184. It took some time for the NEP to take hold. The term “NEP” was not even used until two months after the policy had been introduced. In Ukraine the NEP’s introduction was delayed; in Siberia, only a few districts were initially shifted to the tax in kind from mandatory delivery quotas. Izvestiia, March 23, 1921; PSS, XLIII: 62; Pravda, March 21, 1921; Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, II: 502–3; A. M. Bol’shakov, “The Countryside 1917–1924,” in Smith, Russian Peasant, 48. One provincial party official urged that tax collection “proceed as in war, in the full sense of the word.” Quoted in Radkey, Unknown Civil War, 366–7. The NEP-era tax collectors often were the previous gunpoint-requisitioners. Gimpel’son, Sovetskie upravlentsy.
185. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, II: 289, 295–6.
186. Atkinson, End of the Russian Land Commune, 235.
187. In 1928, Alexei Shchusev designed a colossal new headquarters for the agriculture commissariat at Orlikov Lane, no. 1, in constructivist style. That same year, Smirnov was sacked. The next year, a USSR agriculture commissariat was established. Shchusev’s masterpiece would be completed in 1933.
188. Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside, 104–35.
189. By 1927, the agriculture commissariat would employ one in five Soviet commissariat personnel. Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside, 93–4; Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, 16, 104–5. The statistics commissariat was the fourth largest.
190. Even then, no commissariat received the full amount of funding it sought: the war commissariat received just 37 percent of requests in 1919. Malle, Economic Organization of War Communism, 172–82. The dyes for printing money had to be purchased abroad for gold.
191. As of early 1918, £1 sterling could be purchased for R45; one year later, the number was 400, and by the middle of 1920 £1 cost R10,000, an increase of 222 times; the German mark against the ruble, during the same period, rose from 1 to 1 to around 100 to 1. By fall 1921, following the introduction of the NEP, black currency markets had become fully open, even though such exchange would not be formally legalized until April 1922. Feitelberg, Das Papiergeldwesen, 50.
192. Aliamkin and Baranov, Istoriia denezhnogo obrashcheniia, 194–5.
193. Katsenellenbaum, Russian Currency, 10.
194. Preobrazhenskii, Bumazhnye den’gi, 4. See also Arnold, Banks, Credit, and Money, 95–6; Feldman, The Great Disorder; Fergusson, When Money Dies.
195. G. Ia. Sokol’nikov, “Avtobiografiia,” in Gambarov, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, XLI/iii: 73–88, republished in Anfert’ev, Smerch, 190–205, and in Sokol’nikov, Novaia finansovaia politika, 39–50; Oppenheim, “Between Right and Left”; Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, II: 351. Krestinsky was made envoy to Berlin.
196. Pravda, February 14, 1919 (Stalin); Genis, “G. Ia. Sokolnikov.” On the sealed train see Sokolnikov, in Anfert’ev, Smerch, 193. It may have been Sokolnikov, rather than Trotsky, who originally suggested coordinating the October 1917 coup with the opening of the 2nd Congress of Soviets. Rubtsov, “Voenno-politcheskaia deiatel’nost’ G. Ia. Sokol’nikova,” 47.
197. Pravda, December 10, 1917; Sokol’nikov, K voprosu o natsionalizatsii bankov; Sokolov, Finansovaia politika Sovetskoi vlasti, esp. 22–27.
198. Zinoviev refused to go, which is how the task fell to Sokolnikov. Ivan A. Anfert’ev, “Vozvrashchenie Sokol’nikova,” in Anfert’ev, Smerch, 158–89, and “Neizvestnyi Sokol’nikov,” Vozvrashchenye imena (Moscow: Novosti, 1989), II: 223–42 (at 224–5); Sokol’nikov, Brestskii mir.
199. In 1919 at the 8th Party Congress Lenin entrusted him with presenting the case against the “military opposition” of Voroshilov and others and their partisan-warfare tactics. Back at the front, Sokolnikov wrote a denunciation of the First Cavalry Army’s undisciplined, drunken pillaging of the Don Valley civilian population after a victory, thereby eliciting Semyon Budyonny’s everlasting hatred. In July 1920, Trotsky asked Sokolnikov to deliver a course of lectures at the General Staff Academy so that, “in addition to the lectures, socialist literature would be enriched by a good book on military matters.” VIII s”ezd RKP (b) [1959], 144–52, 273 (for the vote on Sokolnikov’s theses); Sokol’nikov, “Avtobiografiia,” in Anfert’ev, Smerch, 190–205 (at 200); Budennyi, Proidennyi put’, I: 374–406. Chigir, “Grigorii Iakovlevich Sokol’nikov,” 63 (citing RGASPI, f. 760, op. 1, d. 71, l. 124).
200. Golikov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, IX: 108, 159.
201. G. Ia. Sokol’nikov, “Liquidatsiia Turkestanskogo rublia,” Pravda, December 30, 1920.
202. Arnold, Banks, Credit and Money, 126; Iurovskii, “Arkhitektor denezhnoi reform,” at 141; Katzenellenbaum, Russian Currency and Banking, 149–52; Nikolaev, “Na puti k denezhnoi reforme 1922–1924 godov,” 89. Katzenellenbaum worked under Sokolnikov. Efforts at private bank restoration had actually begun in the fall of 1919 but did not bear fruit until 1921, when the regime sought to reestablish normal trade relations, which also required determining a value for tsarist-era debts. On Sokolnikov’s health problems, see V. Rozanov, “Vladimir Il’ich Lenin,” Krasnaia nov’, 1924, no. 6: at 153. The State Bank was located at Neglinka, 12, in a solid two-story structure, with allegorical figures on the façade; it had been the Moscow branch of the imperial Russian State Bank built in 1894 on the site of the Vorontsov clan gardens. The vaults (Gokhran) were at Nastasinsky Lane, in the former Moscow Treasury building, built in 1913–16 in the style of the seventeenth century (called Moscow Baroque or neo-Byzantine).
203. Al’tman, “Lichnost’ reformatora,” 159. Details on the monetary reforms can be found in Finansovaia politika Sovetsko; and Sokolov, Finansovaia politika Sovetskogo gosudarstva; Denezhnaia reforma; Atlas, Ocherki po istorii denezhnogo obrashcheniia. Atlas (b. 1903) presents the story of monetary reform without mentioning Sokolnikov’s name, an oddity related to the date of his book’s publication (1940). He was the top person (professor) in the department of monetary circulation and credit in capitalist countries and the USSR at the economics institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
204. Atlas, Ocherki po istorii denezhnogo obrashcheniia, 196 (who, again, fails to mention Sokolnikov’s name); Goland, “Currency Regulation”; David Woodruff, “The Politburo on Gold, Industrialization, and the International Economy, 1925–1926,” in Gregory and Naimark, Lost Politburo Transcripts, 199–223. Herbert Hoover, when he learned in 1923 of renewed Soviet exports of food—which, unbeknownst to him, went to pay for imports of rifles and machine guns—suspended ARA operations. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 418–9.
205. Katzenellenbaum, Russian Currency and Banking, 84–8, 105, 145. The ruble went from 10,000 to 1 (January 1, 1922), 100 to 1 (January 1, 1923), and 50,000 to 1 (March 7, 1924). Lawton, Economic History of Soviet Russia, I: 151.
206. Goland, Diskusii ob ekonomicheskoi politike. 1924 would be the last such surplus of the NEP.
207. In 1924–5, vodka would deliver 500 million rubles to the budget—a spectacular, embarrassing revival of the “drunken budget” of the old regime. Carr, Interregnum, 43, n5.
208. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 278 (RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 231, l. 2).
209. Galina Serebriakova, “Iz vospominanii,” in Anfert’ev, Smerch, 230–49 (at 234).
210. Mau, Reformy i dogmy, 137–51.
211. XI s”ezd RKP (b), 360–1. Larin, in the mid-1920s, recanted utterly: “I think it’s safe to say that, first, this is the most intelligent of our commissariats, and secondly, it is the only commissariat with a clear economic line at any time.” Quoted in Genis, “Upriamyi narkom s Il’inki,” in Sokol’nikov, Novaia finansovaia politika, 5–38 (at 19).
212. Carr, Socialism in One Country, I: 490. The Workers and Peasants Inspectorate fought for its prerogatives against the finance commissariat.
213. Mikhail Koltsov, the talented young journalist, dubbed Sokolnikov “the stubborn commissar
from Ilinka,” who imposed all manner of taxes and restrictions—which, however, had conjured into being a real currency and economic stabilization. Kol’tsov, Izbrannoe, 39.
214. The society began with sixty-four members, who participated in commemorative evenings and published memoirs. Inside the regime, in parallel, tensions arose over the notion of Old Bolsheviks and whether comparative length of party membership should be treated as a kind of seniority. By 1925, when the party would nearly double in size to 1.1 million members and candidates, just 8,500 of them (0.8 percent) had joined before 1917, and a mere 2,000 (0.2 percent) before 1905 (the earliest date in order to be eligible members of the society). XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 460; Korzhikhina, “Obshchestvo starykh Bol’shevikov,” 50–65. Ustav obshchestva starykh bol’shevikov; Rezoliutsii i postanovleniia pervoi Vsesoiuznoi konferentsii Obshchestva starykh bol’shevikov; Spisok chlenov Vsesoiuznogo obshchestvo starykh bol’shevikov.
215. Rigby, “The Soviet Political Elite,” 419–20. Rigby points out that only 13 percent of the delegates to the 9th Congress had attended party congresses before the October Revolution; at the 10th Congress, the proportion fell to 5 percent. IX s”ezd RKP (b), 483; X s”ezd RKP (b), 762.
216. Lenin, characteristically, fretted about dilution of the party from admitting too many workers, because many had only recently arrived from a “petty-bourgeois” village milieu, complaining to Molotov that “the proletarian policy of the party is determined not by its composition, but by the immense, indivisible authority of its narrowest stratum, which could be called the old party guard.” But most other high officials were embarrassed about the glaring dearth of worker members in a worker party. PSS, XLV: 17–20; Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 239–41 (RGASPI, f. 5, op. 2, d. 27, l. 9–10).
217. In the factories, most party members as of 1921 were managers and administrators, not proletarians. The 10th Party Congress reprioritized recruitment of workers, a goal reaffirmed at the 11th Party Congress. Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State, 50–1; X s”ezd, 236–41, 284, 564; Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 93–5.
218. Rigby, “The Soviet Political Elite.” See also Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 132.
219. “The obvious prominence of the lower-middle strata necessitates rethinking many problems of the revolution,” one scholar has correctly noted. “It has been like a missing puzzle piece whose placement permits many new connections.” Daniel T. Orlovsky, “State Building in the Civil War Era: The Role of the Lower Middle Strata,” in Koenker, Party, State, and Society, 180–209 (at 203, n3). See also Buldakov, Bor’ba za massy, 164–256; and Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class.
220. “Moi ded, Viacheslav Molotov, ne platil Leninu gonorarov,” Rodnaia gazeta, May 20, 2005 (interview with Viacheslav Nikonov).
221. Nikonov, Molotov, 88, 91–2, 109–13.
222. Watson, Molotov and Soviet Government, 43.
223. Bazhanov, Vospominaniia [1990], 179.
224. Kuibyshev, Epizody iz moei zhizni; Elena Kuibysheva, Valerian Vladimirovich Kuibyshev; Berezov, Valerian Vladimirovich Kuybyshev; G. V. Kuibysheva, Valerian Vladimirovich Kuibyshev; Khromov and Kuibysheva, Valerian Vladimirovich Kuibyshev; Flerov, V. V. Kuibyshev; Buzurbaev, Kuibyshev v Sibiri; Erofeev, Valerian Kuibyshev v Samare.
225. Schapiro, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 260–2; Schapiro, Origin of the Communist Autocracy 1977 ed., 288–9. Kuibyshev had replaced Mikhailov in the party secretariat.
226. Trotsky, Stalin School of Falsification, 126.
227. Kuibyshev appeared in a compendium of top regime figures, which mostly included politburo members and candidates (Molotov was not included). Volin, 12 biografii. The twelve, alphabetical in Russian, were Bukharin, Dzierzynski, Zinoviev, Kalinin, Kamenev, Kuibyshev, Rykov, Smirnov, Stalin, Tomsky, Trotsky, and Frunze.
228. Rees, “Iron Lazar,” 1–59.
229. “I always laughed at that. I told Makhover, for example, in the presence of everyone, ‘You’ll never resemble Stalin, you have a different brain and anyway the main thing is you lack a mustache.’” Balashov and Markhashov, “Staraia ploshchad’, 4 (20-e gody),” no. 5: 195. Balashov was short, 153 cm (about five feet).
230. In 1923, Kaganovich noted that entire branches of industry were concentrated in the hands of unverified non-party people, sometimes even not the best non-party specialists but “slick careerists” (lovkikh proidokh). The upshot, he insisted, was that the party had to get involved and insert its people. Pavliuchenkov, Rossiia Nepovskaia “Orden mechenostsev,” 68 (citing f. 17, op. 68, d. 49, l. 28–31).
231. Bazhanov, Avec Staline dans le Kremlin, 58.
232. On April 7, 1925, Stalin would name Kaganovich party boss in Ukraine, one of the three strategic party organizations, alongside Moscow and Leningrad. Rees, “Iron Lazar,” 17. Kaganovich would not obtain an entry in Granat’s 1925 bibliography of the top 240 leading personages of the Soviet Union, but he belonged to the innermost core of Stalin’s machine. Gambarov, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’.
233. “Kalinin is a good fellow and for us an irreplaceable person,” Voroshilov wrote to Orjonikidze after a spring 1923 trip across the North Caucasus (Dagestan, Chechnya, Vladikavkaz, Nalchik). “In order to judge him properly, one needs to travel with him to villages and hear his conversations with peasants; here, he is utterly in his all peculiar beauty and, I should say straight out, force. One cannot find another like him in our party. Very few can like him set out our theory and practice to the peasants. . . . I had thought he was a bit of a lummox, but now I repent and beg forgiveness from Allah for my sins. I suggested to Kalinin that he visit you in Tiflis, but he clearly explained to me that without permission from the Central Committee he could not do such things.” Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 274 (RGASPI, f. 85, op. 24, d. 150, l. 1–2).
234. Sergei Minin, the top Tsaritsyn Bolshevik, would side with the anti-Stalin opposition at the 14th Party Congress in 1925. He appears to have fallen mentally ill by 1927. Minin would survive the terror and live until 1962. Pravda, June 29, 1962. Alexander Chervyakov, the Donbass miner who served as head of the Cheka in Tsaritsyn, returned to his native Ukraine in 1919 after the restablishment of a Bolshevik regime there, and served as deputy chairman of the Ukraine Cheka. In 1921, he was demoted to a party position in Zhitomir; for a time, he served on the commission for the struggle against famine in Zaporozhe. In 1922, he was transferred over to the Soviet executive committee of Ukraine. He would also survive the terror. With the war’s approach to Moscow, he would volunteer for the front but survive by being mostly in the rear. After the war he would teach and write; he would die in 1966. This Chervyakov (Alexander Ivanovich) is not to be confused with Alexander Grigoryevich Chervyakov (1892–1937), who helped found the Belorussian SSR, served in the USSR central executive committee, and committed suicide on June 16, 1937, during an intermission of a Belorussian party conference.
235. Nazarov, Stalin i bor’ba za liderstvo, 93.
236. Nazaretyan was the courier Stalin entrusted with delivering his private letters to Lenin (or Trotsky), and the person Stalin assigned to draft many Central Committee circulars. Bazhanov, Vospominaniia [1983], 53. Kun, Unknown Portrait, 286–8.
237. Rusanova, “I. P. Tovstukha.” From 1924 to 1926, Stalin would send him over to the Lenin Institute, as an aide to the director, responsible for Lenin’s archive and Collected Works. In 1930–1, Stalin sent Tovstukha back to the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin as deputy director and head of the archives. He would die in August 1935, and his ashes would be interred in the Kremlin Wall.
238. Nazaretyan, complaining of overwork, after a stint at Pravda on Stalin’s behalf, was returned to Georgia. Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1935, no. 6: 129–31.
239. Rubtsov, Iz-za spiny vozhdia, 33.
240. Balashov and Markhashov, “Staraia ploshchad’, 4 (20-e go
dy),” no. 6: 184–5.
241. Demidov, Politicheskaia bor’ba i oppozitsiia, 61–72; Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism, 25. Malenkov entered a technical university in Moscow in 1921, where he became the party secretary; his wife, Valeria Golubtsova (whose aunt knew Lenin), got hired in the orgburo and obtained an apartment among the trading rows near the Kremlin at the former Loskutnaya Hotel (House of Soviets no. 5), where many young apparatchiks lived. Malenkov received an invitation to join the central apparatus in 1924, becoming a protégé of Poskryobyshev, responsible for record-keeping on personnel. Nikolai Yezhov (b. 1895) would enter Stalin’s apparatus in 1927, as Poskryobyshev was gaining ever greater responsibility, and become Malenkov’s new patron. Danilov, Tragediia Sovetskoi derevni, III: 850; Petrov, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 184–6; Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power, 131–2. The Loskutnaya Hotel would become the headquarters of Moscow metro construction in the early 1930s; in 1938, it was torn down as the site was opened for a larger square as part of Moscow’s reconstruction.
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