Stalin, Volume 1
Page 98
Stalin would not be deterred. On May 28, 1928, he appeared at the Institute of Red Professors, located in the former Tsarevich Nicholas School, at Ostozhenka, 53; invites had also gone out to select students of the Sverdlov Communist University, the Russian Association of the Social Science Research Institute, and the Communist Academy, with no mention of the name of the lecturer, which heightened anticipation. In preparation, “cleaning women had given an extra wash and polish to the floors, workmen had cleaned up the courtyard, the librarians had displayed the best books, chimneysweepers had climbed on the roofs, and professors had lined up at the barber’s,” according to one young Chechen Communist at the Institute, who added that authorities had hung a full-length oil portrait of Stalin in the hall, but “the head, crudely cut out with a blunt instrument, was lying nearby on the floor.” The vandals had stuck a sign to Stalin’s painted chest, composed of letters cut from a newspaper: “The Proletariat has nothing to lose but Stalin’s head. Proletarians of all lands, rejoice!”258
A replacement portrait of Stalin seated next to Lenin at Gorki in 1922 was quickly installed. It is unclear who had perpetrated the vandalism. Trotsky and the Left had been enormously popular at the Institute; most student leftists had been expelled. What the students may not have realized, however, was that Stalin was about to make the most aggressive leftist speech of his life. Titled “On the Grain Front,” Stalin’s lecture reprised the heretofore unknown brave new world of his January 20 peroration in Novosibirsk.
Stalin again outlined a stirring vision of an immediate, wholesale agricultural modernization to large-scale farms—not of the individual kulak variety, but collectivized. Where no farms currently existed to collectivize, there would be newly founded massive scale state farms. “Stalin spoke quietly, monotonously, and with long pauses,” the Chechen Communist recalled. “Of course, Stalin had a Georgian accent, which became especially noticeable when he got nervous.” He “spoke for about two hours without stopping. He frequently drank water from a glass. Once, when he lifted the carafe, it was empty. Laughter erupted in the hall. A person in the presidium handed Stalin a new carafe. Stalin gulped down nearly a full glass, then turned to the audience and said, with a mischievous laugh: ‘There, you see, he who laughs last, laughs best! Anyway, I have welcome news for you: I have finished.’ Applause broke out.” After a ten-minute recess, Stalin answered written questions, some of which were irreverent: one student evidently inquired about the suicide note of the Trotsky supporter Adolf Joffe, another about why the OGPU had informants in the ranks of the party (these went unanswered). The assembled students also asked about the implications of Stalin’s speech for the NEP; Stalin answered with reference to Lenin’s dialectical, tactical teachings. “It turned out we were present at an historic event,” the Chechen Communist, in hindsight, would note. “Stalin for the first time set out his plan for the future ‘collective farm revolution.’”259 The speech was published in Pravda (June 2, 1928).260
Youth, alongside the working class, constituted Stalin’s core audience for the accelerated leap to socialism. Membership in the Communist Youth League had risen from 22,000 (in late 1918) to more than 2 million (of nearly 30 million eligible), making it a mass organization. About one third of party members by the late 1920s had once been Youth League members.261 Stalin’s apparatus was dispatching armed Youth League militants, among others, to villages, where they measured “surpluses” by the eye, smashed villagers on the head with revolvers, and locked peasants in latrines until they yielded their grain stores. In parallel, police arrests under Article 107 and Article 58 spiked again in May and June, provoking the onset of a spontaneous “dekulakization.” Many peasants fled to nearby cities or other regions; some even joined collective farms, fearful they would starve otherwise. But some peasants began to organize resistance. “The grain reserves in the village will not be turned over to the government,” resolved a group of peasants in Western Siberia’s Biysk county, where Stalin had secretly visited earlier in the year. Party officials began to try to prevent peasants from meeting, but in Biysk a poor peasant went to the rural soviet and told the chairman, “Give grain to us poor peasants. If not, we will take it by force. We will go first of all to the party secretary, and if he does not give us grain voluntarily, we will kill him. We must take all the grain and establish a clean soviet power, without Communists.” Elsewhere others were reported to say, “Let’s get our pikes and become partisans.”262 Rumors spread of a foreign invasion, and the return of the Whites. “The peasantry is under the yoke of the bandit Stalin,” read one letter received by Rykov’s government in June 1928. “The poorest peasant and worker is your enemy.”263
The siege Stalin was imposing generated evidence of the need for a siege, as the OGPU reported spreading “kulak” moods, Ukrainian “nationalist” moods, and “peasant” moods in the army.264 The general crisis that Rykov feared was unfolding.
Stalin had stopped speaking to Bukharin, just as he often refused to speak with his wife, Nadya—a silent treatment, which, in Bukharin’s case, too, baffled and infuriated someone who thought he was close to Stalin.265 In May and again in early June 1928, Bukharin sent letters, addressed to “Koba,” trying to get through. “I consider the country’s internal and external situation very difficult,” he wrote, adding that he could discern no thought-through plan of action, whether on taxes, manufactured goods, prices, or imports, nothing. Already the next harvest was upon the country. Incredulous, Bukharin stressed what he regarded as the scandalous fact that Jan Sten, a respected Marxist theorist, was saying that “the 15th Party Congress had been mistaken, that the Trotskyites had turned out to be right and were vindicated by history.” In fact, Bukharin wrote, “our extraordinary measures (necessary) are, ideologically, already being transformed, growing into a new political line.” He concluded by suggesting that after the upcoming Comintern Congress and Chinese Communist Party Congress in Moscow, “I will be ready to go wherever, without any fight, without any noise, and without any struggle.” Bukharin’s letter revealed that he just could not believe that Stalin would irrevocably alter the entire strategic landscape in a sharp leftist direction. “Collective farms, which will only be built over several years, will not carry us,” Bukharin wrote. “We will be unable to provide them with working capital and machines right away.”266
Stalin did not respond.267 But a row broke out at a politburo meeting on June 27 when Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov declared party policy in rupture, and Molotov denounced their declaration as “antiparty,” an ominous formulation.268 At this or perhaps at the follow-up politburo meeting, where Stalin formed a compromise commission with himself and Rykov, the worst confrontation yet between Stalin and Bukharin may have taken place. Stalin finally had deigned to receive Bukharin in his office. “You and I are the Himalayas—the others are non-entities,” Stalin flattered him, according to the memoirs of Bukharin’s wife. Then, at a politburo meeting, when Stalin laced into Bukharin, the latter divulged Stalin’s flattery of him, including the line that the others were “non-entities.” Livid, Stalin shouted, “You lie. You invented this story to poison the other members of the politburo against me.”269
SECOND TACTICAL RETREAT (JULY 1928 PLENUM)
Peasant anger continued to smolder. “The highest level of government is based on swindling—that’s the opinion of everybody down below,” one peasant wrote on July 4, 1928, to the Peasant Newspaper, adding, “The death of Comrade Lenin was a shame. He died early, unable to carry this business through to the end. So, you government comrades, in the case of war, don’t rely on the peasants too much. . . . Our grain goes to feed England, France, and Germany, while the peasants sit and go hungry for a week.”270 That same day another joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission opened, with its first few days given over to Comintern affairs. Then, on July 6, Mikoyan delivered a grim report. Foreign trade was in “an extraordinarily strained situation, more strained than in the
last two years,” he observed. Oil production substantially exceeded domestic consumption, but oil exports could not generate the revenues that grain had (nor could timber, furs, sugar, and cotton exports). Grain exports had undergirded the tsarist industrialization spurt. Mikoyan grimly noted that perhaps no more than one third of tsarist export levels might be realistically attainable, unless Soviet harvests miraculously grew by leaps and bounds. 271 Disquiet coursed through the upper party ranks.272
Later that night, at 1:30 a.m. on July 7, Andrei Vyshinsky read out the Shakhty trial verdicts in the Hall of Columns. Four of the fifty-three defendants were acquitted, including the two Germans Ernst Otto and Max Maier. Four more were judged guilty but given suspended sentences, including Wilhelm Badstieber (who was acquitted under Article 58 but convicted under Article 53 for bribery). Otto and Maier, released within two hours, went to the ambassador’s residence; Badstieber, also released, had been fired by Knapp and refused to return to Germany. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau finally departed Moscow; no one from the foreign affairs commissariat showed up at the station to see him off.273 Procurator General Krylenko had demanded twenty-two death sentences, exclaiming “execution” after each name during his summation; in the event, eleven death sentences were pronounced, but six were commuted to prison terms. Altogether, nearly forty people went to prison, the majority with terms of four to ten years, though many got one to three years. Staging such public trials even under censorship and an invitation-only foreign audience had turned out to be no mean feat: the regime never published a stand-alone transcript of the imperfect spectacle.274 Still, a pamphlet summarizing the trial for agitators spotlighted how the wrecking was ultimately thwarted because the proletariat was strong, and exorted the party to bring the workers closer to production, enhance self-criticism to fight bureaucratism, become better “commissars” watching over bourgeois specialists, and produce new Soviet cadres of engineers.275 Stalin would assert that the Shakhty trial had helped “to strengthen the readiness for action of the working class.”276
At the plenum on the evening of July 9, Stalin gave no quarter to critics. The politburo, he stated, had resorted to extraordinary measures only because there had been a genuine emergency—“we had no reserves”—and he credited the coercion with saving the country. “Those who say extraordinary measures are bad under any circumstances are wrong.”277 Then he turned bluntly to grand strategy. Whereas England had industrialized thanks to its colonies, Germany had drawn upon the indemnity imposed as a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and the United States used loans from Europe, the USSR had no colonies, indemnities, or long-term foreign loans, leaving solely “internal resources.” On this point no Bolshevik could readily disagree. But Stalin sought to draw the full logic of the Bolshevik position. The peasants “pay the state not only the usual taxes, direct and indirect, but they also overpay in relatively high prices for industrial goods, first of all, and, second, they underreceive in prices for agricultural produce,” he explained, matter-of-factly. “This is an additional tax on the peasantry in the interests of raising industry, which serves the whole country, including the peasants. This is something like ‘tribute’ [dan’], something like a supertax, which we are forced to take temporarily, to preserve and advance the present tempo of the development of industry, to provide for industry for the whole country.” Stalin did not seek to prettify: “This matter of which I am speaking is unpleasant. But we would not be Bolsheviks if we glossed over this fact and closed our eyes to this, that without an additional tax on the peasantry, unfortunately, our industry and our country cannot make do.”278 Despite his apparent iron logic, however, his use of the term “tribute”—an expression not published at the time—provoked people in the hall.279
Stalin rejected other policy options, such as the calls by Sokolnikov, a plenum member, to raise the price paid to peasants for grain (by 25 percent). “Is it necessary to close the ‘scissors’ between town and country, all these underpayments and overpayments?” Stalin asked, in his now signature style. “Yes, unquestionably, they should be eliminated. Can we eliminate them now, without weakening our industry and our economy overall? No, we cannot.”280 Such, ostensibly, was the brutal “logic” of accelerated industrialization: “tribute” extraction trumped market concessions, at least for now. Might “tribute” become permanent? Stalin did not say. He did, however, portray the road ahead as still more arduous. “As we advance, the resistance of the capitalist elements will grow, the class struggle will become sharper, and Soviet power, whose forces will increasingly grow, will carry out a policy of isolation of these elements, . . . a policy of suppression of the resistance of the exploiters,” he asserted. “It has never been seen and never will be seen that obsolete classes surrender their positions voluntarily, without attempting to organize resistance . . . the movement towards socialism must lead to resistance by the exploiting elements against this movement, and the resistance of the exploiters must lead to an inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.”281
Lenin during the civil war had hit upon the idea of escalated resistance by implacable foes as their defeat approached.282 And before that, before anyone had ever heard Stalin’s name, Georgi Plekhanov, the father of Marxism in Russia, had noted that once capitalists realized they were a historically doomed class, they would engage in greater resistance.283 That said, Stalin’s assertion of a “sharpening of the class struggle,” like his use of the term “tribute,” struck many in the hall as unorthodox. But Stalin pointed to the peasant decision not to sell their produce to the state at low fixed prices as a “grain strike,” nothing less than “the first serious action, under the conditions of NEP, undertaken by the capitalist elements of the countryside against the Soviet government.”284 More than any other figure, Stalin for years had banged hard on the circumstances of capitalist encirclement, the hostility of the capitalist class elements inside the USSR and the dangers presented by the new NEP-era bourgeoisie (kulaks), the linkages between external and internal enemies, the threat of a renewed “intervention”—in a word, Shakhty. Shakhty was a colossal fait accompli, no smaller than the trip to Siberia. And in one of those uncanny coincidences that always accompany a well-executed strategy—that is, an improvisation in a certain strategic direction—the five Shakhty death sentences were carried out the very day of Stalin’s plenum speech.
Still, the Shakhty trial was over and a road back from “emergency-ism” remained. Immediately after Stalin, on the morning of July 10, Bukharin got the floor. Bukharin was still so afraid of falling into the trap of allowing Stalin to accuse him of “opposition” to the Central Committee line that he refused to air his differences, essentially failing to appeal to the large, top-level audience, upward of 160 people, including guests.285 Bukharin had admitted that kulaks were a threat and needed to be pressured, even expropriated—in other words, that coercion in the countryside was appropriate, up to a point. He had admitted that it was necessary to build socialism, necessary to industrialize the country, necessary to combat wrecking with vigilance. And Stalin, the tactician, had blunted Bukharin’s critique by his retreat at the April 1928 plenum, which Stalin took credit for without even having to follow through, thanks to a combination of induced events (coercion producing diminishing returns) and manipulations (Shakhty). Hounded by Stalin loyalists as he tried to speak, Bukharin insisted that the plenum discuss facts, and he told of some 150 major protests across the country, mentioning “a revolt in Semipalatinsk, violence at the Leningrad and Moscow labor exchanges, an uprising in Kabardiya”—all of which, and more, had indeed taken place.286 In fact, between May 20 and June 15, 1928, thirteen violent conflicts were recorded at labor exchanges in various cities.287 He cited letters from village and worker correspondents, evidently received by Pravda, where he was still nominally editor in chief, but Bukharin also claimed he had only just learned many of these disturbing facts of social unrest, and only because he had gone in person to the OGPU and sat there for two
days, reading through the political mood reports (which, normally, were supposed to be presented to the politburo). Kosior shouted out, “For what did you incarcerate him [Bukharin] in the GPU? (laughter).” Mezynski answered: “For panicmongering. (laughter).”
Bukharin insisted, based on the evidence of discontent and social instability, that the extraordinary measures had to be stopped. “Forever?” someone shouted. Bukharin allowed that extraordinary measures might be necessary at times but should not become permanent, otherwise “you’ll get an uprising of the peasant, whom the kulak will take on, will organize, will lead. The petit bourgeois spontaneity will rise up against the proletariat, smash it in the head, and as a result of the sharpest class struggle the proletarian dictatorship will disappear.” At Bukharin’s picture of social crisis and peasant rebellion, Stalin shouted out, “A terrible dream, but God is merciful (laughter).”288
Amid the bullying, on July 11, Kalinin reported on state farms, and objected to the forced exile of kulaks, which risked the loss of their grain before new sources came on line. “Will anyone, even one person, say that there is enough grain?” he stated. “All these conversations, that the kulak conceals grain, that there is grain, but he does not give it up—these are conversations, only conversations. . . . If the kulak had a lot of grain, we would possess it.” Here was a politburo vote that Rykov-Tomsky-Bukharin might recruit for repeal of the emergency measures. But Kalinin also agreed with Stalin to an extent, calling the grain shortfall a consequence of a “productivity deficit,” which “pushes us into the organization of state farms.”289