180. Tsakunov, V labirinte, 143–4 (citing RGASPI, f. 325, op. 1, d. 108, l.44–5).
181. McNeal, Stalin’s Works, 110–1; Sochineniia, VI: 61–2.
182. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” would become institutionalized in the Comintern. Claudin, Communist Movement, 76–7.
183. Kamenev, in his article against Trotskyism in November 1924, had cut to the nub, noting that Trotsky’s permanent revolution “put the workers’ government in Russia in exclusive and complete dependence on an immediate proletarian revolution in the West.” Kamenev, “Leninizm ili Trotkizm (Uroki partiinoi istorii),” Pravda, November 26, 1924, reprinted in Kamenev, Stat’i i rechi, 188–243 (at 229); Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 57.
184. Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, June 20, 1925: 21.
185. Sochineniia, VI: 358–9.
186. Le Donne, Russian Empire and the World, 222.
187. On March 10, 1921, Maxim Litvinov, then Soviet ambassador to Estonia, had sent a note to the Estonian foreign minister protesting the formation of units on Estonian territory from the former Northwest Army for the defense of Kronstadt (“Thus criminal elements are intending to transform Estonia into a base for enemy actions against the Russian Republic”). The Estonian minister categorically denied their presence. Kronstadtskaia tragediiia, I: 348–9, 371. Soviet counterintelligence evidently detained more than one hundred Estonian agents and their collaborators in the five years from 1922, of whom thirty-five were executed or killed by Chekists in attempted capture. Tumshis and Papchinskii, 1937, bol’shaia chistka, 307–8.
188. Litvinov and Sidunov, Shpiony i diversanty, 39.
189. “A ring formed around the great USSR of small countries, where the bourgeois has held on thanks to the support of the predator nations of Western Europe,” Anatoly Lunacharsky, the enlightenment commissar, wrote of Estonia and other former tsarist territories, which he called “mere patches of land.” A. V. Lunacharskii, “Okrovavlennaia Estoniia” [1925], in Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinenii, II: 308.
190. In early 1925, Stalin had sent a ciphered telegram to Emanuel Kwiring, whom he had appointed party boss of Ukraine, noting of Trotsky, “It’s necessary to dismiss him from the Revolutionary Military Council,” but Stalin added, so far the majority considers it “not expedient to put Trotsky out of the politburo, but to issue a warning,” so that in the event of repeat violations of Central Committee policies, the politburo could “immediately remove him from the politburo and from work in the Central Committee.” “A minority,” according to Stalin, stood for “immediately driving him out of the politburo but retaining him in the Central Committee.” Stalin put himself in the ranks of this minority. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 7: 183.
191. Pravda, January 20, 1925. Officially, Trotsky was removed by resolution of the Soviet central executive committee on January 26, 1925. A translation of Trotsky’s long resignation letter appears in Eastman, Since Lenin Died, 155–8. Mikhail Lakoba, Nestor’s stepbrother, and the Abkhazia deputy interior minister, was put in Trotsky’s bodyguard detail. So was Shalva Tsereteli of the Georgian Cheka. Hoover Institution Archives, Lakoba papers, 1–47, 1–37.
192. XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 484.
193. Józef Unszlicht, who had been moved from the Cheka to head war commissariat supply, became Frunze’s first deputy. Pravda, February 7, 1925.
194. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 162, l. 62; Sochineniia, VII: 11–4.
195. “Literatura po leninizmu,” Sputnik politrabotnika, 1925, no. 8–9: 24–40. See also “Pomoshch’ samoobrazovaniiu: kratkaia programma po izucheniiu leninizma po skheme Stalina,” Krasnyi boets, 1924, no. 13: 58. Stalin also wrote that day to the editorial board of Worker Newspaper calling Lenin “teacher” and summoning Soviet inhabitants to love and study the departed “leader” [vozhd]. Rabochaia gazeta, January 21, 1921, in Sochineniia, VII: 15.
196. Pravda, January 30, 1925, in Sochineniia, VII: 25–33 (at 27).
197. Some observers believe Chicherin evinced a strong pro-German bias, coupled with a forward policy against the British empire, meaning support for national independence struggles and Communist parties in the East, while Maxim Litvinov, Chicherin’s first deputy, plumped for a British-French orientation. Haslam, Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 17.
198. See the wrangling in 1923: DBFP, VIII: 280–306.
199. Izvestiia, August 10, 1924; Dokumenty vneshnei politiki, VII: 609–36; Adibekov, Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i Evropa, 48–9.
200. DVP SSSR, VII: 556–60, 560–1; Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 136–9.
201. A Belorussian group objected, sending an article to Pravda (“On the English Treaty”), dated August 18, 1924, citing Rakovski to the effect that “we are paying the old debts” just in order for Britain to offer a new loan. “And so, we have to liquidate almost all the effects of the October Revolution on the foreign bourgeoisie,” they wrote. “No one asked us about signing the treaty.” They called the treaty “a defeat of the revolution without a fight,” and called for a discussion by the whole party. Khromov, Po stranitsam, 216–7 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 290, l. 5–7). The article was signed by N. Makarov, P. Leblev, and A. Vasilev, from a settlement in Minsk province. Pravda sent the draft article to Stalin. On August 25, 1924, Stalin sent it to the Belorussian Central Committee (party boss Asatkin): “It is necessary to verify whether the named people are Communists, whether they signed the article, and if yes, what spurred its contents. No repressive measures should be taken against the authors” (l. 3). In other words, the positions of the British conservative Tories and the Belroussian leftist Communists coincided.
202. In fact the Soviets attached a high value to relations with Britain, as reflected in the envoys sent: Krasin, Rakovski, Dovgalevsky, and Maisky.
203. Hilger and Meyer, Incompatible Allies, 124.
204. Pro-Western Germans admitted that “the Rapallo agreement gave us a lot and afforded a certain weight in international politics, but the Bolsheviks used it more,” and they railed against Comintern agents. D’iakov and Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR, 60–4 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 98, l. 153–7: February 5, 1925).
205. The count had been instrumental in getting Karl Radek released from a German prison in 1919. Debo, Survival and Consolidation, 67–70.
206. Ulrich Brockdorff-Rantzau, Dokumente, 146ff.
207. Rosenbaum, Community of Fate; O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution, 95–6.
208. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy, xxxiii (RGASPI, f. 2, op. 2, d. 515, l. 1).
209. Akhmatzian, “Voennoe sotrudnichestvo SSSR,” Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee [1994].
210. Dyck, “German-Soviet Relations,” 68 (citing Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, L337/L1oo564–68: Rantzau to Stresemann, March 9, 1925).
211. Dyck, “German-Soviet Relations,” 69 (citing Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, 5265/E317849–52: Rantzau to the Foreign Ministry, Dec. 1, 1924).
212. Carr, Socialism in One Country, III: 257.
213. Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 156–8.
214. “K mezhdunarodnomy polozheniiu i zadacham kompartii,” Pravda, March 22, 1925, in Sochineniia, VII: 52–9 (53).
215. By 1933, 450 German Luftwaffe pilots trained at Liptesk.
216. Gorlov, Sovershenno sekretno: al’ians Moskva-Berlin, 146.
217. Schroeder, “The Lights That Failed.” Beck, Dernier rapport. See also Salzmann, Great Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union; Johnson, Locarno Revisited; Wright, “Locarno: A Democratic Peace?”
218. Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 174. As Jacobson summarized elsewhere, “The security of France was Germany’s insecurity; the security of Germany was Poland’s insecurity.” Jacobson, “Is There a New International History of the 1920s?,” 620.
&
nbsp; 219. Pravda, October 20, 1925; Izvestiia, November 24, 1925 (Litvinov).
220. A top analyst for the Soviets, the Hungarian economist Jeno Varga (b. 1879), the finance minister in the shortlived Bela Kun Hungarian Soviet government, had been delivering long reports at Comintern congresses on the “crisis of capitalism,” but with Locarno, Varga, along with others, began to write of a “stabilization of capitalism.” In 1926 Varga would side with Stalin against the united opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev; Varga would soon become one of Stalin’s top foreign policy aides, heading the Institute of World Economy and World Politics, which had been created in 1925. He took over for Fyodor A. Rothstein, who had been born in tsarist Lithuania, and spent thirty years in Great Britain, but published Trotsky in the institute’s journal. Eran, The Mezhdunarodniki, 32; Duda, Jeno Varga, 37, 85, 97–8; Mommen, Stalin’s Economist.
221. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 23, l. 126–7: notes for the main political report to the 14th Party Congress, December 1925. For the report he delivered: Sochineniia, VII: 273–4.
222. Sochineniia, VII: 12–13, 28, 280.
223. White, “Early Soviet Historical Interpretations.” Sergei Kirov, reporting to the Baku party organization he headed in February 1925 on Trotsky’s Lessons of October, stated that “Here the matter is not some simple theoretical fistfight, rather here the matter in the literal sense, is the fate of our party and our revolution”—an admission, perhaps, of the exhaustion induced by the all-consuming polemics. Bakinskii rabochii, February 5, 1925.
224. Lenoe, “Agitation, Propaganda, and the ‘Stalinization’ of the Soviet Press,” 6.
225. Volkogonov, Trotsky, 207. An exhibition for the fifth anniversary of the Red Army in 1923 had devoted an entire room to Trotsky’s fabled civil war train, but the train, which made its last trip in 1922, was officially decommissioned in July 1924. Iubileinaia vystavka Krasnykh; Argenbright, “Documents from Trotsky’s Train.”
226. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 145. Isaac Zelensky had only just been appointed as one of the CC secretaries in June 1924; in August he was shipped out to Tashkent.
227. Uglanov would later remark that Zinoviev and Kamenev “carried on conversations with me from which I understood that they were trying in a roundabout way to fasten on me their disagreements with Stalin,” but he “declined their invitation.” XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 193. Back in Leningrad, when Uglanov and a number of young party officials clashed with Zinoviev, Lenin, along with Stalin and Molotov, had supported the youngsters. Merridale, Moscow Politics, 29 (citing Moskovskaia Pravda, February 12, 1989). See also Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 142; and Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 62.
228. Nadtocheev, “‘Triumvirat’ ili ‘semerka’?,” 61–82. The group was also known as the “leading collective.” Trotsky certainly suspected people were gathering behind his back. In 1926, Zinoviev, after Stalin had run roughshod over him, too, confessed the existence of the septet to Trotsky. But Trotsky did not speak out against the septet until 1927. Fel’shtinskii, Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia v SSSR, III: 87; Lars Lih, “Introduction,” in Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 5.
229. The Stalin-Bukharin alliance appears to have begun, at Stalin’s initiative, in late 1924: XIV s”ezd VKP (b), 136, 397–8, 459–60, 501; Cohen, Bukharin, 429, n1. On the breakdown of the triumvirate, see Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution, 235–7; Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: ch. 13.
230. Trotskii, Sochineniia, III/i: xi–lxvii; Uroki Oktiabria; “Lessons of October,” in Trotsky, The Essential Trotsky, 125, 157, 172, 175. See also Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 151ff; and Pavliuchenkov, Rossia nepovskaia, 97 (citing RGASPI, f. 325, op. 1, d. 361, l. 3). Already on October 16, 1924, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had convened at Kamenev’s apartment to plot how they would go after Trotsky, using Pravda and other forums, to put him on the back foot—but he ambushed them. Trotsky wrote “Lessons” as a long introduction to volume III of his Collected Works, which dealt with 1917 and was published out of chronological order. Twenty-one volumes would be published by 1927: more than for any other top leader, including Lenin. Trotskii, Sochineniia. See also Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’, December 10, 1924. Like Trotsky, Zinoviev had aides record his speeches for subsequent publication. Six volumes of Zinoviev’s “works” were published in 1924 (the preface to the first volume bore the date October 1923): Zinov’ev, Sobranie sochinenii, I, II, III, V, XV, XVI. Kamenev, who edited Lenin’s Collected Works, did not publish his own; he had tried to issue a three-volume edition in 1907 (a contract was signed but nothing came of it), but in 1924 issued three volumes (I, X, XII) of his Speeches. Publication was soon discontinued.
231. Pravda, November 2, 1924 (Bukharin), reprinted in Za leninizm, 9–25; Trotskizm i molodezh’, 41–7 (Zinoviev); Bol’shevik, 1925, no. 14 (November 5): 105–13 (Sokolnikov); Za leninizm, 28–30, 60–2 (Kamenev).
232. Pravda, November 26, 1924. See also Kamenev, Stat’i i rechi, I: 188–243; Za leninizm, 87–90, 94–5; and Stalin, Sochineniia, VI: 324–57. See also Zinoviev, Bol’shevizm ili trotzkizm?
233. Pravda, December 16, 1924, in Krupskaia, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 142–3; McNeal, Bride of the Revolution, 249. It is unclear who might have inserted these pointed words into Krupskaya’s bland text.
234. “Yenukidze” [January 8, 1938], in Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov [1991], 233–44 (at 241), [1984], 251–72 (at 264–6). On March 22, 1925, Alexander Myasnikyan, known as Myasnikov, the deputy chairman of the South Caucasus Council of People’s Commissars, and Solomon Mogilevsky, the head of the South Caucasus Cheka, were killed in the crash of a Junkers plane after takeoff near the Tiflis aerodrome. Two days later, a different plane arrived with friends of Trotsky’s, members of the central executive committee: the Soviet ambassador to France Rakovski and the people’s commissar of the post Smirnov, who claimed that Avel Yenukidze, a close Stalin associate and the secretary of the central executive committee, had provided them with the airplane. The plane that crashed had caught fire while still in the air; the cause of the fire was never established. Both pilots also died. Beria headed the first, inconclusive investigatory commission; a second and then a third commission headed by Karl Pauker from Moscow never got to the bottom of the incident. Trotsky, who suspected Georgian Mensheviks, went to Tiflis from Sukhum for the funeral. Trudovaia Abkhazia, March 25, 1925; Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1925, no. 6: 234–6; Biulleten’ oppozitsii, January 1939: 2–15.
235. Nazarov, Stalin i bor’ba za liderstvo, 108–9 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 179, l. 105).
236. Anfert’ev, Smerch, 233. Sokolnikov had met Galina (b. 1905) when she was seventeen—they shared an entrance to their living quarters at the Metropole (she lived one floor above him)—just before she went on to study at Moscow University’s medical faculty; he would come by in the evenings to play chess with her first husband, Leonid Serebryakov, whom she married in 1923 but left in 1925 to marry Sokolnikov. Galina Serebriakova, “Iz vospominanii,” in Anfert’ev, Smerch, 235.
237. Anfert’ev, Smerch, 233–4.
238. Woodruff, Money Unmade, 27; Sokol’nikov, Novaia finansovaia politika, 200–1.
239. Johnson and Temin, “The Macroeconomics of NEP,” 753. On the skepticism, see Barmine, One Who Survived, 125; and Serge, Ot revoliutsii k totalitarizmu, 177.
240. Bourne and Watt, British Documents on Foreign Affairs, VII: 376 (undated, date deduced from content).
241. Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, 1924, no. 8: 47–116, reprinted in Novaia ekonomika (1926), 52–126. A rejoinder, from Bukharin, was entitled “How to Wreck the Worker-Peasant Alliance” (Pravda, December 12, 1924). See also Carr, Socialism in One Country, I: 219–26.
242. L. A. Neretina, “Reorganizatsiia gosudarstvennoi promyshlennosti v 1921–25 godakh: prontsipy i tendentsii razvitiia,” in Davies, NEP, 75–87; Brovkin, Russia After Lenin, 179–81. Private trade wa
s far more substantial than private industry, but was being harassed. Davies, Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 76–9.
243. Sokol’nikov, Gosudarstvennyi kapitalizm; Leninskii sbornik, XXIII: 192–3.
244. Zinoviev made a bid to seize agricultural policy with a call for the party to “turn its face to the countryside,” part of a gambit to enhance his stature as Lenin’s heir. Zinoviev’s cluelessness, however, was evident: as late as July 3, 1924, Leningrad pravda, his newspaper, had foreseen major grain exports. Pravda, July 30, 1924; Leningradskaia pravda, July 30, 1924; Zinov’ev, Litsom k derevne.
245. Izvestiia, September 3, 1924 (Rykov); Reswick, I Dreamt Revolution, 84–96. (Reswick was an American citizen, born in Russia, who was willing to be used by the Soviet regime in exchange for nonpareil access.)
246. Andrei Andreyev, a Central Committee secretary, traveled around Siberia, the Urals, and the North Caucasus, and got to the heart of the matter. “A bureaucratic [chinovnich’e] introduction of laws magnifies to the scary red-tape of our institutions—here is the main evil,” he stated. “Our soviet and party functionaries devote little attention to small concrete matters that the peasant raises, but spend most of their time spewing general answers. The peasant tiller asks a concrete question and he is subjected to verbiage about major state and international issues.” Gimpel’son, NEP, 384 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 112, d. 733, l. 170).
247. At a January 3, 1925, politburo session Stalin instructed those present to read the feuilleton of David Dallin, serialized in several issues of the emigre Menshevik newspaper, because “it has wonderful data on how the muzhik thinks about agricultural cooperatives and why he prefers them.” Stalin disagreed with Sokolnikov’s assertion that “consumer cooperatives were a leap into the unknown,” but he accepted his emphasis on the need to focus attention on agricultural cooperatives. Stalin argued that kulaks should be allowed to become members: “This would have a gigantic significance, because it would act as a stimulus for whole villages to join the cooperatives.” At the same time, he disagreed with the suggestion of Alexander Smirnov, the RSFSR agriculture commissar, to allow kulaks not only to join but also to run them. “In the management of society even one kulak would be dangerous,” Stalin stated. “The kulak is a smart person, experienced. In a management capacity, he can win over ten non-kulaks.” He recalled Lenin’s instruction about how after the end of the civil war kulaks could be allowed to stand for elections to soviets, but, five years after the Whites had been defeated on the battlefield, Stalin stated that “We have a long way to go to full liquidation of the civil war, and we shall not get there soon.” Vatlin, Stenogrammy zasedanii Politburo, I: 305–7, 314–5; Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 1925, no. 20, 21, 23, 24. See also Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 91 (citing Nashe otechestvo [Moscow: Terra, 1991], II: 197).
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