Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Stalin spoke again that afternoon, polemicizing with other speakers, especially Tomsky. (After observing Stalin verbally assault Tomsky, Sokolnikov had another private meeting with Kamenev at which he said Stalin had appeared “dark, green, evil, irritated. A forbidding sight. . . . What struck us most was his rudeness.”)290 Tomsky, like Bukharin (and Rykov), had proposed stepping back from the brink. “You retreat today, retreat tomorrow, retreat the day after tomorrow, retreat without end—that’s what he says will strengthen the alliance” between workers and peasants, Stalin said. “No comrades, this is not true. . . . A policy of permanent concessions is not our policy.”291 And then, in a shock, Stalin capitulated: the plenum, unanimously, repealed the “extraordinary measures.”292 Grain prices were soon raised.293 Unauthorized searches and arrests in pursuit of grain and the closing of bazaars were made punishable offenses; Article 107 cases against poor and middle peasants were discontinued, and those peasants behind bars were released under an amnesty.294 Stalin’s multiple interventions at the plenum could leave no doubt about his deep-set commitment to the line announced in Novosibirsk and reprised at the Institute of Red Professors.295 But for the second time, he undertook a tactical retreat. Perhaps he wanted to avoid being the one who had forced a split vote and “schism.” Stalin also must have known that Bukharin had conducted conversations with other politburo members, including Orjonikidze, Voroshilov, and Kalinin, about removing him as general secretary at the plenum, which called for caution on Stalin’s part.296 That said, it was easier to retreat knowing he could just go back to Old Square and ring the OGPU.

  INTRIGUE OF INTRIGUES?

  The short-lived United opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev with Trotsky had achieved little more than exacerbating their already extreme acrimony.297 Stalin had exiled Zinoviev and Kamenev internally to Kaluga, about 110 miles from Moscow, in early 1928. Zinoviev continued to beg for reinstatement in the party, writing an abasing article in Pravda in May 1928, inducing a pitiless Trotsky to observe, “Zinoviev resembles a wet bird and his voice from the pages of Pravda sounds like the peep of a sandpiper from the swamp.”298 Finally, in June 1928, Stalin had allowed Zinoviev and Kamenev, along with about forty oppositionists, to be reinstated.299 But Stalin’s minions appear to have deviously set in motion a false rumor that Bukharin and his allies had voted against Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s readmission, whispers that, predictably, sent Bukharin into a tizzy. Grigory Sokolnikov was reasonably close to both Kamenev and Bukharin, and it appears that Kamenev, during a trip from Kaluga to Moscow, told Sokolnikov about the rumor and Sokolnikov separately mentioned this to Bukharin, who in turn asked Sokolnikov to act as a peacemaker. Sokolnikov sent a letter to Kamenev in Kaluga, providing his Moscow phone number; when Kamenev called on July 9, Sokolnikov summoned him to the capital for a meeting with Bukharin.

  How much this episode was fully planned by a supremely cunning Stalin, and how much was happenstance he managed to turn to his advantage, remains unclear. What is clear is that Stalin did nothing to tamp down the divisive rumor. Also clear is that any contact with Kamenev in exile would have been perlustrated or tapped by the OGPU. Sokolonikov, however, was scarcely the type willingly to participate in one of Stalin’s master intrigues. But Kamenev? He was able to travel unhindered to Moscow. Stalin had not even taken away his Kremlin apartment, where, on the morning of July 11, with the plenum still under way, Kamenev received another call from Sokolnikov. “The matter has gone much farther, Bukharin has had a final break with Stalin,” Sokolnikov stated. “The question of Stalin’s removal was posed concretely: Kalinin and Voroshilov went back on their word.” Here was a bombshell, related—over a tapped line—by a Central Committee member to a non-member, recklessly, fearlessly. Sokolnikov and Kamenev shared a bond—the only two people ever to call for Stalin’s removal as general secretary at a Party Congress, and Sokolnikov might not have abandoned that quest. Kamenev likely held on to that dream as well, but he also seems to have been eager, like Zinoviev, to return himself to favor and resume a high position commensurate with his self-perception and past. Shortly after the second phone call, Sokolnikov showed up at Kamenev’s apartment with Bukharin. (Sokolnikov would leave before Bukharin.) Kamenev, who had written notes of his conspiratorial conversation with Sokolnikov, did so again, depicting Bukharin as erupting in an emotional rant of disloyalty to Stalin.

  “We consider Stalin’s line fatal for the whole revolution,” Bukharin told Kamenev, according to the notes. “The disagreements between us and Stalin are many times more serious than they had been with you. Rykov, Tomsky, and I unanimously formulate the situation as follows: ‘it would be a lot better if in the politburo we had Zinoviev and Kamenev instead of Stalin.’” Bukharin added that he spoke about this openly with Rykov and Tomsky, and that he had not spoken with Stalin for weeks. “He is an unprincipled intriguer, who subordinates everything to the maintenance of his own power. He shifts theory on the basis of who at any given moment he wants to remove.” After all these years together, Bukharin still did not know that Stalin was a hard-core leftist and a Leninist of flexible tactics. Bukharin did at least understand that Stalin “had made concessions” at the July plenum “in order to put a knife in us” and that Stalin “was maneuvering to make us into schismatics.” Bukharin also revealed that Stalin “had not suggested a single execution in the Shakhty case,” instead sitting back while others did it for him, appearing the moderate, while also making ostensible concessions in all negotiations. Still, Bukharin mocked as “idiotic illiteracy” Stalin’s two major plenum formulations: “tribute” from the peasantry and the sharpening of the class struggle as socialism grew. Kamenev asked Bukharin to elucidate the extent of his forces, and Bukharin named himself, Tomsky, Rykov, Nikolai Uglanov, some Leningraders, but not the Ukrainians (whom Stalin had “bought off” by removing Kaganovich), adding that “Yagoda and Trillisser”—of the OGPU—“are with us,” but that “Voroshilov and Kalinin went back at the last minute.” He also said that Orjonikidze “is no knight. He came to me and cursed Stalin, but at the decisive moment he betrayed us,” and that “the Petersburg [Leningrad] people . . . got scared when the talk got to the possibility of removing Stalin . . . there is a terrible fear of a split.”300

  What in the world was Bukharin doing spilling his guts out to Kamenev, a non-politburo member and internal exile, about such top secret, weighty matters? Bukharin was hardly naïve. He flat-out warned Kamenev not to call him on the phone, which he knew was eavesdropped (Stalin had evidently once shown him a transcript of an intimate exchange between Zinoviev and his wife).301 He also told Kamenev they were being tailed. But Bukahrin appears to have been goaded by desperation. Kamenev noted that Bukharin’s “lips sometimes shook from emotion. Sometimes he gave the impression of a person who knows he is doomed.”302 And so, Bukharin had taken the risk. But his act also shows he had not abandoned hope. His main purpose appears to have been to deny the rumor that he had voted against Kamenev’s reinstatement in order to preempt Kamenev and Zinoviev from being recruited by Stalin against Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov. The notion that Stalin would have reinstated the two Kaluga exiles because he needed them boggles the mind, but Bukharin evidently assumed that Stalin could not rule the country by himself.303 Bukharin also did not believe Stalin’s faction contained people of stature (to Kamenev, he referred to the “moron Molotov, who teaches me Marxism and whom we call ‘stone ass’”). Thus, if Stalin, moving demonstratively to the left, was going to jettison Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov, it seemed to Bukharin that the Georgian would have no choice but to recall Zinoviev, Kamenev, and perhaps even Trotsky. The meeting was based upon sad misapprehension.

  Kamenev, for his part, may have entertained similar delusions about Stalin needing his services in the shift to the left, but in Kamenev’s case Bukharin could well have been a means to an end.304 Bukharin told Kamenev that “Stalin knows only one means: revenge, and he puts the knife into your back. Let’s recall the theory of
‘sweet revenge.’” The latter referred to an anecdote about Stalin, retailed by Kamenev, said to be from a group picnic in the early 1920s, when someone asked what was the best thing in the world, the kind of question posed in a drunken state. Kamenev had supposedly answered “books,” Radek, “a woman, your woman,” Rykov, “cognac,” and Stalin, revenge against one’s enemies.305 Conspicuously, each person in the anecdote—which exists in many variants—was stereotyped: the bookish Kamenev, the womanizing witty Radek, the alleged alcoholic Rykov, the vengeful Stalin. But what if Kamenev was indulging a tinge of revenge himself against Bukharin, who, after all, had venomously ripped him at the 14th and 15th Party Congresses? What if Kamenev was ingratiating himself with Stalin? Kamenev was an intriguer of the first order. He had worked hand in glove with Stalin many times, including on the virtuoso intrigue against Mirsayet Soltanğaliev and the Muslim Communists. It is possible Kamenev set Bukharin up. Kamenev not only wrote down notes of a conspiratorial meeting but mailed them to Zinoviev back in Kaluga.306

  Kamenev would later claim that he had planned to stay in Moscow awhile, and did not want to wait to tell Zinoviev in person. Perhaps this was true. And yet, could someone like Kamenev, who had spent fifteen years in the Bolshevik underground and who knew intimately the practices of the Soviet secret police, have doubted that such a letter—to Zinoviev—would get through without being intercepted and reported? Then there is the matter of the exceptionally damning portrait Kamenev painted of Bukharin. Bukharin would later complain that Kamenev’s notes “are written, to put it mildly, one-sidedly, tendentiously, with the omission and garbling of a number of important thoughts.”307 More precisely, Sokolnikov would observe that Kamenev’s notes “represent a specific interest in the sense of an assessment of the sharpness and sharpening of internal relations.”308

  We may never know whether Kamenev meant to avenge himself against Bukharin and rehabilitate himself with Stalin by means of such a bizarre, tendentious document. Be that as it may, it was not Kamenev who had initiated the cockamamie tête-a-tête in the territory of the tightly watched Kremlin. Bukharin’s conspiracy with Kamenev—which he evidently undertook without the knowledge of his allies Rykov and Tomsky—handed Stalin a gargantuan gift. Bukharin had divulged politburo secrets to a non-member, and admitted an effort to remove Stalin, naming names. Rykov, summoned to a private audience with Stalin, found out that Bukharin was negotiating over secret politburo matters with the disgraced former Trotsky coconspirator Kamenev, in an effort to remove the general secretary. Rykov headed for Bukharin’s Kremlin apartment, lacing into him for being a “silly woman, not a politician.”309 Stalin could rely on Molotov and secondly Kaganovich, capable, thuggish organizers and executors of his will; Rykov had what? Tomsky, a tough but overmatched fighter, and Bukharin, who woefully lacked sufficient political calculation for the crucial regime position he occupied. Bukharin, thanks to Kamenev’s notes, had also managed to implicate Orjonikidze, perhaps the one Stalin loyalist who did not detest him. Orjonikidze was forced to explain himself before Koba. Yagoda, too, had to submit a written explanation to Stalin concerning Bukharin’s mention of OGPU support for removing the general secretary. All that from one false rumor about Bukharin’s opposition to Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s reinstatement.

  FUTURE BRICKS, PRESENT MALEVOLENCE

  Signs of a world turning upside down were unmistakable. On July 12, Molotov closed out the Soviet party plenum with a report on the training of new specialists, pointing out the backwardness of the Soviet science laboratories and technical learning, giving examples of one Moscow school with equipment dating to 1847 and textbooks to 1895. He divulged that the vast Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic had a mere 117 students studying for Ph.D.s in technical subjects. Of course, the secret police and press, with Molotov’s rabid collusion, were hounding the few genuinely qualified bourgeois specialists.310 But Stalin was not going to remain beholden to these class aliens. During the Soviet plenum, the Sixth Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party came to a close in Moscow, the first Chinese congress convened outside of China. Eighty-four delegates attended (Mao stayed home). Moscow formally acceded to the formation of separate Chinese Communist army units, a process already under way, but Stalin still insisted they had to be under the Guomnindang flag, despite Chiang Kai-shek’s massacres. Chiang, for his part, had continued his military unification campaign, seizing Peking on July 6 from an ex-bandit and warlord (Zhang Zuolin, expecting Japanese protection, had retreated to Manchuria but was killed by a bomb en route). Stalin found himself still stamping out Trotskyite views inside the Chinese Communist party, even as he was now forcing through a version of Trotskyite views at home.311

  Only the absolute keenest Kremlinologists could penetrate the fog of the regime. After reading the published version of Stalin’s speech to the Communist Academy, which recapitulated what the dictator had said in closed session in Siberia, Boris Bakhmeteff, the deposed Provisional Government’s ambassador to the United States, wrote in August 1928 to a fellow Constitutional Democrat in exile, Vasily Maklakov, that “the dictatorial regime cannot feel firmly planted and tranquil because the main sphere of the country’s economic life—agriculture—depends in the final analysis on the good will of the many millions of individual peasant proprietors.” Bakhmeteff deemed Stalin “one of the few remaining incontrovertible fanatics . . . despite the fact that the majority of foreign writers are inclined to see in him only an opportunist, leading Russia back to capitalism,” and noted that Stalin had “recognized that Soviet power must have the source of agricultural production in its hands,” just as it did industry. Bakhmeteff further pointed out that the farmers who were designated as kulaks—“even though in essence they are just lads possessing two horses and two to three cows and are not exploiters”—had gradually come to perform the function of old gentry agriculture, producing the surplus desperately needed by the governing authorities. Bakhmeteff laughed off Stalin’s earlier mid-1920s polemics with Trotsky and others over the NEP because now Stalin himself had begun to strangle these producers-kulaks, and noted that such actions were correct from the point of view of “Marxist logic and Communist doctrine,” which in place of private proprietors needed “bread factories, i.e., collective and state farms” that would “render sufficient grain to emancipate the regime from the whims and sentiments of the peasant masses.” Bakhmeteff even understood that “inside the party one can detect a current, which is much fiercer and faster than I thought, against Stalin’s new course.”312

  But not even Bakhmeteff, indeed not even regime insiders, foresaw that Stalin’s momentous turn to force collectivization and rapid industrialization became centered upon a drawn-out, painstakingly sadistic humiliation of Bukharin. On July 17, the Sixth Comintern Congress opened in Moscow (it would run through September 1), with more than 500 attendees from more than fifty Communist parties around the world. No Comintern Congress had met since 1924, an embarrassingly long hiatus. Never mind: Stalin reached for yet another truncheon against his duumvirate partner. Already on the heels of Stalin’s return from Siberia, a plenum of the Comintern’s executive committee had already unmasked what was called a right deviation. Tomsky, a target, observed of the dirty campaign, “Every day a little brushstroke—here a dab, there a dab. Aha! . . . as a result of this clever bit of work they have turned us into ‘rightists.’”313 Bukharin had stopped turning up at Comintern headquarters, despite still being its de facto nominal head. Now Stalin’s agents spread rumors in the corridors of the congress that Bukharin’s days in the leadership were numbered, that he was next in line for internal exile to Alma-Ata. Trotsky, from there, made a contribution to paying Bukharin back for all his years of vicious slander, observing that the number of hours Bukharin spoke at the congress was in inverse proportion to his decision-making power.314 With the congress dragging on through the summer, in August 1928 Stalin inserted Molotov into the Comintern executive committee to ramp up the pogrom against �
�rightist tendencies.”315

  Stalin did not take kindly to Bukharin’s efforts, dating back to the 1923 cave meeting, to curb his powers or even remove him as general secretary, but this was not Trotsky, where the enmity had been ferocious from the moment Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks in summer 1917 and grew to hatred. Stalin had been treating Bukharin like the younger brother he never had, or even like a son, despite the mere decade that separated them.316 When Bukharin lived in three rooms at the House of Soviets No. 2, that is, the Hotel Metropole, with his widowed father (a retired math teacher), and the residence became a gathering place for young acolytes and political allies, Stalin visited, too. In 1927, Stalin had moved Bukharin into the Kremlin. Esfir Gurvich, Bukharin’s second wife, a Latvian Jewish woman with a degree from St. Petersburg, continued to live separately from him back at the Metropole, but she had become close with Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife. The couple’s daughters, both named Svetlana, became boon companions at the Zubalovo-4 dacha. Bukharin rode to and from Zubalovo with Stalin in his Packard, an unheard of privilege. True, Bukharin and Gurvich observed Stalin’s abuse of Nadya firsthand, and later rumors circulated that because Gurvich was too well informed about Stalin’s private life, he drove a wedge between her and Bukharin. (The couple would soon break up.)317 But the causes here were significantly deeper, and entailed strategy over the building of socialism. Still, the malice was extraordinary. Stalin compelled Bukharin, the “theorist,” to write up the congress program documents, then humiliatingly crossed out and rewrote everything from top to bottom. The declaration of a Comintern surge to the left came out in Bukharin’s name.318 Stalin’s malevolence was palpable.