine in question (Novo-Azov) had been detonated in 1921 by directive of the Coal Trust, which had lacked sufficient capacity to restore all the mines and sealed some for safety reasons. Rumor and gossip lent additional credence to the charges. The Polish ambassador was convinced German specialists were conducting espionage (information gathering) on behalf of Germany, albeit not sabotage, but the Lithuania ambassador told his German counterpart that a large Polish-financed organization had carried out sabotage near Shakhty.169
Sabotage under Soviet law did not have to be deliberate: if someone’s directives or actions resulted in mishaps, then counterrevolutionary intent could be assumed.170 But in Shakhty the regime was alleging intent, which meant the OGPU had to get the defendants to confess, a high-order challenge for which the secret police employed solitary confinement on unbearably cold floors, forced sleeplessness for nights on end (“interrogations” by “conveyor” method), and promises of lighter sentences. This produced comic pirouettes: when one defendant who confessed to everything predicted to his defense lawyer that he would be imprisoned for just a few months, the lawyer informed him he could get the death penalty, which induced a recantation. But the “investigator” refused to record the change of heart, while a codefendant worried the recantation would end up destroying them both. (The defense lawyer resigned.)171 Stalin insisted that the evil intent was on orders of international paymasters, which raised the interrogators’ challenge still higher, for the trial was going to be public and visible to foreigners. OGPU chief Mezynski, suffering intense pain as well as bouts of flu, would soon depart for Matsesta to undergo sulfur-bath treatments; it was not his problem.172 Yagoda had to take charge in Moscow. Neither he nor Yevdokimov were stupid: they understood there was no deliberate sabotage.173 Still, Stalin’s pressure was intense, and Yevdokimov and Yagoda gave Stalin what he wanted, from stories of “a powerful counterrevolutionary organization operating for many years” in the Donetsk Coal Trust to “the collusion of German and Polish nationals.”174
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