Stalin took the floor on the morning of April 10 and asserted that bourgeois specialists in the Shakhty case had been financed by the Russian emigration and Western capitalist organizations, calling such actions “an attempt at economic intervention,” not industrial accidents. With the opposition smashed, he stated, the party had wanted to get complacent, but it needed to remain vigilant. “It would be stupid to assume that international capital will leave us in peace,” he advised. “No, comrades, this is untrue. Classes exist, international capital exists, and it cannot look quietly at the development of a country building socialism.” The Soviet Union faced two paths, he said: either continue conducting a revolutionary policy and organizing the world working class and colonial peoples around the USSR, in which case international capital would obstruct them at every turn; or back down, in which case international capital “would not be against ‘helping’ us transform our socialist country into a ‘nice’ bourgeois republic.” Britain had proposed dividing Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey into two spheres of influence, could the USSR make such a concession? “Uniform voices: No!” The United States had demanded that the USSR renounce the policy of world revolution—could the USSR make such a concession? “Uniform voices: No!” The USSR could establish “friendly” relations with Japan if it agreed to divide Manchuria with her—could the USSR agree to such a concession? “No!” And on Stalin went. Terminate the state monopoly over foreign trade, pay back the imperialist war debts of the tsarist and Provisional Government? “No!” The USSR’s refusal to make such concessions, Stalin averred, had spurred the “economic intervention” by international capital using internal enemies—ergo, Shakhty. It all made sense somehow.
Stalin mentioned that he had seen a play, The Rails Are Buzzing, by the young “proletarian” playwright Vladimir Kirshon (b. 1902). The protagonist was a Communist factory director, promoted from the workers, who, when he tried to reorganize the giant factory, discovered that he needed to reorganize people, including himself. “Go see this play, and you’ll see that the worker-director is an idealist martyr who should be supported in every way,” Stalin advised, adding that “The NEPmen lie in wait for the worker-director, he is undermined by this or that bourgeois specialist, his own wife attacks him, and despite all that, he sustains the struggle.”216
The plenum voted a resolution in verbatim support of Stalin’s Shakhty line on foreign “preparation for intervention and war against the USSR.”217 The party police machinery fell right in line: Ukraine OGPU chief Balytsky secretly wrote to Yagoda that the Shakhty interrogations had fully substantiated “the conclusions of comrade Stalin in his report to the plenum” concerning “preparation of an intervention.”218 Kaganovich, party boss in Ukraine, conveyed the same conclusion to Stalin, and urged that the party “strengthen the role of the GPU” in the industrial trusts by inserting “OGPU plenipotentiaries, something like the [self-standing] GPU organs for transport.”219 Kaganovich knew Stalin only too well.
Stalin, Leninist to the core, pressed his offensive relentlessly on Shakhty, but on grain procurements executed a tactical retreat.220 His position still depended on holding a majority of politburo votes, and he made concessions to Rykov—who after all, accepted Shakhty—in order to retain the votes of Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, and Kalinin. The plenum’s resolution on the village mentioned “kulak influence” on procurements but stipulated that “at the bottom of these difficulties lay the sharp violation of market equilibrium”—Rykov’s line. Complaints were pouring in about excesses related to the emergency measures: by mid-April, arrests totaled 16,000 Union-wide, including 1,864 under Article 58 (counterrevolution), and the plenum resolution terminated application of Article 107 to farmers for not selling grain.221 More than that: officials who had punished non-kulaks (“violations of the class line”) were themselves to be punished; some were tried and even executed.222 It was a stunning reversal.
Lower-level party officials who scoured newspapers for subtle differences in the published speeches of top leaders had begun to whisper about a schism between Stalin and Rykov. “I think that oppositionists (concealed), who always infiltrate meetings of party actives, write of Rykov and Stalin factions,” Stalin wrote on a note to Voroshilov at a politburo meeting in April 1928.223 That may have been the same meeting (April 23) at which Stalin pressed the issue of forming giant “state farms”—new farms where there had been none before—on virgin lands in northern Kazakhstan, the Urals, Southern Siberia, the North Caucasus, even Ukraine. He took as his model the large-scale mechanized farm (95,000 acres) of Thomas Campbell in Montana, perhaps the largest and most productive single farm in the world.224 When Kalinin, a state farm proponent, observed that they would be supplemental to existing farms (which would eventually be collectivized), Stalin interjected his approval (twice).225 Stalin’s retreat, in other words, was only partial. He had gotten the plenum to recognize the party’s right to reintroduce emergency measures, should the situation call for them. After the plenum, he told the Moscow party organization (April 13) that although “the crisis has been surmounted,” if “capitalist elements try again to ‘play tricks,’” Article 107 would be back.226
Stalin did not have long to wait: April grain procurement numbers would be just one fifth those of March and one tenth those of February; peasants were avoiding state officials and selling at the bazaars for five times the state-offered price. The margin for error in the Soviet economy had diminished as a result of regime missteps and the larger contradiction between a market economy and a socialist regime. Some regions—especially Ukraine and the North Caucasus—had suffered drought and crop failure. In northern Kazakhstan poor weather and a poor harvest had induced many households to try to obtain food for their own consumption at markets, which pushed prices up; but when the harvest collection began, grain for sale disappeared from the markets. Checkpoints had been established on the roads to block grain from being brought into these poor harvest regions, while better-off peasants—the ones who had grain—refused to sell at the low set prices, but they were afraid to sell it at the market high prices. Some poor peasants were asking why kulaks were not being squeezed more.227 A series of conferences was hastily convened with provincial party bosses, beginning on April 24, with Molotov and Mikoyan chairing and orchestrating: some regional bosses called for renewed application of Article 107 and a reduced definition of kulak from someone who possessed thirty-six tons of grain to twelve or even seven, and criticized proposals for peasant amnesty and prosecution of officials who had managed to secure grain. One provincial secretary demanded an end to the press discussions of “excesses,” which he claimed had produced “a demobilized mood.”228 Molotov, parroting Stalin as ever, told them that “often kulaks write Moscow in the guise of poor peasants. You see, kulaks know better than anyone else how to maneuver around Moscow.”229 Not all fell in line: some regional party bosses expressed well-founded skepticism that the required grain was out there for the taking, while behind the scenes a fight was on to steer policy away from coercion.230 But under the pressure of falling procurements already on April 26, the politburo voted to reinstate the application of Article 107 to growers.231
The year 1928 was the year of hoping against hope that Stalin would back down, but evidence of his resolve continued to be visible everywhere. Secret police country mood summaries, right on cue, increasingly moved away from mentions of a price scissors, a manufactured goods deficit, or other facts, to evocations of “sabotage” and “class enemies.”232 Sometimes the signals of Stalin’s muscle flexing were comically unintentional. For example, local branches of the OGPU sent some political mood summaries to party committees and soviets in their regions, but on May 16, 1928, Yagoda sent a circular designated “absolutely secret” lamenting how “in the political mood summaries circulated to local institutions, some referred derogatively to functionaries by name,” which created the “false impression” that these functionaries were under close surveillance for what they wer
e saying and to whom. “It is necessary to remove not just all mention of functionaries in the external mood summaries but to avoid this even in those summaries of an internal character.”233 Regime functionaries under surveillance by the secret police—a false impression, obviously.
SHOW TRIAL
Nothing had ever erupted in the Soviet Union quite like the spectacle of the Shakhty trial, which opened on May 18, 1928, in the marble-walled Hall of Columns of the House of Trade Unions and lasted forty-one days.234 It was the first major Union-wide public trial since 1922 but far exceeded that affair. Other trials in 1928 that were also designed to instill political lessons, such as a military tribunal hearing about an alleged Anglo-Finnish “spy ring” in the Leningrad border zone, failed to acquire anything remotely resembling Shakhty’s intensity and significance.235 It was staged in Moscow for maximum exposure; nearly 100 handpicked foreign and Soviet journalists reported on the proceedings.236 More than 30,000 Soviet inhabitants would be led through the red-draped courtroom (the party would claim 100,000)—workers, Communist Youth League activists, out-of-town delegations. “Crowds poured in noisily and jockeyed for advantageous seats,” wrote one American foreign correspondent. “The boxes gradually filled with diplomats, influential officials and other privileged spectators—much bowing and hand-shaking.”237 Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief judge, stood out in his suit and pince-nez; Nikolai Krylenko, the chief prosecutor, wore a hunting jacket, riding breeches, and puttees. Shakhty was filmed for newsreels and a stand-alone documentary, and Krylenko’s shaven head glistened under the Jupiter lights.238 Radio broadcast the proceedings. Shakhty electrified the country.
Capitalists were gone, of course, so the prerevolutionary engineers and managers had to assume their roles.239 Of the fifty-three defendants, twenty pleaded guilty, eleven admitted the accusations partially, and the rest maintained their innocence. Those who denied the charges did not conceal their distaste for the Soviet regime, or their disbelief in the dream of building socialism but argued that being professionals, they could still perform their work conscientiously; their admission of hostile views, however, was taken as proof of engagement in sabotage. Krylenko quoted purported worker statements about abuse suffered at the hands of “vampires of the working class.”240 He “played to the gallery from start to finish,” one pro-Soviet foreign correspondent would later recall. “He never missed a chance to harangue the police-picked audience and draw their applause. There were times when some of the defendants applauded along with the cheering crowd.”241 But details in the confessions offered different dates for the establishment of the counterrevolutionary “organization.” The choreography was further disturbed when the German technician Max Maier (b. 1876) told Vyshinsky that he had signed his confession only because he was exhausted from the nightly interrogations and did not know Russian (so he did not know what he signed). When Vyshinsky asked Maier to confirm the guilt of the Soviet inhabitant Abram Bashkin, Maier called Bashkin the most conscientious engineer he knew in the Soviet Union, absolutely devoted to the fate of the imported turbines; Bashkin, sitting in the defendant cage, suddenly shouted out that his own earlier confession (minutes earlier) had been a lie. Vyshinsky declared a recess. Some forty minutes later, Bashkin reconfirmed his earlier self-incrimination.242
No one who was innocent would confess, it was widely assumed. Underneath the manipulations, moreover, lay concerns that were partly verifiable. Back in March 1927, the head of the foreign concession department for the air force was arrested, accused of deliberately buying poor-quality airplane parts from Junkers, and at inflated cost, netting the German firm a handsome excess profit, pocketing a hefty kickback, and damaging Soviet security. The official also was accused of divulging the state of Soviet aviation industry to German personnel in his private apartment, something that among professionals might look like shop talk but did cross the line over to espionage. Two months after his arrest, the air force foreign concession head was executed along with alleged accomplices. Merely out of mundane pecuniary motives, tsarist-era specialists, colluding with foreigners, could take advantage of the technical ignorance or bribability of poorly educated Soviet supervisory personnel. Of course, a preternaturally distrustful Stalin assumed that hostile class interests, too, motivated them. Either way, bourgeois engineers wielded potentially far-reaching power, and Stalin saw little recourse other than severe intimidation.243
The central figures of what was dubbed the Moscow Center were Lazar Rabinovich (b. 1860); Solomon Imenitov (b. 1865), the Donetsk Coal Trust representative in Moscow, who was accused of failing to report his knowledge of counterrevolutionary activity; and Nikolai Skorutto (b. 1877), an official in the Supreme Council of the Economy who was returning from the United States via Berlin and read about the arrests of his colleagues yet had continued on to Moscow anyway. Skorutto informed the court that he had confessed, but, according to a journalist witness, “the courtroom was electrified by an unearthly shriek from the box where the relatives of prisoners sat. . . . ‘Kolya,’ the woman cried, ‘Kolya darling, don’t lie. Don’t! You know you’re innocent.’” Skorutto collapsed. Vyshinsky recessed. After ten minutes, Skorutto spoke again, stating that he had decided to withdraw his confession. “I had hoped that this court would be more lenient with me if I pleaded guilty and accused the others,” he stated.244 Rabinovich, like Imenitov, denied the charges. “I am absolutely not guilty, I repent for nothing, I shall beg for nothing,” he stated. None other than Lenin had tasked Rabinovich, as head of the entire Soviet coal industry, with restoring the civil war‒ruined coal mines. “I have behind me fifty years of complete trust, respect and honor, as a result of my public and private life. I have been open with everyone. To the extent of my strength, I served the cause of the proletariat, which has viewed me with full trust and helped create a good working atmosphere for me. My work was conscientious to the end. I knew nothing of sabotage.”245 But Rabinovich had graduated from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute and begun his career in 1884; he was also a former Cadet deputy to the tsarist Duma—prima facie evidence of inimical class interests. Rabinovich requested a death sentence. He got six years: “I sleep as soundly in prison as in my own bed. I have a clear conscience and I have nothing to fear.”246 (He would die in prison.)
German ambassador von Brockdorff-Rantzau, whose height was said to help make him the “most conspicuous” dignitary in the foreigners’ section, was suffering from throat cancer, but he refused to depart Moscow for urgent medical treatment (he did give up cognac).247 The count was angry that no French or Polish nationals, only Germans, were in the dock, and lamented that his own advocacy for maintaining relations through thick and thin had made possible such abuse of his country for Soviet ends. Still, Izvestiya (May 29), at least, tried to ratchet down Stalin’s aggressiveness, writing that “the German Reich does not sit in the dock, neither does German industry nor German companies as such, only individual German citizens.” The German elections that Stalin had eyed when he approved the Germans’ arrests took place during the trial. The Social Democrats emerged the top vote getters at 9.2 million (30 percent of those cast), while the German Communists also gained, taking 3.2 million, cracking the 10 percent barrier, and coming in fourth place. The Beer Hall Putsch ban against the Nazis had been lifted, but they polled just 2.6 percent. On May 31, Voroshilov wrote to Stalin that the German high command was recommending that eight Soviet officers again this year visit for studies; the Germans would also want six observers at Soviet maneuvers, including General von Blomberg. Voroshilov interpreted this as a desire on the part of Germany to maintain surveillance over the growing power of the Red Army, and wrote that “the Germans consider the Red Army powerful enough to manage a confrontation with Poland and Romania.” He recommended accepting the German offer, and appended a list of proposed Red Army officers for reciprocal travel. Stalin agreed.248 None of this brought him any closer to acquiring financing for industrialization and state-of-the-art technology.
Spring’s renewed wave of coerced grain procurements provoked sharp price increases, long queues, and pockets of starvation. Rationing loomed for the big cities.249 Trying to convey the despair and anger when armed squads, for the second time in a short period, had come looking for “hidden” grain, an official in the Urals reported the story of an old man who had hung himself: “His son had showed the commission all their reserves. They left them, 14 people, just 2 poods [72 pounds] of grain. The 80-year-old decided he would be one mouth to feed too many. . . . I am worried most about the children. What will be their impression of Soviet power when its representatives bring only fear and tears to their homes?”250
The OGPU directed its village informants—who numbered 8,596 Union-wide—to pay close attention to “anti-Soviet agitation” at private village pubs and any queues of women.251 Some localities had begun improvising rationing of what food they had to hand. Syrtsov was writing from Siberia (May 24, 1928) that peasants had no more grain and that Siberia’s own cities might face starvation.252 Stalin dispatched Stanisław Kosior, who took along his aide Aleksandr Poskryobyshev—soon to become Stalin’s top aide—to Novosibirsk. At the June 3 Siberian party committee’s “grain symposium,” for which officials had been summoned from every Siberian region as well as Kazakhstan and the Urals, Kosior emphasized the need to keep pressuring the kulaks with Article 107.253 Country-wide, grain procurement in the agricultural year through June 1928 would end up down only slightly from the previous year (10.382 instead of 10.59 million tons).254 But the late April resumption of “extraordinary measures,” on top of the drought, had further disorganized internal grain markets.255 By June, the regime would again begin to import grain. Most troubling, many farmers were unable to acquire seed grain to sow.256 Others were simply refusing to plant, despite secret circulars and press exhortations.257
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