NEP, via its own middling success, was producing kulaks who, in turn, were the ones producing the harvest. Kamenev, at their July 11, 1928, encounter, had pointedly asked Bukharin about his plan for procuring grain, recording the following response: “One can persecute the kulak as much as possible, but we must make peace with the middle peasant.” But out in the countryside where such decisions were made by officials following the same class analysis, a farmer with three cows in 1925 who had six by 1928 suddenly became registered as a “class-enemy.” In Vologda, a dairy center, where Stalin had spent several years of domestic exile under the tsars, between 1927 and 1928 alone the number of kulaks leapt from 6,315 to 8,462, more than 2,000 new “bloodsuckers,” at a time when the province counted just 2,500 rural Communists.15 For marketed grain, the regime had become dependent on just 2 million peasant-household producers who sowed more than eight hectares each.16 This was a substantial population—not Bukharin’s alleged mere 3 to 4 percent of kulaks—which was susceptible to reclassification as class enemies because of their hard work. The class analysis to which all top Bolsheviks subscribed, Bukharin included, effectively ensured that the NEP had to fail if it succeeded.
Bukharin presented no genuine alternative to Stalin, even leaving aside the fact that he lacked political heft or an organizational power base. A figure with a more solid reputation and skill set was Alexei Rykov, far and away the most important proponent of the NEP. It was the authoritative Rykov who chaired politburo meetings, and had opened and closed the 15th Party Congress. A talented administrator, he possessed skills that Kamenev had only to a lesser degree and that Zinoviev and Trotsky lacked almost completely. Rykov “was gregarious and hearty and would often visit his subordinates in their homes, even if they were not Communists,” observed Simon Liberman, who knew him from 1906 and worked under him after the revolution. “He loved to take a glass with them and have expansive talks with them. His slight stutter made him a good deal more human than most of his forbidding colleagues.”17 The warmhearted kindly provincial doctor whom Liberman imagined was not the Rykov who had gone after Trotsky with a vengeance and never wavered during the infighting against the opposition. Rykov was rumored to be prone to alcohol abuse—as one nasty joke had it, “Trotsky dictates in his last will that upon his death his brain should be preserved in alcohol with the instruction that the brain goes to Stalin and the alcohol to Rykov”—but it is unclear if this was true. Rykov was a hard Bolshevik but prudent type, favoring fiscal discipline and living within one’s means. He did not dispute that in time small-scale farming would have to be replaced by large-scale and mechanized farms and that modernized farms would be “socialist” (collectivized), but he put a premium on the stability engendered by the NEP’s class conciliation. His position was less that the NEP would alchemize capitalism into socialism (Bukharin) than that forced collectivization could simply not be done, and that any attempt to do so would merely destroy what progress had been made since the civil war and famine, bringing on renewed catastrophe.
Rykov turned out to be bleakly prescient about forced collectivization’s dire, destabilizing consequences, but on the question of what to do instead he had little idea, other than staying the failing course of the NEP. Another figure, however, who worked under Rykov for many years did have some idea—Grigory Sokolnikov. Sokolnikov, who was Bukharin’s former gymnasium classmate, was also known for his softness and intellectualism. He belonged to that group of Bolsheviks—Krasin, Chicherin, Rakovski—from well-to-do families, which could be politically problematic. But he had turned out to be nearly perfect for the role of finance commissar. And when Bukharin was allied with Stalin and eviscerating the United opposition, Sokolnikov clashed with the dictator by insisting on open debate within the monopoly Communist party, including the right to open debate for Zinoviev and Kamenev, with whom Sokolnikov disagreed fundamentally on economic policy. Even in the aftermath of the brouhaha over Bukharin’s “Enrich yourselves” speech, Sokolnikov had not shrunk from extolling market relations. To be sure, unlike Yakov Yakovlev, the founder and editor of Peasant Newspaper, Sokolnikov did not go as far as to advocate that the regime allow peasants to register their de facto possession of land as private property, which could be bought, sold, or inherited. Still, Sokolnikov had insisted that the market, at least in the countryside, was compatible with socialism—not just during the present difficult conjuncture, but permanently. He also insisted that the so-called kulaks were good farmers, not enemies.
Sokolnikov agreed with Rykov’s and Bukharin’s insistence on a version of industrialization compatible with market equilibrium, but he went much further and explicitly rejected the vision, alluring to almost all Communists, of achieving comprehensive economic planning in practice. (Sokolnikov allowed for the lesser possibility of coordination.)18 Of course, almost all non-Bolshevik specialists in the finance commissariat and elsewhere were saying this, but Sokolnikov was a member of the Central Committee. He had not argued in favor of capitalism—it is hard to see how any Bolshevik could have done so and survived in a leadership position—and implementing his market socialism would not have been easy. The Soviet party-state lacked much of the institutional capacity necessary to regulate a market economy skillfully (Sokolnikov excepted). This was especially true of the mixed-state market economy of the NEP, which required a subtle understanding of the effects on the country’s macroeconomy of price controls and use of state power against private traders.19 Nonetheless, acceptance of the market and rejection of planning as a chimera were the sine qua non of any alternative path to the one Stalin had proclaimed in Novosibirsk in January 1928.
When Stalin had evicted Sokolnikov from the politburo and finance commissariat in early 1926, he had named him deputy chairman of the state planning commission—aware that Sokolnikov did not believe in planning—but this had not ended Sokolnikov’s career. He had been part of a Soviet delegation to a world economic conference in Geneva convened by the League of Nations in May 1927, when he delivered a substantive, businesslike speech on the Soviet economy and socialism that evidently impressed at least some members of the foreign audience. (Sokolnikov, who had a doctorate from the Sorbonne, spoke even better French than Bukharin.) Sokolnikov argued that the Soviet mode of industrialization was distinct because of coordination and the participation of the masses, but he called for trade and cooperation between the capitalist world and the Soviet Union, especially in the form of foreign investment.20 The applause was said to have emanated from “every seating bench of the parliament of the capitalist economy,” as a Swiss journalist sympathetic to the left observed, according to Pravda. “Even the English applauded in a sign of approval of Sokolnikov’s speech.”21 This favorable assessment in the party organ was followed, in summer 1927, by Sokolnikov’s break with the opposition.22 In December 1927, at the 15th Congress, Stalin allowed Sokolnikov to be reelected to the Central Committee, a nearly unique outcome for a former oppositionist. In spring 1928, Stalin would shift Sokolnikov over to the chairmanship of the oil trust; oil exports began to generate significant budget revenues.
That said, Sokolnikov was a mere individual, not a faction. No top military men were loyal to him; no high GPU operatives worked for him; he had no Kremlin telephone network (the vertushka) at his command, except when he was summoned on it; no power to send out directives in the name of the Central Committee on which he sat. Sokolnikov had enjoyed his greatest influence under Stalin’s patronage and now, too, his promarket, antiplanning stance would have required a politically muscular patron—such as Rykov. A Rykov-Sokolnikov political-intellectual leadership would have offered a genuine alternative to Stalin only if Rykov and others in a ruling coalition came around to capitulating on the commitment to anticapitalism in the village. Such an eventuality would have raised weighty questions: Would the regime be able to manage one system (socialism) for the city and another system (petit bourgeois capitalism) for the countryside? Would such an arrangement have even permitted
socialism in the city? Would the Communist party have had to surrender its political monopoly eventually and, if so, would a Rykov-Sokolnikov leadership have acceded to or survived that? Would Rykov, who was far closer to Stalin than to Sokolnikov and fundamentally did not understand markets, even have accepted Sokolnikov as a partner?23
Of course, the existence of Stalin’s personal dictatorship meant that any real alternative to his preferred course—as opposed to a mere intellectual exercise—had to trump his power, either by outvoting him, because members of his faction defected, or by removing him. Bukharin had tried such a maneuver and failed, but when Stalin, by offering to resign, handed Rykov the opportunity, he failed to seize it. Perhaps Rykov acted out of political self-preservation, given Stalin’s power and vengeful disposition. But Rykov and others in the politburo had come to see not only a prickly, self-centered, often morose, vindictive person in Stalin, but also an indomitable Communist and leader of inner strength, utterly dedicated to Lenin’s ideas, able to carry the entire apparatus, the country, and the cause of the world revolution on his back.24 Stalin displayed a strategic mind, which had its cruelties—sizing up the weaknesses of Bukharin for sadistic as well as political purposes—but also its payoffs for managing the nationalities and regional party machines. Additionally, the group arrayed around Stalin was incomparably below him. Orjonikidze was no strategist, and in constant poor health; Voroshilov was no military man, and he knew it; Kirov had a public politician’s touch but was given to laziness and womanizing; Kaganovich was an organizer of talent but barely educated; Mikoyan worshiped Stalin, not just for careerist reasons, but because he was young; Kalinin was underestimated, but also no Stalin; Molotov could flex some political muscles, but even he operated in Stalin’s shadow. Stalin’s dark side had become no small matter to manage, but managing entirely without his leadership?
Perhaps, in the end, Rykov clung to the hope that Stalin would see the folly of his coercive turn. But Stalin would charge Bukharin and Rykov with failing to accept the logic of their own Leninism. If the Soviet Union needed to mechanize agriculture on the basis of consolidated farms (it did), and if one believed this should ultimately occur within a socialist (non-capitalist) framework (at the top almost all believed so), and if the peasants were not joining collectives voluntarily (they were not), what was the Leninist conclusion? Either seize the means of production in the countryside or be prepared to sacrifice the party’s monopoly in the long run, for, according to Marxism, class was the determinant of politics and the flourishing of a new bourgeoisie would inevitably bring political consequences. Stalin “was incorruptible and irreconcilable in class questions,” Nikita Khrushchev, a rising official in the Ukrainian party apparatus at the time of Stalin’s trip to Siberia, would recall. “It was one of his strongest qualities, and he was greatly respected for it.”25
• • •
ULTIMATELY, the principal alternative to Stalin was the willing abandonment or unwilling unhinging of the Bolshevik regime—which Stalin himself almost caused, and not just because of collectivization.
Authoritarian rulers the world over were almost never so bold as to stand up to the great powers, putting their personal regimes at risk. They pursued private gain, appointed relatives and cronies, gathered harems, delivered Populist speeches in public about defending the interests of the patria, then sold out their countries to the Europeans or gringos for the enrichment of themselves and their entourages. This was the typical story of Latin American caudillos, for example. The Soviet Union, to be sure, had a conception of itself as a world power, the center of world revolution, but it, too, was a peasant country, and still hurting from civil war and famine, yet standing up to the whole world. The Bolsheviks, with their coup, had created a condition of capitalist encirclement, then proceeded to conduct themselves in a way that reinforced their predicament, attempting coups in countries where they had won hard-fought diplomatic recognition and sought wider trade relations. But if the challenges for Russian power in the world, always great, had grown harder under a Communist regime, which had no alliances or real friends, they grew harder still as a result of Stalin’s brazen defiance.
Alongside the previous shocks of Bismarck’s unification of Germany and the Meiji restoration in Japan, whose challenges grew, on top of the long-standing competition with the global British empire, had been added a series of new shocks: the anti-Soviet states in former imperial Russian territories—the “limitrophe” of Poland, Finland, and the Baltics, as well as Greater Romania. Moreover, Germany, the United States, Britain, France, even Italy possessed the world’s advanced industrial technology, and the Soviets had been appealing to capitalists’ greed, offering to pay good money, in the form of technical assistance contracts, for advanced machines and assistance in mounting and operating them. It was not really working. But although he had tried to cut a deal with France by recognizing tsarist debts, Stalin detested the prospect of becoming dependent on foreign bankers, or conceding changes in Soviet domestic political arrangements. Provocatively, he turned to arresting German engineers in the Shakhty fabrication almost immediately after restarting negotiations for major German loans and investments, shocking Berlin and other capitals. The Soviet Union, Pravda wrote grimly in late summer 1928, would have to rely “on our own strength without help from abroad.”26 But going it alone was a delusion: the Red Army could be crushed by superior technology.
Had Stalin not only caused the mass loss of the country’s most productive farmers and half its livestock in collectivization but also failed to finagle the machinery necessary for Soviet industrialization, including tractors for agriculture, his rule would have risked the destruction of the Leninist revolution. But a fortuitous event rescued his reckless gambling. On September 4, 1929, stock prices began to fall in New York and on October 29 the market crashed. A host of structural factors and policy mistakes transformed the financial dislocation into a Great Depression. By 1933, industrial production would drop by 46 percent in the United States, 41 percent in Germany, and 23 percent in Britain. Unemployment in the United States would reach 25 percent and still higher elsewhere. International trade would drop by half. Construction would come to a virtual standstill. The world’s misfortune was Stalin’s great, unforeseen fortune.
Of course, in Marxist thinking this was no accident: Capitalism was seen as inherently prone to booms and busts, a market economy produced depressions, misallocation of capital, mass unemployment, for which planning was supposed to be the answer. But there had never before been a capitalist crisis on the scale of the Great Depression (and there has not been since). The timing of the Depression, moreover, could not have been better for Stalin: right after he launched collectivization and dekulakization. The upshot was a windfall. More than one thousand factories would be newly built or overhauled from top to bottom, and nearly every single blueprint and advanced machine came from abroad.27 The Depression afforded Stalin unprecedented leverage: suddenly, the capitalists needed the Soviet market as much as the Soviets needed their advanced technology. Without the Great Depression would the capitalists have developed such overwhelming incentives to pursue the Soviet market no matter what? Indeed, the capitalist powers not only sold their best technology to the Communist regime, they continued doing so even after the Soviets were found to be violating contracts by purchasing designs for one factory and using them for others, trickery that was amply recorded in indignant internal foreign company records; the capitalist had no other customers for massive capital goods. Scholars who write of Moscow facing an “uncooperative world economy” have it exactly backward.28 Ideology and the party monopoly were the constraints; the global economy, the enabler. In fact, the global economic crisis was a double gift. Nothing did more to legitimate Stalin’s system. But Stalin had no idea that a Great Depression was around the corner, and that it would bring the foreign capitalists on bended knee.
Because of the Great Depression, we forget just how wild was Stalin’s gamble
—as great or greater than Lenin’s October coup, Brest-Litovsk, and the NEP. The Communist party, let alone the country, was not prepared for forced wholesale collectivization. Stalin could use the police to outflank the party, of course, but he also had to mount a high-profile public trial to fan the flames of “class warfare” The mass mobilization campaign launched with the Shakhty trial entailed the arrests of many qualified engineers amid a severe shortage, when they were desperately needed for the regime’s ambitious industrialization.29 The disruption caused by removing supposedly recalcitrant or sabotaging engineers was worse than whatever these alleged wreckers could have caused. Both collectivization and the class warfare campaign also required Stalin to outmaneuver his own inner circle, which looks easy only in retrospect.
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