Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  282. Fischer, Men and Politics, 94; Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 383–4; Shishkin, Stanovlenie vneshnei politiki postrevliutsionnoi Rossii i kapitalisticheskii mir, 282. N. P. Ryutin and A. M. Lezhava were there on behalf of the Moscow party committee.

  283. Volkogonov, Trotsky, 279, 303 (GARF, f. 5446, op. 2, d. 33, l. 19).

  284. Pravda, November 25, 1927.

  285. Moskovskie bol’sheviki, 106 (citing MPA, f. 63, op. 1, d. 153, l. 75; f. 3, op. 5, d. 2, l. 200: Pravda, December 2, 1927).

  286. XV s”ezd VKP (b), I: 43–74.

  287. XV s”ezd VKP (b), II: 1596–8.

  288. XV s”ezd VKP (b), I: 89–90; Sochineniia, X: 351.

  289. XV s”ezd VKP (b), I: 291. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 175.

  290. XV s”ezd VKP (b), I: 279–85.

  291. XV s”ezd VKP (b), I: 411–21; Sochineniia, X: 354–71 (at 371).

  292. XV s”ezd VKP (b), I: 623; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 86.

  293. XV s”ezd VKP (b).

  294. Bulletin no. 30, supplement no. 1: 35–7. Medvedev, Let History Judge. The Testament was published in a post-Stalin edition of the proceedings: XV s”ezd VKP (b), II: 1477–8.

  295. Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, I: 119–35 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 5, d. 386, l. 1–3, 15–45). A grim joke made the rounds: “They’re saying that they abolished the letter ‘M’—there’s no meat (miaso), no butter (maslo), no material to make clothing (manufaktura), no soap (mylo), and no reason to retain the ‘M’ just for the single surname Mikoyan” (the head of Soviet trade). Another pun was equally bitter: “The revolution gave workers a report (doklad), functionaries a salary (oklad) and their wives a treasure chest (klad), and the peasants hell (ad).” Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva, 30.

  296. Sevost’ianov, “Sovershenno sekretno,” V: 675.

  297. Mif, “Kitaiskaia Kommunisticheskaia partiiia v kriticheskie dni,” 106.

  298. “Iz istorii kollektivizatsii 1928 god: poezdka Stalina v Sibir’,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 7: 182–6.

  299. XV s”ezd VKP (b), II: 1599. See also Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, 385–9.

  300. XV s”ezd VKP (b), II: 1599–1600.

  301. XV s”ezd VKP (b), II: 1398–1400.

  302. A congress resolution formally submitted by Orjonikidze as chair of the Central Control Commission called for the expulsion of seventy-five prominent oppositionists; it passed without debate. XV s”ezd VKP (b), II: 1468–70. The oppositionists were formally accused of creating “an ideological orientation” of defeatism that “has transformed the Trotskyite opposition into an instrument of petit bourgeois democracy within the USSR and into an auxiliary detachment of international social democracy outside its borders.” Pravda, December 20 and December 21, 1927; KPSS v rezoliutsiakh, IV: 13–74. In the aftermath of the congress, some 1,500 party members would be expelled, while around 2,500 would sign written recantations. Popov, Outline History of the C.P.S.U., II: 327; Conquest, The Great Terror, 11 (no citation).

  303. Trotsky, My Life, 521.

  304. Of Central Committee members only 49 percent were Great Russian between 1917 and 1923; that number would reach 54 percent in 1934, but become heavily Great Russian by 1939. Evan Mawsdley, “An Elite Within an Elite: Politburo/Presidium Membership Under Stalin, 1927–1953,” 74.

  305. Grigorov, Povoroty sud’by i proizvol, 507. Trotsky [Bronstein] believed his, Zinoviev’s, and Kamenev’s Jewishness played a significant role in their defeat. Trotskii, Stalin, II: 224–5.

  306. Pravda, December 18, 1927.

  307. Mozokhin, VChK—OGPU, 24 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 5, por. 1, l. 31).

  308. Gerson, The Secret Police, 269.

  309. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 22.

  310. Cherniavskii, “Samootvod,” 67–70 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 335, l. 4–8: Rykov’s copy of the stenogram for correction). See also Murin, “Eshche raz ob otstavkakh I. Stalina,” 72–3.

  311. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 335, l. 3–7. See also Cherniavskii, “Samootvod.”

  312. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh [1970], III: 247; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, I/i: 710.

  313. Kvashonkin, Bol’shevistskoe rukovodstvo, 357–61 (GARF, f. R-5446, op. 55, d. 1338, l. 1–4).

  314. XV s”ezd VKP (b), II: 1132.

  315. XV s”ezd VKP (b), II: 1454–68; Pravda, December 20, 1927.

  316. XV s”ezd VKP (b), dekabr’ 1927 goda, I: 66–7, II: 1419. One scholar asserted that not even close observers of the 15th Party Congress could have surmised that the country stood on the cusp of a revolutionary remaking. Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, 230.

  317. XV s”ezd VKP (b), I: 63, 66–7, II: 1419–22.

  318. Stalin held meetings in his office on his birthday: Na prieme, 773.

  319. Pravda, December 18, 1927; Reswick, I Dreamt Revolution, 210–9. On November 6, 1926, Stalin had written to Leningrad Pravda refusing permission to publish a Russian version of his conversation with Davis.

  320. Ivan P. Tovstukha, “Stalin,” in Gambarov, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, XLI/iii: 107–10; Tovstukha, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. It was slightly expanded and published in Pravda in 1929 on the occasion of Stalin’s birthday. See Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1935, no. 6: 130; and Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 428.

  CHAPTER 14: A TRIP TO SIBERIA

  1. Sochineniia, XI: 170 (first published 1952); Viola, War Against the Peasantry, 101.

  2. Chuev, Tak govoril Kaganovich, 1.

  3. Sochineniia, XI: 369–70. The office logbooks have Stalin receiving visitors in his office on January 17—Antipov and Goto of Japan—but they were likely received by someone else in Stalin’s office, since he was gone. Stetsky is listed as being received on January 28, 1928, when Stalin was still in Siberia. Na prieme, 26, 768, 774, 781.

  4. Paul R. Gregory, “National Income,” in Davies, From Tsarism to the New Economic Polic [1990], at 247.

  5. Kindleberger, World in Depression, 46.

  6. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, I/ii:943 (table 7).

  7. Koniukhov, KPSS v bor’be, 66 (citing RGASPI, f. 17 op. [unnumbered], d. 95, l. 29–30).

  8. Jasny, Socialist Agriculture, 223–7; Dohan, “The Economic Origins of Soviet Autarky,” 605; Davies, Socialist Offensive, 419 (table 1); Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, I/ii: 698, 916–9, 1,027 (table 38). The postrevolutionary record harvest of the NEP occurred in 1925–26: 76.8 million tons.

  9. Davies, Socialist Offensive, 1–18.

  10. Itogi vypolneniia pervogo piatiletnego plana, 135.

  11. Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 446; Davies, Socialist Offensive, 4, 13. Harvest data for the Soviet Union in the 1920s were estimates: statisticians asked a sample of peasants to estimate their harvests before the gathering had commenced, on a scale of one to five, then derived a percentage of a projected average, then multiplied by a prerevolutionary average. Finally, they would raise their guesstimates, believing peasants were lowballing anticipated harvests to evade taxes. The official results likely overestimated harvest size. In 1929, statisticians would invalidate the use of the prerevolutionary average, thereby invalidating all their estimates of the 1920s harvests. Tauger, “Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union.” Collectivization made possible accurate assessments of the Soviet harvest, although that did not mean accurate results were reported.

  12. Both the regime policies and the understandings of economics in support of industrialization—in circles far wider than the Stalin faction—were incompatible with the NEP before Stalin went to Siberia. Davies and Wheatcroft, “Further Thoughts,” 798. One scholar colorfully wrote that “NEP was a house built on sand.” But only because of the regime’s anti-market behavior. Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, 250.<
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  13. L. A. Neretina, “Reorganizatsiia gosudarstvennoi promyshlennosti v 1921–25 godakh: prontsipy i tendentsii razvitiia,” in Davies, NEP, 75–87 (at 84).

  14. Davies and Wheatcroft, “Further Thoughts,” 798; Dmitrenko, “Chto takoe NEP?,” 46. Designed to aid farmers, the harassment of private traders and imposition of price controls actually turned the terms of trade against farmers, while damaging the monetary stabilization, in a dynamic the Bolsheviks did not understand. Allowing the market to determine prices would have been better for farmers and for the overall macroeconomy. Johnson and Temin, “The Macroeconomics of NEP”; Gregory and Mokhtari, “State Grain Purchases.”

  15. “V. V. Kuibyshev i sotsialisticheskaia industrializatsiia SSSR,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1958, no. 3: at 56.

  16. Quoted in Bogushevskii, “Kanun piatiletki,” 478. See also Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution, 7.

  17. Carr, Interregnum, 20–2; Barsov, Balans stoimostnykh obmenov mezhdu gorodom, 23; Millar and Nove, “A Debate on Collectivization,” 57; S. G. Wheatcroft, “Agriculture,” in Davies, From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy [1990], 79–103; Gregory, Russian National Income, 102–21, 194. For the results of a survey of peasants on their reasons for not selling grain, see Statistika i narodnoe khoziaistvo, 1928, no. 2: at 146.

  18. Dohan, “Soviet Foreign Trade in the NEP Economy,” 343–5. During an earlier crisis of grain procurements, in 1925, the authorities had raised the price paid for grain. Davies, Socialist Offensive, 37–41. See also Woodruff, “The Politburo on Gold, Industrialization, and the International Economy, 1925–1926,” 206–8.

  19. Harrison, “Prices in the Politburo, 1927,” 224–46. Rykov, during the 15th Party Congress, met with officials of grain regions and forbid them from even mentioning price rises for grain, a stance formulated in a politburo resolution on December 24, 1927: Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, I: 112.

  20. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, I/i: 46, I/ii: 724–30. The issue of summertime productivity is confounding. One study of textile workers in 1927, for example, claimed that average worker productivity rose during the months of May, June, and July, the time when workers who owned land generally returned to their village on holiday. Antropov, “Sviaz’ tekstil’nykh rabochikh,” 4–7. Even as averages went up, however, absolute production declined.

  21. Sevost’ianov, “Sovershenno sekretno,” VI: 58–60 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 6, d. 575, l. 1–58).

  22. Contemporary analysts attributed the goods shortage to difficulties in paying for imports of raw materials for light industry (cotton, cloth, wool, leather). Dohan, “Foreign Trade,” 223. The regime sought to cut costs and raise efficiency in the trade bureaucracy via mergers and staff reductions. Koniukhov, KPSS v bor’be, 95 (citing Molot, February 1, 1928), 131–2 (citing Izvestiia Sibkraikoma, 1928, no. 4: 4–5).

  23. Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevnia, I: 27, 108. See also XVI s”ezd VKP (b), 762–3, 975–7; Velikanova, Popular Perceptions, 86–8.

  24. Cleinow, Neue Sibirien, 408. Mikoyan, perhaps the principal official at the top keeping track, in early December 1927 stated: “we believe that the drop in grain procurements is temporary and in the near term will be replaced by a rising tendency.” Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’, December 3, 1927. A week later, Rykov deemed the situation a “crisis,” but optimistically noted it could be overcome by supplying more manufactured goods. XV s”ezd VKP (b), II: 859–60.

  25. Danilov, Kak lomali NEP, I: 9 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 662, l. 3).

  26. Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, I: 136 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 6, d. 982, l. 99). The use of article 107 against private traders had been especially concerted from 1927. On October 29, 1927, Yagoda had written to the head of the government, Alexei Rykov, warning “we need to implement quick repressive measures, in order to spur an immediate improvement on the markets,” and submitted a draft decree regarding “speculators” (private traders) to be issued in the government’s name. Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, I: 100–1 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 6, d. 567, l. 1–5). The OGPU already had the prerogative of extrajudicial investigation and sentencing (up to execution) for certain crimes, such as those committed by OGPU personnel in the line of duty, as well as counterfeiters and bandits; additionally, the OGPU could request such a prerogative for specific cases, but not usually for economic crimes. See also Nove, Economic History of the USSR, 137.

  27. Mozokhin and Gladkov, Menzhinskii, 257 (no citation).

  28. “Iz istorii kollektivizatsii 1928 god,” no. 5: 193–5; Viola, War Against the Peasantry, 32–4, 45–7.

  29. Egorova, “Khlebozagotovitel’naia kampaniia 1927–1928,” 262 (PANO, f. 2, op. 1, d. 2571, l.310–1), 264–5.

  30. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, I/i: 44–6. On Bolshevik understandings of peasant market behavior, see Larin, Sovetskaia derevnia, 217.

  31. Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, I: 105–8 (at 107: TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 6, d. 53, l. 32–49).

  32. Ugolovnyi Kodeks RSFSR [1926], 31; Ugolovnyi Kodeks RSFSR [1927], 178; Ugolovnyi kodesk RSFSR [1929], 64–5. On the turn to coercive measures, see Manning, “The Rise and Fall of ‘the Extraordinary Measures.’”

  33. Pravda, January 8, 1928.

  34. Andreev, Vospominaniia, 168–9 (letter dating to January 27, 1928). Pravda (December 24, 1927) had announced that central officials would descend upon the key grain regions—Andrei Zhdanov to the Volga valley, Nikolai Shvernik to the Urals, and Anastas Mikoyan to the North Caucasus.

  35. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 5: 193. One historian has asserted that the report of Orjonikidze’s illness was mere pretext for Stalin to go himself. But of course, Stalin could have assigned himself to go without inventing a pretext. Shishkin, “Poezdka I. V. Stalina v Sibir’,” 44.

  36. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, no. 5: 193-5; Na prieme, 779.

  37. Pavlova, “Poezdka Stalina v Sibir’,” 133–55; Kosachev, “Nanakune kollektivizatsii,” 101–5; Chuev, Sto sorok, 377. Two plenipotentiaries, Alexander Dogadov, a functionary in the central orgburo apparatus, and Pankratov, were already in Novosibirsk, and met with the Siberian leadership on January 6 and January 9, 1928; on January 10, Siberian officialdom established a special “troika,” with a military-style HQ in Novosibirsk, to direct grain procurement operations; it consisted of Syrtsov, Robert Eihe, an ethnic Latvian and the head of the Siberian Soviet Executive Committee, and the trade chief in Siberia, A. N. Zlobin (GANO, f. 47, op. 5, d. 68, l. 197–9). Copycat troikas to expedite grain procurements would be established lower down in all counties by the end of January. Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, I: 780, n55; Shishkin, “Poezdka I. V. Stalina v Sibir’,” 196–9; Gushchin, Sibirskaia derevnia, 185; Egorova, “Khlebozagotovitel’naia kam-paniia 1927–1928,” 262 (citing PANO, f. 2, op. 1, d. 217, l. 229); Gushchin and Il’inykh, Klassovaia bor’ba, 172. On January 12, 1928, seven hundred railway officials and workers in Novosibirsk met to discuss labor discipline and expediting grain shipments; a few bosses were fired, to make examples. Hughes, Stalin, Siberia, 136. Dogadov soon joined the so-called Right (1928–29), and in 1931 would be demoted to Transcaucasia.

  38. Bazhanov had joined the orgburo staff in 1922 and served briefly as technical secretary for the politburo (August 1923–May 1924) in place of Maria Glyasser. On November 28, 1927, he was named head of the business directorate (upravdelami) in the Turkmenistan party secretariat. RGAE, f. 7733, op. 18, d. 527, l. 1–25 (Bazhanov’s personnel file). Balashov claims that Bazhanov begged the British consulate in Askhabad to organize his escape across the border, and that his married lover arrived from Moscow to join him in flight but that she was caught trying to cross the border.

  39. Agabekov, OGPU, 132–8, 234; Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 191. See also Bortnevskii, “Oprichnina.” Agabekov defected June 13, 1930, while stationed in Ista
nbul; in the summer of 1937 he was hunted down and killed near the French-Spanish border.

  40. Brook-Shepherd, Storm Petrels, 19–84, 107–8 (no footnotes). On January 12, 1937, Bazhanov gave a briefing to Polish intelligence—a document that fell into Soviet hands during the 1939 capture of Eastern Poland (Western Belorussia). Duraczynski and Sakharov, Sovetsko-Pol’skie otnoshenii, 65–6 (RGANI, f. 453, op. 1, d. 54, l. 25–33).

  41. Stalin, der rote Diktatur (Berlin: Aretz, 1931), 21.

  42. Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 105–6.

  43. Kindleberger, World in Depression, 73–4; Malenbaum, World Wheat Economy.

  44. This also meant selling goods abroad that were in deficit at home, such as cotton cloth. Dohan, “Soviet Foreign Trade in the NEP Economy,” 482–3; Dohan, “Foreign Trade,” 223.

  45. Rieber, “Stalin as Foreign Policy Maker: Avoiding War, 1927–1953,” 141–2.

  46. Cited in Danilov, “Vvedenie,” in Danilov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, I: 25 (June 1927). See also Ken and Rupasov, Politbiuro TsK VKP (b), 484–5, 491, 497.

  47. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 382 (citing TsA FSB, d. PF 10289, t. 2, l. 393, 395). Pnevsky (b. 1874) died a natural death in 1928, unlike most other former tsarist officers in Red Army service.

  48. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 103 (January 3, 1927).

  49. Nazarov, Missiia Russkoi emigratsii, I: 43–4.

  50. Based on hearsay, one Soviet emigre characterized Syrtsov’s efforts as setting up Potemkin villages, as if that were possible given Stalin’s reliance on the OGPU. Avtorkhanov, Stalin and the Communist Party, 11–2.

  51. Zakovsky had been posted to Novosibirsk at the same time as Syrtsov. He replaced Ivan Pavlunovsky, who had the misfortune of being transferred to the South Caucasus, where a young political climber named Lavrenti Beria ate him for lunch.