Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  96. XV konferentsiia VKP (b), 535.

  97. XV konferentsiia VKP (b), 578.

  98. XV konferentsiia vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b), 599, 601. See also Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 305; and Cohen, Bukharin, 240.

  99. Pravda, November 12, 1926, in Sochineniia, VIII: 298–356.

  100. Simonov, “‘Strengthen the Defense of the Land of Soviets,’” 1357.

  101. Golubev, Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku, 98–104; Samuelson, Soviet Defence Industry Planning, 40–4.

  102. O’Connor, Diplomacy and Revolution, 131–2.

  103. Golubev, Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku, 98–104.

  104. Ken and Rupasov, Politbiuro TsK VKP (b), 484–5, 491, 497.

  105. Wandycz, Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 50.

  106. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 305: Zakovsky to Mezynski, January 31, 1927.

  107. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 318 (citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 5, d. 32, l. 16. 19).

  108. Neilson, Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse, 52–3.

  109. Melville, Russian Face of Germany.

  110. Pravda, December 16, 1926, in Eudin and Fisher, Soviet Union and the West, 208–9; Fischer, Stalin and German Communism, 529–36.

  111. Neilson, Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse, 53 (citing FO 371/11787/N5670/387/38: J. D. Gregory memo-randum).

  112. Samuelson, Plans for Stalin’s War Machine, 36 (citing RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 128, l. 24: January 29, 1927).

  113. D’iakov and Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR, 80 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 128, l. 26: Jan Berzin to Voroshilov, January 29, 1927); Duraczynski and Sakharov, Sovetsko-Pol’skie otnosheniia, 63.

  114. Davies, review of David Stone (citing Vestnik finansov, 1927, no. 8: 140–1).

  115. Erickson, Soviet High Command [2001], 301–4.

  116. Stone, Hammer and Rifle, 22.

  117. Erickson, Soviet High Command [2001], 288.

  118. Kudriashov, Krasnaia armiia, 139–41 (APRF, f. 3, op. 50, d. 257, l. 30–31); Sokolov, Ot voenproma k VPK, 62–3 (citing GARF, f. 8418, op. 16, d. 3, l. 355); Ken, Mobilizatsionnoe planirovanie, 21.

  119. Murin, “Eshche raz ob otstavkakh I. Stalina,” 73 (APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 131, l. 64–5).

  120. Lih, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 131–2.

  121. Pravda, January 9, 1927.

  122. Pravda, January 9, January 13, January 14, and January 20, 1927.

  123. The myth-manipulation interpretation takes a superficial view: L. N. Nezhinskii, “Byla li voennaia ugroza SSSR v kontse 20-x—nachale 30-x godov?” Istoriia SSSR, 1990, no. 6: 14–30; Velikanova, “The Myth of the Besieged Fortress.”

  124. Samuelson, Plans for Stalin’s War Machine, 35 (citing PRO, Foreign Office, N530/190/38: January 26, 1927). Some scholars properly surmised that the war scare was genuine: Schapiro, Communist Party, 303–4.

  125. Prokofiev, Soviet Diary 1927, 43–4, 59, 66, 106, 156. In the early 1930s Prokofiev would return for good to Stalin’s USSR, and work alongside Shostakovich, who had never left.

  126. Loginov, Teni Stalina, 95.

  127. Na prieme, 766–73.

  128. Von Riekhoff, German-Polish Relations, 248–55.

  129. D’iakov and Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR, 71–6 (RGVA, f. 33987, op. 3, d. 151, l. 18–23).

  130. Akhtamzian, “Voennoe sotrudnichestvo,” 14–5; Akhtamzian, “Soviet-German Military Cooperation,” 105. See also Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, 96–7; and Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 227–9.

  131. Samuelson, Plan’s for Stalin’s War Machine, 32–3 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 611, l. 18: January 13, 1927).

  132. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 53–4 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 6, d. 110, l. 114–5).

  133. APRF, f. 3, op. 63, d. 137, l. 23–47 (courtesy of Sergei Kudryashov). The informant’s report might have been written and/or supplied by Mieczysław Loganowski (b. 1895), a functionary in the foreign affairs commissariat—someone using red pencil wrote his name in block letters on the typescript. Loganowski was a veteran of Red Army intelligence and had previously served under diplomatic cover as concurrent civilian (GPU) and military intelligence (GRU) station chief in Warsaw, where he organized armed sabotage brigades and plotted an assassination of Piłsudski. A protégé of Dzierzynski and especially Unszlicht, fellow Poles, Loganowski then played a similar role in Austria, before being posted to the foreign affairs commissariat in Moscow. One Soviet diplomat in Warsaw recalled him as “a person of strong will, iron stamina, and animal savagery.” Besedovskii, Na putiakh k terimodoru, 92–3; Sever and Kolpakidi, Spetsnaz GRU. Stalin knew Loganowski as a result of his own close involvement in the Unszlicht-coordinated sabotage-coup squads in multiple countries. Loganowski’s name on the document could refer to his authorship, or it could have been a reminder to contact him for follow-up.

  134. Samuelson, Plans for Stalin’s War Machine, 39 (citing RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 39, l. 6).

  135. Anglo-Sovetskie otnosheniia, 100–4; DVP SSSR, X: 6–62.

  136. Chernykh, Stanovlenie Rossii sovetskoi, 13. Word got to Moscow in 1927 of a group of a few dozen people in Yakutia agitating against Soviet power and predicting its downfall. The spring rains and mud prohibited sending in a police team until September to apprehend the conspirators before they could launch their “uprising.” Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 386 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 4, d. 204, l. 19).

  137. Pravda, March 3, 1927, in Sochineniia, IX: 170.

  138. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 8: 199–201 (A. G. Gorbunov: April 16, 1927). Some reports from the countryside deemed the political allegiance of peasants firm. “We don’t want war—we haven’t recovered from the last one yet—but we won’t give up Soviet power for anything,” one report from Ulyanovsk summarized. In the event of a war, these peasants pledged “every last one of us will fight.” Penner, “Stalin and the Ital’ianka,” 53 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 32, d. 110, l. 10: July 20, 1927).

  139. Lenin, Collected Works, 30: 93–104 (September–October 1919).

  140. Van Ree, Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, 222 (citing RGASPI, f. 558, op. 4, d. 598, l. 5–8).

  141. Smith, A Road Is Made.

  142. Smith, A Road Is Made, 28.

  143. Wilbur and How, Documents on Communism, 733.

  144. Smith, A Road Is Made, 168.

  145. Smith, A Road Is Made, 171.

  146. Stalin put great store in the Guomindang army. In November 1926, he likened the Chinese revolutionary movement to that of Russia’s in 1905, but added that “In China it is not an unarmed people that faces the troops of an old government but an armed people in the person of its revolutionary army. In China an armed revolution is fighting against an armed counterrevolution.” Sochineniia, VII: 357–8, 363.

  147. VKP (b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae, I: 64.

  148. VKP (b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae, I: 494.

  149. Michael Weiner, “Comintern in East Asia, 1919–39,” in McDermott and Agnew, Comintern, 158–190 (at 164, no citation).

  150. Wilbur and How, Missionaries of Revolution, 248–50. CU East Asian DS740.5.S65 W55 1989.

  151. Liu, Military History of Modern China, ch. 2.

  152. Karl, Staging the World, 195 (quoting Chen Duxiu, writing in 1904).

  153. Evans and Block, Leon Trotsky on China, 113–5.

  154. Pravda, May 22, 1925; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 2714, l. 17, reprinted in Sochineniia, VII: 133–52 (but without the clause “after the model of the Guomindang”). Stalin, in China, was leftist even when he appeared not to be. Pantsov, Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 86–9, 129; Kara-Murz, Strategiia i taktika Kominterna v natsional’no-
kolonial’noi revoliutsii, 112.

  155. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 44–5.

  156. Kartunova, “Kitaiskii vopros,” Kartunova, “Novyi vzgliad na razryv s Chan Kaishi . . .”; Peskova, “Stanovleniie diplomaticheskikh otnoshenii mezhdu Sovetskoi Rossiiei i Kitaem”; Peskova, “Diplomaticheskie otnosheniia mezhdu SSSR.”

  157. VKP (b), Komintern, i natsional’no-revolutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae, I: 549–53; Pantsov, Tainaia istoriia, 126; Pantsov, Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 84–5.

  158. Slavinskii, Sovetskii soiuz i Kitai, 101, citing Tszian Chzhun-chzhen [Chiang Kai-shek], Sovetskii Soiuz v Kitae, 26 (March 14, 1924).

  159. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 561, l. 1.

  160. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 3, l. 55 (April 29, 1926).

  161. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 155–60; Pantsov, Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 101–23.

  162. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 73 (citing Trotsky archives: “Voprosy nashei politiki v otnoshenii Kitaia i Iaponii”). Voroshilov was on the same committee.

  163. VKP (b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionoe dvizhenie v Kitae, II: 36–40; Pantsov, Tainaia istoriia, 163 (citing RGASPI, f. 495, op. 1, d. 73, l. 15: Zinoviev to Hu, February 8, 1926, and f. 514, op. 1, d. 233, l. 33); Pantsov, Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 111–2.

  164. Isaacs, Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 162, 351–2, n12.

  165. Izvestiia, April 8, 1927; Wilbur and How, Documents on Communism, 8–9.

  166. Slavinskii, Sovetskii soiuz i Kitai, 131–3; Kapitsa, Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniia, 177–81; Schwartz, Chinese Communism, 42–60.

  167. Wilbur, Nationalist Revolution in China, 108.

  168. Paul R. Gregory, Hsiao-ting Lin, Lisa Nguyen, “Chiang Chooses His Enemies,” Hoover Digest, 2010, no. 2; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 279, l. 1–7, 10, 12, d. 280, l. 2–17, d.281, l. 1–17, d. 282, l. 94–154 (Zinoviev’s theses), d. 283, l. 259–60, d. 284 (the edited, shortened published plenum, with April 15 cut), l. 22–30 (protocols with Zinoviev’s theses appended); Golubev, ‘Esli mir obrushitsia na nashu Respubliku,’ 49 (citing TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 5, d. 448, l. 20).

  169. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 115 (citing Trotsky archives, letter of April 18, 1927).

  170. Slavinskii, Sovetskii soiuz i Kitai, 155–6.

  171. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 327. “Our first disagreements with the leading core of the present politburo in regard to the Chinese question already refer to the beginning of 1926,” Zinoviev and Trotsky would write in late May 1927. The Trotsky-Zinoviev proposal that the Chinese Communists break with the Guomindang was confirmed by Bukharin and Stalin at the July 1926 plenum. Pantsov, Tainaia istoriia, 162 (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 166, d. 189, l. 2; Ob”edeninennyi plenum TsK i TsKK VKP (b), 14–23 iiulia 1926 g. Vyp. 1, l. 15, 75).

  172. Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 90.

  173. Vygodskii, Vneshniaia politika SSSR, 292, 145 (citing Izvestiia, December 4, 1962).

  174. Lubianka: Stalin i VChk-OGPU-NKVD, 133–4 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 5, l. 35). Gorodetsky, Precarious Truce, 221–31; Fischer, Soviets in World Affairs, 500–10; Fischer, Russia’s Road from Peace to War, 169.

  175. Khinchuk, K istorii anglo-sovietskikh otnoshenii, 46; Izvestiia, May 18, 1927 (Mikoian).

  176. Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 131.

  177. It would do so again in March 1928. Slavinsky, Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact.

  178. Fel’shtinskii, Kommunisticheskaia oppozitsiia v SSSR, III: 57–9; Volkogonov, Trotsky, 287.

  179. VKP (b), Komintern i natsional’no-revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae, II/ii: 763–4.

  180. Bol’shevik, May 31, 1927, in Sochineniia, IX: 311–2.

  181. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 336–7.

  182. Trotsky and Zinoviev, along with more than four score supporters, sent a long document known as the Declaration of the 84 for the initial signatories (a number that would grow above 300) to the Central Committee requesting a confidential Central Committee session to discuss the blowup of the revolutionary movement in China. It also enumerated Stalin’s domestic failures in peasant policy and industrialization, employment, wages, housing—in short, it was a full-throated anti-NEP, pro-revolution leftist manifesto. “Declaration of the 84,” in Trotsky, Challenge of the Left Opposition, II: 224–39.

  183. Gorodetsky, Precarious Truce; Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered, 222. Henderson and Dovgalevsky, “Anglo-Soviet Relations.” Relations would not be restored until 1929.

  184. Since trade relations had resumed in 1921, Moscow had sold London goods worth £70 million, while purchasing £24.3 million—cotton, wools, machinery, rubber, and tools. Velikanova, Popular Perceptions, 54 (citing Foreign Office 371, 1927, vol. 12595: 191, 193; vol. 12593: 161).

  185. Werth, “Rumeurs defaitistes et apocalyptiques”; Viola, “The Peasant Nightmare.” See also Simonov, “‘Strengthen the Defense of the Land of Soviets,’” 1355–6; Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 117. Leonard Schapiro speculated that the Soviet leadership may have been genuinely worried—which was true. Schapiro, Communist Party, 303–4. See also Sontag, “Soviet War Scare”; Meyer, “The Soviet War Scare of 1927”; and Romano, “Permanent War Scare,” 103–20.

  186. Rykov, Angliia i SSSR, 4–5, 21–31, 36.

  187. Von Riekhoff, German-Polish Relations, 248–55.

  188. Eudin and North, Soviet Russia and the East, 303–4; Sochineniia, X: 31–3; Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China, 133.

  189. Wu, “A Review of the Wuhan Debâcle.”

  190. Valedinskii, “Organizm Stalina vpolne zdorovyi,” 69.

  191. Criminal codes were issued at republic level, not all-Union, and in the 1926 RSFSR criminal code a person could be sentenced as “dangerous” even without having committed a crime, merely for “connection to a criminal environment” or “past activity” (article 7). The criminal code also contained a special section (article 58) devoted to crimes against the Soviet political order, which were deemed “the most dangerous” and carried the death penalty. Goliakov, Sbornik dokumentov po istorii ugolovnogo zakonodatel’stva SSSR, 220–3, 267–9, 293–7; Berman, Soviet Criminal Law, 23–4; Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 796–8, n61. “There is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn would write, “which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58.” Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, I: 60.

  192. “Sovetskii Azef,” Segodnya [Riga], May 9, 1927. The OGPU had decided to unwind its grand operation targeting Russian emigres known as the Trust. Polish intelligence had already figured it out: the information from the Trust did not match what the Poles were getting from other intelligence channels. The Trust also kept putting off the planned uprising against the Soviet regime, saying the time was not ripe, furthering suspicions. The game had essentially been played. Many people had been caught in the web, but the secret police had failed to lure back General Kutepov, who headed the All-Russia Military Union, the main emigre organization for officers and the principal target of Soviet foreign intelligence. But the double agent Alexander Upeninysh (Upelints), a Latvian, who used the names Alexander Opperput and Eduard Staunitz, among others, crossed from the USSR into Finland without permission on the night of April 12–13, 1927, and gave himself up, exposing the Trust in a Russian-language emigre publication. His expose conveyed the impression that the GPU was ubiquitous, omniscient, had penetrated everything and everyone. But for the GPU, the exposure was stinging. Kutepov went to Finland and insisted that Opperput-Staunitz, as well as Maria Zakharchenko-Shultz, Kutepov’s niece, prove the sincerity of their break with the GPU by sneaking back into the USSR and carrying out a terrorist act. The operatives felt they had no choice but to implement Kutepov’s directives, to demonstrate their bona fides, but in their attempt in flight
, near Smolensk, Opperput-Staunitz would be killed; Zakharchenko-Shultz would die later on, either in a shootout or by her own hand. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, 150.

  193. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 323–4. On January 26, 1930, OGPU agents would manage to kidnap Kutepov in Paris. He had a heart attack and died, either while still in Paris or on the Soviet ship Spartak sailing from Marseilles to Novorossiyka. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, 91; Nedelia, 1989, no. 49.

  194. Arsen’ev, Podzhigateli voiny, 21–2; Dokumenty i materialy po istorii sovetsko-pol’skikh otnoshenii, V: 151–2; Zhukovskii, Polnomochnyi predstavitel’ SSSR, 202–5; Shishkin, Stanovlenie vneshnei politiki postrevliutsionnoi Rossii i kapitalisticheskii mir, 283–91; Blackstock, Secret Road to World War Two, 136–61; Korbel, Poland Between East and West, 217–20. The Polish courts sentenced the assassin Boris Koverda to life imprisonment, but on June 15, 1937, the Polish government amnestied him.

  195. Shishkin, Stanovlenie vneshnei politiki postrevliutsionnoi Rossii i kapitalisticheskii mir, 289–90. Soviet protest: Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, II: 220–1, 228–31.

  196. Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 133 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 71, l. 2–3); Pravda, June 8, 1927. See also Shishkin, Stanovlenie vneshnei politiki postrevliutsionnoi Rossii i kapitalisticheskii mir, 283–91; Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, II: 220–1, 228–31; Dokumenty i materialy po istorii sovetsko-pol’skikh otnoshenii, V: 151–2; Zhukovskii, Polnomochnyi predstavitel’ SSSR, 202–5; Blackstock, Secret Road to World War Two, 136–61; Korbel, Poland Between East and West, 217–20.

  197. Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 137–8 (APRF, f. 3, op. 58, d. 3, l. 113–113ob.), 796, n60.

  198. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 767, l. 35–6.

  199. Pravda, June 10, 1927. As per Stalin’s directives, the OGPU also reinforced its agent networks with new recruits among so-called former people (members of the tsarist upper-class and priests). Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU, 313.

  200. Plekhanov, VChK-OGPU 130 (citing TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 5, d. 136, l. 10; d. 36, l. 3). On June 19, Mezynski limited “the quantity of [summary] executions by a relatively small number.” Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, I: 24. Mezynski admitted (July 19, 1927) that “few active monarchist groups were unearthed in Belorussia, Smolensk, Moscow, Leningrad, and so on.” Vinogradov, “Zelenaia lampa,” 5.