248. Male, Russian Peasant Organization.
249. Bol’shevik, 1924, no. 3–4: 23, 25 (Slepkov).
250. Gladkov, Sovetskoe narodnoe khoziaistvo, 73, 343.
251. Pravda, December 19, 1924; Carr, Socialism in One Country, 208–11.
252. Sochineniia, VI: 135, 243–4.
253. Pravda, June 4, 1930, in Sochineniia, VI: 321.
254. Pravda, January 30, 1925, in Sochineniia, VII: 25–33 (at 28).
255. XIV konferentsiia VKP (b).
256. See Stalin’s glowing remarks on NEP’s success, delivered in a report on the 14th party conference at the Moscow party organization: Pravda, May 12 and May 13, 1925, reprinted in Sochineniia, VII: 90–132 (at 128–9). See also Graziosi, “‘Building the First System.’”
257. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 23, l. 45. As it happened, when the commissariats were united (in 1926), Stalin would name Mikoyan as trade commissar.
258. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 4–5; Pittaluga, “The Genoa Conference.” It has been argued that the gold standard, and its effect of requiring price deflation, furnished an additional impetus to ideological proclivities for authoritarian interventionism in the economy to administer prices. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 233–4.
259. Vatlin, Stenogrammy zasedanii Politbiuro, I: 379 (November 2, 1925), I: 533 (December 12, 1925), II: 507 (January 3, 1927). Thanks to Professor Paul Gregory for pointing me toward Stalin’s demonstrations of insight on political economy at party forums.
260. Bukharin, “O novoi ekonomichheskoi politike i nashikh zadachakh,” 3–15.
261. Bukharin, to reinforce the message, wrote a pamphlet, Can We Build Socialism in One Country in the Absence of the Victory of the West-European Proletariat? (April 1925). In connection with the 14th party conference (April 27–29, 1925), Stalin edited Zinoviev’s draft theses, crossing out some passages, inserting others, and producing the following: “Leninism teaches that the final victory of socialism in the sense of a full guarantee against the restoration of bourgeois relations is possible only on a world scale (or in several decisive countries).” Further, Stalin added: “In general, the victory of socialism (not in the sense of final victory) is absolutely possible in one country.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 3359, l. 11, 6, 15. Zinoviev would launch a critique of the Stalin view in September 1925, with his book on Leninism, but his criticisms were incoherent (at one point he wrote that “if one asks us whether we can and must establish socialism in one country, we will reply that we can and must”). Van Ree, “Socialism in One Country,” 107. In September 1925, Jonava Vareikis, head of the press section in the party secretariat, published a pamphlet, Vozmozhna li pobeda sotsializma v odnoi strane? (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1925), praising Stalin’s December 1924 article as the only serious contribution to Leninism since the leader’s death!
262. Lih, “Zinoviev.” Lih is right that Carr was wrong when he wrote that after January 1924 (the 13th party conference) “it could be clearly seen that personalities rather than principles were at stake.” Carr, Interregnum, 340.
263. Black, “Zinoviev Re-Examined.”
264. Brovkin, Russia After Lenin, 160 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 16, d. 766, l. 253).
265. Sochineniia, VII: 153. The episode is handled in Carr, Socialism in One Country, I: 260, 284.
266. PSS, XLIII: 330, 333, 357, XLIV: 325, XLV: 372.
267. Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 79.
268. Pravda, May 13, 1925; Sochineniia, VII: 132.
269. Sochineniia, VII: 111, 123–4.
270. “So much anger and frustration can be felt in these letters that one is truly overwhelmed,” the editor of the journal New Village reported. “Never before have we had letters with so much resentment, hatred, and envy of the growing new agricultural households as now. A hungry and poor peasant is beginning to hate the prosperous toiling agriculturalists so much that he wants to bring ruin upon them.” Brovkin, Russia After Lenin, 159 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 87, svodka 45), 160.
271. Ehrenburg, Memoirs, 68.
272. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, I: 256 (citing U.S. State Department Decimal File, 316-164-205).
273. One American journalist, who called the NEP “an armed truce, at best,” wrote of the NEPmen as “a class existing by sufferance, despised, and insulted by the population and oppressed by the government. It became a curious burlesque on capitalism, self-conscious, shifty, intimidated, and ludicrous.” Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 84–5. In 1925, just the official taxes on NEPmen exceeded those on prewar traders. But officals levied additional “punitive” taxation for “luxury goods,” whose definition was conveniently inflatable. Trifonov, Ocherki istorii klassovoi bor’by, 84.
274. Bribe taking and other forms of corruption began early and persisted: Epikhin and Mozokhin, VChK-OGPU v borb’e s korruptsiei, 312 (TsA FSB, f. 66, op. 1, por. 36, l. 324), 315–17 (TSA FSB, f. 66, op. 1, po. 106, l. 64–64ob.), 334–35 (TSA FSB, f. 66, op. 1, d. 108, l. 83), 339 (APRF, f. 3, op. 58, op. 187, l. 16), 482–4 (TsA FSB, 2, op. 4, por. 32, l. 5–6); Plekhanov and Plekhanov, F. E. Dzerzhinskii, 442–3 (TsA FSB, f. 66, op. 1-T.D. 100v., l. 6).
275. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 202, n1.
276. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 69–84; Kosheleva, Pis’ma I. V. Stalina V. M. Molotovu, 13–26.
277. Bol’shevik, 1925, no. 16 [September]: 67–70. See also Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 74–7; Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 169–70, 247–8; Eastman, Love and Revolution, 442–55, 510–16.
278. Stalin would quote Trotsky: “all talk about [Lenin’s] ‘testament,’ allegedly suppressed or violated, is a malicious invention and is directed wholly against Lenin’s real will and the interests of the party he founded.” Sochineniia, X: 175.
279. Bol’shevik, 1925, no. 16 [September]: 67–70. Bolshevik claimed a print run of 40,000. Kamenev, Bukharin, and Yaroslavsky were three of the five members of the editorial board.
280. Valentinov, Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika [1991], 295.
281. Later, Trotsky would claim that his statement had been “forced on me by a majority of the politburo.” Biulleten’ oppozitsii, March 19, 1931 (letter of September 11, 1928).
282. Her repudiation raised the question of whether she had been involved in the Eastman incident, and was perhaps linked to Trotsky. Shvetsov, “Lev Trotskii i Maks Istmen,” 141–63.
283. Bol’shevik, 1925, no. 16: 71–3 (Krupskaya letter dated July 7, 1925).
284. Some have speculated that Rakovski had been the intermediary, while others have fingered Krupskaya, who is said to have given it to a member of the opposition who was going abroad in connection with a conference on international debts, and who handed it to the French leftist Boris Souvarine in Paris. McNeal, Bride of the Revolution, 258; Trotsky, The Real Situation in Russia, 320–3.
285. Frunze also exempted numerous categories of people from conscription, and blessed the Great War experience of national units. Berkhin, Voennaia reforma, 116–45; Erickson, Soviet High Command [2001], 164–213; Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship; Von Hagen, “The levee en masse,” 159–88. Much of the debate behind the reforms had been launched at a closed session at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. Sergei Gusev and Mikhail Frunze had called for reorganizing the Red Army in line with a new strategy of “a national defensive war,” while Trotsky had argued for a Red Army in line with a strategy of “exporting revolution.” Simonov, Voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks SSSR, 22.
286. Sokolov, Ot voenproma k VPK, 39–42 (citing RGAE, f. 2097, op. 1, d. 64, l. 8–24: report of March 2, 1924).
287. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 174. As of January 1, 1921, tsarist officers had made up 34 percent of the Red Army commanders at all levels, some 12,000 officers overall. In 1921, the Special Departme
nt initiated a Red Army census, gathering some 400,000 responses to a fifteen-question form, looking for those who had served in any of the White or national armies during the civil war. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 337 (citing TsA FSB, f. 1, op. 6, d. 670, 216–216ob.)
288. Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty, 174; Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 342 (citing Arkhiv UFSB po Omskoi oblasti, f. 39, op. 3, d. 4, l. 77); Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 269 (citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 3, d. 674, l. 5); Antonov-Ovseenko, Stroitel’stvo Krasnoi armii, 31.
289. Trotskii, Kak vooruzhalas’ revoliutsiia, II: 92–3.
290. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 102, citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 3, d. 773, l. 2 (A. Snesarev). Soviet foreign intelligence managed to recruit agents or representatives in twenty-seven countries. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 283; Kapchinskii, Gosbezopasnosti iznutri, 115 (citing GARF, f. 130, op. 5, d. 89, l. 565–6), 117 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 227, l. 57). Up to 2 million people had left Russia during the revolution and civil war, and perhaps 1.2 million were still abroad. A very large number of people who did not leave acquired relatives “abroad,” often in former pieces of the empire, with whom they corresponded, becoming a target of systematic perlustration. V zhernovakh revoliutsii; RGASPI, f. 76, op. 3, d. 331, l. 1–2: March 30, 1924).
291. There are two stories on the origins of the Trust that are not incompatible. By some accounts, the formation of an underground brotherhood of anti-Soviets was originally the work of Polish intelligence: in the spring of 1920, Wiktor Kijakowski-Steckiewicz (b. 1889), a secret member of the underground Polish Military Organization, was supposedly tasked with crossing over into the Soviet Union to organize an intelligence network in Petrograd, but he was arrested and, by some accounts, agreed to collaborate. (Later, after his wife left him, in despair he attempted suicide and ceased to work in counterintelligence. In 1932 he was transferred to foreign intelligence and posted to Mongolia, where he died during an uprising.) The other story centers on Alexander Yakushev, a transport commissariat official and staunch monarchist, whose name evidently emerged in intercepted mail. Instead of rolling up his handful of associates, the GPU persuaded him to cooperate and created the Monarchist Organization of Central Russia, code named “the Trust” (as in the corporation). See Voitsekhovskii, Trest.
292. Fleishman, V tiskakh provokatsii; Gilensen, “V poednike s pol’skoi ‘dvuikoi’ pobedili sovetskie ‘monarkhisty,’” 75; Gaspar’ian, Operatsiia Trest; Seregin, “Vyshii monarkhicheskii sovet i operatsiia ‘Trest,’” 67–72; and Pares, My Russian Memoirs, 595.
293. Minakov, Sovetskaia voennaia elita, 58 (citing GARF, f. 5853, op. 1, d. 1–24: a secret analysis from the Berlin emigration, February 15, 1922). A “revolutionary Bonaparte,” Wrangel’s representative in Berlin, General von Lampe, noted in his private diary of Tukhachevsky. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 280–1 (citing GARF, f. 5853, op. 1, d. 2, l. 422)”.
294. “Glavkoverkh Tukhachevskii,” Rul’, October 1922 (written by Prince F. Kasatkin-Rostovsky, under the pseudonym Antar); Minakov, Sovetskaia voennaia elita, 60–2.
295. Behind the journal stood B. Bortnovsky and G. Teodori, although the editor was M. I. Tmonov (then A. K. Kelchevsky, then V. Kolossovsky). Teodori worked to explain away Tukhachevsky’s defeat at Warsaw by pointing out that his flank had been exposed by the failure of the other Soviet army force to show (an implicit criticism of Stalin); Teodori made the same points in the Soviet press. See also the note by the pundit N. Korzhenevsky in the former Prague archive: Ioffe, “‘Trest’: legendy i fakty.”
296. During maneuvers in the Western Military District, the Special Department became suspicious that Tukhachevsky so desired revenge against Poland he might launch his own war: all his orders and actions were suddenly subject to meticulous investigation in the summer of 1923. After maneuvers had finished, on September 29, 1923, Dzierzynski, who was obsessed with any matters relating to Poland, had ordered that the central OGPU Special Department conduct a still more thorough investigation of Tukhachevsky. After familiarizing himself with the results, Dzierzynski in January 1924 wrote to Wiaczesław Mezynski ordering immediate action. “It is impossible to wait passively while ‘Smolensk [Western headquarters] dictates its will to the Kremlin.’” Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 285–7 (citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 1, d. 882, l. 829; op. 2, d. 27, l. 1; d. R-9000, t. 24, l. 165). At the 7th Belorussia Congress of Soviets in Minsk in 1925, Tukhachevsky stated that the Belorussian government “place the issue of war [with Poland] on the agenda.” VII Vsebelorusskii s”ezd sovetov, 231.
297. On October 8 (Thursday), the doctors decided he had to undergo an operation; the internal bleeding frightened Frunze, but he held back. Stalin sent Mikoyan to urge Frunze to undergo the operation, then went to Frunze himself. Frunze wrote to his wife Sofia in Yalta that “I remain in the hospital still. On Saturday [October 10, 1925] there will be a new consultation. I’m afraid surgery might somehow be refused [kak by ne otkazali v operatsii].” Kanonenko, “Kto ubil Mikhail Frunze” (citing RGVA, f. 32392, d. 142, l. 3–5).
298. Volkogonov garbled this letter: Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, I/i: 127–8. The full text appears in Kanonenko, “Kto ubil Mikhaila Frunze.”
299. Pravda, October 29 and October 31, 1925; Pravda, November 1, 1925 (for the autopsy, conducted by A. I. Abrikosov, and signed by the entire medical team).
300. Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 100–2; Bazhanov, Vospominaniia [1990], 141; Gamburg, Tak eto bylo, 181–2.
301. Pravda, November 3, 1925.
302. A version of Frunze’s murder told by a Trotsky supporter to the writer Boris Pilnyak was soon fixed in a novella, “Tale of the Unextinguished Moon,” published in the journal Novyi mir; censors would confiscate the entire run. Ulam, Stalin, 260–1; Carr, Socialism in One Country, II: 123–4. Frunze’s comrades demanded a special investigation, under the auspices of the Society of Old Bolsheviks. Health commissar Nikolai Semashko testified that the Central Committee medical commission had had no experts in ulcers and that before the commission had ruled Professor Rozanov had spoken with Stalin and Zinoviev. That may have been as far as the investigation went. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 156–8. Later, Stalin would also be accused of organizing the murder of Yefraim Sklyansky, Trotsky’s former first deputy at the war commissariat, who died in August 1925 in a boating accident on a lake in upstate New York, 350 miles north of Manhattan, on a visit to Isaiah Hoorgin, head of the Soviet-American Trading Co. (Amtorg). The two were waiting for their train to return to New York City and killing time in a canoe when a sudden strong wind overturned their small vessel. Neither was a champion rower and accompanying staff, in rowboats, proved too far off (or perhaps too inebriated) to rescue the pair. Hoorgin was thirty-eight, Sklyansky thirty-three. L. Trotskii, “Sklianskii pogib,” Pravda, August 29, 1925; New York Times, August 30, 1925; Time, September 14, 1925; Pravda, Sepetember 22, 1925. Bazhanov leveled the accusations of murder; the death took place after he had left Stalin’s employ: Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 65–6. The loss of Hoorgin was significant. Litvinov wrote to Stalin in late 1925, urging the appointment of “an authoritative comrade, who could immediately take up leadership of the political work, meet with official representatives of the American government for unofficial negotiations, make overtures, respond to similar overtures from the other side, and so on.” Gaiduk, “Sovetsko-Amerikanskie otnosheniia” (citing RGAE, f. 413, op. 2. d. 2040, l. 144–5). Pyotr Ziv, Hoorgin’s deputy, took over temporarily. Amtorg was soon given to Saul Bron.
303. Zal’kind, “O zabolevaniiakh partaktiva.” In November 1925, Leonid Krasin fell deathly ill; blood tests revealed acute anemia. Alexander Bogdanov, who had been experimenting with blood transfusions, recommended one and Krasin looked over the research himself, agreed, and seemed rejuvenated—word spread of a mir
acle cure, and Stalin supposedly summoned Bogdanov. Bogdanov’s visit to Stalin (late December 1925) was recorded in Bogdanov’s diary but not in Stalin’s office logbook; what they discussed remains unknown. Bogdanov would die in 1928 in an experiment gone awry: for yet another transfusion, he used the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis; it may have been an incompatible type. Krementsov, A Martian Stranded, 61 (citing GARF, f. A-482, op. 42, d. 590). Zalkind would die of a heart attack on the way home in 1936 at the age of forty-eight.
304. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 704, l. 27.
305. See Adibekov, Politbiuro TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b): povestki dnia zasedanii, I: 421; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 533, l. 10; Krementsov, A Martian Stranded, 66 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 701, l. 73–95); Izvestiia, February 28, 1926: 5. The Germans were Friedrich Krause and Otfried Forster.
306. Teplianikov, “Vnikaia vo vse,” 169–70. Orjonikidze was made a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic.
307. Voennye arkhivy Rossii, vyp. 1: 406.
308. Pravda, November 7, 1925.
309. Tukhachevsky wrote (January 31, 1926), “I already reported to you orally that the Red Army general staff works in abnormal conditions, which make productive work impossible, and prevents the staff from bearing the responsibility laid upon it.” Minakov, Stalin i ego marshal, 356–7.
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