Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  The irreconcilable schism cum civil war of the global left was also on gruesome display. The Sixth Comintern Congress fully institutionalized the slander of socialist (non-Communist) parties as handmaidens of fascists. Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist party, who had no love for social democracy, nonetheless viewed its class base (the working masses) as distinct from that of fascism (petite bourgeoisie and haute bourgeoisie) and objected to the “social fascism” slogan (“We think this formulation is absolutely unacceptable. Our delegation is decisively opposed to this bending of reality”).319 Bukharin, too, stated that “it would be a mistake to lump social democracy and fascism together.”320 But in the menacing atmosphere, where Molotov and other Stalin stooges held sway, “social fascism” was forced through for the rest of the left, the complement to the “right deviation” inside the Communist party.321

  Stalin had delayed his regular Sochi holiday, originally scheduled to commence June 10, until August 2, during the Comintern Congress. His 1928 holiday is not well documented.322 We do know that Dr. Valedinsky brought in the renowned neuropathologist Vasily Verzilov and therapist Vladimir Shchurovsky, but we have no record of their diagnoses. Stalin appears to have voiced the usual complaints, pain in his muscles and joints, which was alleviated in the warm sulfur baths. He also talked with the physicians about agriculture and the need to strengthen state farms, clearly matters on his mind.323

  Kamenev met with Bukharin at least three more times, although whether for his own purposes or as Stalin’s double agent, or both, remains uncertain.324 Kalinin, a state-farm proponent, in the end had sided with Stalin at the plenum, spurring rumors that Stalin held compromising material over his head (Kalinin’s liaisons with ballerinas were infamous). Stalin learned that Tomsky was vigorously trying to win over the general secretary’s wavering protégé Andreyev, among others. Stalin evidently wrote to Molotov in August 1928 that “under no circumstances should Tomsky (or anyone else) be allowed to ‘work over’ Kuibyshev or Mikoyan.”325

  Because of the renewal of grain imports between July and September 1928, the USSR had begun to hemorrhage gold (145 million rubles’ worth) and other precious metals (another 10 million rubles’ worth). Foreign exchange reserves fell some 30 percent, down to just 330 million rubles. No one would lend money to the USSR on a long-term basis, so the growing trade imbalance could only be financed by short-term credits, whose renewal was costly and unassured. Soviet external debt rose to 370 million rubles.326 German banks began to question the advisability of rolling over short-term financing; Germany suffered its own decline in the flow of U.S. capital. “Difficulties are observed on two dangerous fronts: foreign-currency/external trade and grain procurements,” Mikoyan wrote to Stalin (“Dear Soso”) in Sochi on August 23, 1928. He claimed there was an incipient “credit blockade” against the USSR on the part of Germany, the United States, and France, with political and industrial circles agitating against doing business in the USSR because of uncertainties. “This dictates the necessity of cutting down the plan for imports; we’ll have to cut where it hurts,” Mikoyan wrote. “This year there will be large reductions in our pace of development as far as imports are concerned.” He called for greater attention to other exports besides grain. As for the “grain front,” he characterized procurements as very tense.327

  The sense of general crisis was palpable. The geochemist-minerologist Vladimir Vernadsky (b. 1863) recorded in his diary in August 1928 that “when one returns from abroad, the expectation of war and the corresponding press propaganda astonish,” and that “in villages they say: war is coming, we’ll take revenge: the Communists, the intelligentsia, in a word the city.”328

  Stalin lived in his world. “I think the credit blockade is a fact!” he wrote back to Mikoyan on August 28. “We should have expected this in the conditions of grain difficulties. The Germans are especially harmful to us because they would like to see us completely isolated, in order to make it easier for them to monopolize our relations with the West (including with America).”329 A few weeks later (September 17), in a better mood perhaps, Stalin wrote to Mikoyan again: “I was in Abkhazia. We drank to your health.”330 Whether Stalin appreciated the full seriousness of the alarming information Mikoyan was communicating remains unclear. Mikoyan also wrote to Rykov—who was on holiday away from Moscow as well—on September 19 about the incipient international financial blockade and the resulting forced reduction in imports. Mikoyan reported that long queues had formed in Leningrad as peasants descended upon the city looking for food, and that the partially failed harvest in Ukraine was causing ripples in all neighboring territories, too, as people roamed in search of provisions. The long letter concluded that Orjonikidze’s health had taken a bad turn and the doctors could not even agree on a diagnosis.331 Orjonikidze was sent to Germany for medical treatment.332 Rykov, before the month was out, would go to Ukraine to examine food relief efforts in connection with the crop failures there. “For over four years we have been fighting drought in Ukraine,” he stated at a speech carried in the local press. “The effectiveness of our expenditures obviously cannot be considered sufficient.”333

  But also on September 19, Valerian Kuibyshev, the zealous super industrializer, told a meeting of the Leningrad party organization that a five-year plan for industry would go forward, and in ambitious fashion. “We are told that we are ‘over-industrializing’ and ‘biting off more than we can chew,’” he remarked dismissively of critics like Rykov. “History, however, will not permit us to proceed more slowly, otherwise the very next year may lead to a series of even more serious anomalies.”334 An irate Bukharin responded in Pravda (September 30, 1928) with a broadside titled “Notes of an Economist,” which was ostensibly directed at unnamed “Trotskyites”—meaning Kuibyshev and the party’s general secretary who stood behind him. Demanding balanced, “crisis-free” industrialization, Bukharin predicted that total elimination of the market alongside forced collectivization of the peasantry would produce unfathomable red tape, overwhelming the party. Of the industrialization “plan,” Bukharin mockingly wrote that “it is not possible to build ‘present-day’ factories with ‘future bricks.’”335

  Building now with future bricks, however, was precisely Stalin’s proposition. He began but never finished a written response to Bukharin’s “Notes of an Economist.”336 Perhaps he thought better of granting Bukharin a public discussion. Once Stalin returned from Sochi, he had the politburo, over the objections of Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin, reprimand Pravda for publishing the article without Central Committee authorization.337 Nothing Bukharin had pointed out softened Stalin’s position. “No matter how well the grain procurements might go, they would not remove the basis of our difficulties—they can heal (they will heal, I think, this year) the wounds, but they cannot cure the disease until machinery raises the productivity of our fields, and agriculture is organized on a new basis,” Stalin had written to Mikoyan from Sochi on September 26. “Many thought that removing the extraordinary measures and raising grain prices would be the basis of eliminating the difficulties. Empty hopes of empty Bolshevik liberals!”338

  A third wave of coercive procurements struck villages that fall of 1928 with greater force than the first (January-February) or second (late April-early July) waves.339 The pressure sparked peasant protests on a scale the regime did not foresee. Before the year was out, the regime formally announced the introduction of bread rationing in the major cities.340 The higher yields anticipated from improved seeds, fertilizers, tractors and other machinery, as well as the assumption that collectivized farming would outperform private, individual work, were nowhere in sight. Stalin continued to rebuff Bukharin’s murmurs about resigning, while publicly smearing the rightists as a grave danger to the party. “Instead of simply telling me, ‘We do not trust you, Bukharin, it seems to us that you conduct an incorrect line, let’s part ways’—which is what I proposed be done—you did it differently,” Bukharin would soon sur
mise. “It was initially necessary to smear, discredit, trample, then it would no longer be a question of agreeing to my request to resign but instead ‘removal’ ‘for sabotage.’ The game is absolutely clear.”341

  • • •

  PEACEMAKER ORJONIKIDZE, back from medical treatment in Germany, wrote a long letter in November 1928 to Rykov, who was downcast and again contemplating resigning. “A conversation with you and with others (Stalin) persuades me that there are no fundamental differences, and that’s the main thing,” Orjonikidze wrote, absurdly. Still more absurdly, he added, “I am frankly imploring you to bring about reconciliation between Bukharin and Stalin,” as if that were within Rykov’s powers. What must Rykov have thought? Orjonikidze was a hard Bolshevik, a Georgian steeped in Caucasus customs, a person who had grown up without a father or mother, a man notoriously prickly and hot-tempered, yet he exhibited none of Stalin’s extreme vindictiveness. Orjonikidze, moreover, although as close to Stalin as anyone, seemed not to understand, or want to understand, him at this moment. He attributed the lingering bad blood inside the politburo merely to the recent grain procurement campaign, without acknowledging that such heavy coercion was the new permanent reality, and that Stalin perceived critics of this policy as enemies.342

  Stalin went after Nikolai Uglanov. A onetime protégé whom he had promoted to boss of the Moscow party machine, and an indispensable persecutor of the Trotskyites, Uglanov had sided openly with Bukharin and was replaced by the all-purpose Molotov in late November. That month, Bukharin finally managed to obtain a long-sought audience with Stalin, which lasted six hours. According to Mikoyan, Bukharin told Stalin that he did “not want to fight, because it will harm the party. If a fight starts, you’ll declare us renegades from Leninism.” Bukharin added: “But we’ll call you organizers of famine.”343 Stalin, however, was immovable: on his Siberia trip he had declared his intention to force the country toward anticapitalism, and since returning to Moscow, he had additionally indulged a chilling malevolence toward close political allies and friends.

  CODA

  IF STALIN HAD DIED

  HE WOULD DO IT. Stalin would force the collectivization of Soviet villages and nomadic steppes inhabited by more than 100 million people between 1928 and 1933, a story taken up in volume II. At least 5 million people, many of the country’s most productive farmers or herders, would be “dekulakized,” that is, enclosed in cattle cars and dumped at far-off wastes, often in winter; some in that number would dekulakize themselves, rushing to sell or abandon their possessions to escape deportation. Those forced into the collectives would burn crops, slaughter animals, and assassinate officials.1 The regime’s urban shock troops would break peasant resistance, but the country’s inventory of horses would plummet from 35 million to 17 million, cattle from 70 million to 38 million, pigs from 26 million to 12 million, sheep and goats from 147 million to 50 million. In Kazakhstan, the losses would be still more staggering: cattle from 7.5 million to 1.6 million, sheep from 21.9 million to 1.7 million. Countrywide, nearly 40 million people would suffer severe hunger or starvation and between 5 and 7 million people would die in the horrific famine, whose existence the regime denied.2 “All the dogs have been eaten,” one eyewitness would be told in a Ukrainian village. “We have eaten everything we could lay our hands on—cats, dogs, field mice, birds—when it’s light tomorrow, you will see that the trees have been stripped of bark, for that too has been eaten. And the horse manure has been eaten. Yes, the horse manure. We fight over it. Sometimes there are whole grains in it.”3

  Scholars who argue that Stalin’s collectivization was necessary in order to force a peasant country into the modern era are dead wrong.4 The Soviet Union, like imperial Russia, faced an imperative to modernize in order to survive in the brutally unsentimental international order, but market systems have been shown to be fully compatible with fast-paced industrialization, including in peasant countries. Forced wholesale collectivization only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology and its repudiation of capitalism. And economically, collectivization failed to deliver. Stalin assumed it would increase both the state’s share of low-cost grain purchases and the overall size of the harvest, but although procurements doubled immediately, harvests shrank. Over the longer term, collective farming would not prove superior to large-scale capitalist farming or even to smaller-scale capitalist farming when the latter was provided with machinery, fertilizer, agronomy, and effective distribution.5 In the short term, collectivization would contribute nothing on net to Soviet industrial growth.6

  Nor was collectivization necessary to sustain a dictatorship. Private capital and dictatorship are fully compatible. In fascist Italy, industrialists maintained tremendous autonomous power. Mussolini, like Stalin, supported efforts to attack inflation and a balance-of-payments deficit despite the negative impact on domestic employment, for he, too, viewed a “strong” currency as a point of regime prestige. But although for Mussolini, too, economics was subordinate to his political power, he was not a leftist ideologue wedded to theories of class struggle and the like. All he needed was industrialists’ recognition of his political supremacy. He got that despite a December 21, 1927, upward revaluation of the lira that the industrialists had adamantly opposed—exports declined (and unemployment skyrocketed to at least 10 percent)—because Mussolini rejected demands by fascism’s syndicalist wing to force production and consumption under the aegis of the state. Instead, the fascist regime lowered taxes and transport costs for domestic industry, increased the allowances for depreciation and amortization, prioritized domestic producers on government contracts, encouraged the concentration of industry to reduce competition in order to keep profit levels up, increased tariffs, and took on some of the exchange risk associated with debt contracted by Italian industry abroad.7 The Italian dictatorship did not go about destroying the country’s economically successful people, who could be imprisoned quickly if they became foolish enough to hint at political opposition. None of this is meant to uphold Italian fascism in any way as a model, but merely to spotlight that nothing prevented the Communist dictatorship from embracing private capital—nothing, that is, except idées fixes.

  Nor did an adverse turn in the world economy compel collectivization.8 Global deflation in commodity prices did hit the Soviet Union hard, reducing the revenues from the sale abroad of Soviet grain, oil, timber, and sugar, but Stalin, in his grand speech in Siberia on January 20, 1928, made no mention of such conditions as a factor in his decision. If the global terms of trade for primary goods producers had been favorable, would Stalin have said in Novosibirsk that day, Let’s develop large-scale privately owned kulak farms with privately hired labor? Look at these high global grain prices, we’ll never have to collectivize the peasantry! If the Soviet Union had obtained abundant long-term foreign credits in 1927–28, would Stalin have said, Let’s double down on markets at home? So what if we risk the party’s monopoly! The pernicious idea that global capitalism caused Stalin’s resort to extreme violence and erection of a brutal command system, in order to exercise control over the export commodities needed to finance industrialization, ignores the vast trove of evidence on the salience of ideology, including ideology’s role in worsening the USSR’s international position in the first place. There was a debate inside the USSR in the 1920s about how to modernize the country, but it was a remarkably narrow debate in which important options were closed off.9

  For that reason, it will not do to simplify collectivization as just another instance in the Russian state’s infamous strong-arming of a predominantly peasant country because its agricultural season—in its northern climate, on a par with Canada—lasted a mere 125 days, perhaps half the length in Europe, where yields per acre were higher. The image of a Russian state through the centuries as a cruel military occupier at home is one-sided: Alexander had emancipated the serfs and Stolypin’s peasant reforms were voluntary. And Stalin was motivated by more than competition with more fort
unate European rivals. Like Stolypin, Stalin wanted consolidated, contiguous farms, not the separated, small strips of the commune, but he ruled out the Stolypin route of betting on independent yeoman farmers (kulaks). Critics of Bolshevism abroad had urged old-regime professionals to work for the Soviet regime precisely in order to transform it from within, toward a Russian nationalist order and a full capitalist restoration.10 Such hopes were Stalin’s fears. Collectivization would give the Communists control over the vast countryside, a coveted goal no regime in Russia had ever had. But still more fundamentally, collectivization, like state-run and state-owned industry, constituted a form of ostensible modernization that negated capitalism. Thus did Stalin “solve” the Bolsheviks’ conundrum of how, in the words of Lenin’s last public speech, “NEP Russia could become socialist Russia.”11

  • • •

  THERE ARE ALWAYS ALTERNATIVES IN HISTORY. The germane question is, was there an alternative within the Leninist revolution? Nikolai Bukharin had set out the magical thinking underlying the NEP when he and Stalin drew close in political alliance. “We had thought it was possible to destroy market relations in one stroke, immediately,” Bukharin had written in The Path to Socialism and the Worker-Peasant Alliance. “It turned out that we shall reach socialism precisely through market relations.” Come again? “Market relations will be destroyed as a result of their own development.” How, exactly? Well, explained Bukharin, under capitalism, large entities end up crushing small ones in market competition, ergo, in the Soviet Union case, the large companies under state control, as well as amalgamated peasant cooperatives, would just squeeze the small private peasant farms out of existence.12 Some version of this abracadabra—that the Soviet Union could, somehow, “grow into socialism” via the NEP—had taken hold in many pockets of the party. But Bukharin was also the one who inadvertently had crystallized the impossibility of growing into anticapitalism via markets with his summons for peasants to “Enrich yourselves!”13 Of course, as any peasant could have told him—and as many did, writing to, among other newspapers, Pravda, which Bukharin edited—no sooner did a peasant household manage to achieve some success, then it was squeezed mercilessly by punitive taxation. And in 1928, with the grain procurement shortfall, hardworking peasants were subjected to criminal sanctions. When armed squads confiscated eight bulls, seven cows, four calves, three horses, thirty-six tons of wheat, a cart, a threshing machine, and a mill from B. Bondarenko of Aktyubinsk province, while sentencing him to a year in prison, he asked the presiding judge to provide an explanation for the basis of his conviction because he was not guilty of a crime. “Our goal is to dekulakize you,” the judge snapped.14 Here was the fateful formulation.