The key to the answers to all questions (as Lenin taught) was who had state power. All the Bolsheviks—the various oppositions and the orthodox—agreed that there was only one truth based on the one true revelation, and that any deviation from that truth was by definition “bourgeois.” All the Bolsheviks agreed—and kept repeating on every occasion—that there was nothing more important than Party unity, and that Party unity was never more important than on that particular occasion. As Radek wrote on behalf of United (“Bolshevik-Leninist”) Opposition in August 1926, “the opposition cannot possibly defend the existence of factions: in fact, it is their most resolute opponent.”
How was one to know which views were true and which were factional? One measure was the doctrinal orthodoxy of one’s views. According to Radek, “every step away from the class position of the proletariat toward the position of the petty bourgeoisie engenders and must engender resistance on the part of the proletarian elements within the Party.” The only reliable way to determine the class position of the proletariat was to determine what Lenin’s position would have been. Bukharin, who had recovered from his own “infantile leftism” a few years earlier, accused the opposition of trying to restore War Communism, from which Lenin had “retreated” in the direction of NEP.48
What was to be done? In Lenin’s absence, who could tell what Lenin would have said? Who was, in fact, fighting “not only against the swamp, but also against those who were turning toward the swamp”? At the Fourteenth Party Congress, Filipp Goloshchekin offered a summary of what provincial Party officials expected from their Central Committee. “Comrade Lenin has died, and none of you can pretend to fill his place. Every one of you has his flaws, but every one of you also has many qualities that make you a leader. Only together can you stand in for Lenin: we demand that you work together in leading our Party.”49
The leaders could not work together because they continued to disagree about where they should be leading the Party—and who should be leading the leaders. Claims of loyalty to Lenin’s ideas could be reinforced by claims of previous physical proximity to Lenin, but because Lenin had not appointed a successor and had said disparaging things about all of his close associates, most arguments about original discipleship turned back into arguments about ideas. Three months after signing “the Letter of the Forty-Six” (which objected to “the division of the Party into the secretarial hierarchy and the ‘laity’”) and one week before Lenin’s death, Osinsky had defended Trotsky against the Kamenev-Zinoviev-Stalin Central Committee: “Comrade Trotsky was absolutely right in telling these sinless apostles of Leninism, who have proclaimed themselves to be Lenin’s apostles and have turned Lenin’s words into holy writ, that ‘no apostleship can guarantee the correctness of the political line. If you truly follow Comrade Lenin’s line, then you are Leninists. But the fact that you are his disciples does not mean anything in and of itself. Marx had disciples who later vanished. You, too, may end up vanishing.’”50
Another way to ensure legitimate succession and determine the correctness of the political line was to hold a vote. “Bolshevik” meant “majority”; the principle of “democratic centralism” consisted of the submission of the minority to the majority; and the most common argument against oppositions was that they did not represent the majority of the Party. Ultimately, however, the majority had to be obeyed only if it was on the path of struggle and not the path of conciliation. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in late 1925, Lenin’s widow, Krupskaia (who had been told repeatedly that physical proximity to the founder did not mean anything in and of itself), reminded the delegates that they were not “English jurists”: “For us, Marxists, truth is what corresponds to reality. Vladimir Ilich used to say: ‘Marx’s teaching is invincible because it is true.’ Our Congress must occupy itself with the search for a correct line. Such is its task. We cannot comfort ourselves by saying that the majority is always right. In the history of our Party there have been congresses when the majority was not right. Think of the Stockholm congress. The majority should not bask in the glory of being the majority; it should be impartial in its search for the correct solution. If it is correct, it will set our party on the right path.” Party congresses were not about voting: they were about a higher truth emerging from a series of public confessions. In Krupskaia’s formulation, “everyone should tell the congress as a matter of conscience what has been perturbing and tormenting them lately.” Bukharin, for one, had compounded the damage done by his conciliatory policies by “denying them three times.”51
Two years later, at the Fifteenth Party Congress, Krupskaia rejoined the majority and attributed the existence of opposition to the fact that some people had lost their class “intuition.” The Party represented “what the masses were feeling”; the Party was represented by its Central Committee; any refusal to obey the Central Committee was a betrayal of what the masses were feeling. In the final analysis, the only way to stay on the right path was to follow the leaders. As Bukharin explained, one of the most fundamental principles of the Bolshevik Party was “absolute loyalty to its leading institutions.” This was, of course, true of many institutionalized sectarian communities: bishops have the monopoly on the correct interpretation of the original revelation because they are bishops. The charisma of office does not depend on the method of investiture: the pope does not owe his role as St. Peter’s rightful successor to the fact of having been elected. Nor is St. Peter disqualified from his position as Jesus’s rightful successor by the fact that he has denied him three times.52
The general recognition of the legitimacy of official succession must lead to “absolute loyalty to leading institutions.” As Bukharin put it on October 26, 1927, at the height of his struggle with the United Opposition (which brought together the leaders of various previous oppositions, including Trotsky, Radek, Kamenev, and Zinoviev), “it is either one or the other. Let the comrades from the opposition come out and say openly: we do not believe that what we have in this country is a proletarian dictatorship! But let them not get angry with us, then, if we tell them that their statement that they wish to defend such a country from an external enemy is vile hypocrisy.”53
Party members who opposed the Party leadership became indistinguishable from non-Party members; non-Party members might include former Party members; former Party members were expelled Party members; “and an expelled Party member,” as Goloshchekin put it, “is someone spat out by the Party, and thus an enemy of the Party.” Any disagreement with the Central Committee was, objectively, an alliance with the enemy. As Bukharin put it, “all kinds of scum is grasping at the opposition’s coattails, trying to sneak through the cracks and proclaim itself their allies…. That is why Comrade Kamenev was absolutely right with regard to today’s situation when, in January 1925, he said that the Trotsky opposition had become “the symbol of all the anti-Communist forces.”54
Bukharin was absolutely right with regard to Kamenev and all the other oppositionists: they, too, were against “factions.” The fact that they thought that the Stalin-Bukharin orthodoxy was heresy did not change the consensus that all heresies were treason. As Bukharin’s closest associate, Aleksei Rykov, said at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, “Comrade Kamenev ended his speech by saying that he does not separate himself from those oppositionists who are now in prison. I must begin my speech by saying that I do not separate myself from those revolutionaries who have put some supporters of the opposition in prison for their anti-Party and anti-Soviet activities. (Tumultuous, prolonged applause. Shouts of “hurray.” The delegates rise.)” It was the Party’s tradition to “forbid the defense of certain views”; the only way for an oppositionist to remain in the Party was to formally “recant the views” rejected by the Party. As for those who did not, the congress, in the words of the secretary of the Moscow Control Commission and former head of the Cheka Investigations Department, Grigory Moroz, “would have to snip off the heads of the arrogant oppositionist noblemen who are taunting the Party.
”55
On November 7, 1927, on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, Moroz presided over the dispersal of an opposition demonstration organized by Ivar Smilga (who had remained a close associate of Trotsky since the trial of the Cossack commander Filipp Mironov). Smilga; his wife, Nadezhda Smilga-Poluian; and their two daughters, aged five and eight, were living in a large four-room apartment in the Fourth House of Soviets, four stories above the Central Executive Committee Visitor’s Office and just across Mokhovaia from the Kremlin. On the morning of the 7th, Smilga, Kamenev, and Muralov (Arosev’s commander during the 1917 Moscow uprising) had hung a banner “Let’s Fulfill Lenin’s Testament” and portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev from the apartment windows. As the three described the events later that day in a letter to the Politburo, “Comrade Smilga’s wife, a Party member, refused to let a group of strangers, who wanted to pull down the ‘criminal’ banners, into the apartment. Several individuals sent to the roof for the purpose attempted to tear the banners down with long hooks. The women inside the apartment thwarted their heroic efforts with mops…. Eventually, about fifteen to twenty Central Committee school officers and Military Academy cadets broke down the door of Comrade Smilga’s apartment, smashing it to bits, and forcibly entered the rooms.”56
Nadezhda Poluian then took the two girls to the apartment of her brother Yan, who lived in the same house (but was not on speaking terms with Smilga for doctrinal reasons). Smilga and several other opposition leaders walked two blocks down the street and attempted to address the crowds from the balcony of the Twenty-Seventh House of Soviets, on the corner of Tverskaia and Okhotnyi Riad (the former Paris Hotel). Soon, cars arrived, bringing Moroz, the secretary of the Red Presnia district Riutin, and several other officials. As Smilga wrote three days later, “Under the direction of the newly arrived authorities, the crowd that had assembled under the balcony began to whistle, cry ‘Down with them!’ and ‘Beat the opposition!’ and throw rocks, sticks, cucumbers, tomatoes, etc. at comrades Smilga, Preobrazhensky, and the others. At the same time, some people standing on the balcony of Comrade Podvoisky’s apartment, located across the street in the First House of Soviets, attacked comrades Smilga and Preobrazhensky by throwing ice, potatoes, and firewood.”57
District Secretary Riutin ordered the militia man on duty to unlock the street door, and several dozen people broke into the apartment and began beating up the opposition. At the head of the crowd, according to Trotsky, was “the notorious Boris Volin, whose moral character needs no introduction.” Smilga claimed to have appealed to Moroz, who allegedly responded: “Shut up, or it’ll get worse.” The oppositionists were locked up in one of the rooms of the house, where they were guarded by Boris Shumiatsky, the liberator of Mongolia. A little while later, they escaped from their guard, ran across the street, and disappeared into the Second House of Soviets.58
At the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, the United Opposition was formally defeated. Ninety-eight oppositionists, including Radek and Smilga, were expelled from the Party. Some, including Voronsky, were expelled a bit later; many, including Radek, Smilga, and, a year later, Voronsky, were sent into exile. The secret police official in charge of the operation was Yakov Agranov, a member of the Brik-Mayakovsky salon. One of the expelled oppositionists (and one of Voronsky’s closest friends), Sergei Zorin, wrote to Bukharin: “Be careful, Comrade Bukharin! You have had many arguments in our Party. You will probably have more. Watch out, or, courtesy of your current comrades, you too will get Comrade Agranov as an arbiter. Some examples are contagious.”59
■ ■ ■
Zorin’s warning would come true much sooner than he (or Bukharin) might have imagined. Within months of the defeat of the United Opposition, Stalin would emerge from Bukharin’s shadow, adopt a radical version of the opposition’s program, and usher in a second “heroic period” of the Russian Revolution. Lenin had described NEP as a “retreat” followed by “a most determined offensive.” The time for that offensive had come. Lenin had predicted that “some day, this movement will accelerate at the pace we can only dream of now.” That day—the real real day—had finally arrived.60
Early signs of the return of the apocalypse, in 1927, would include the massacre of the Chinese Communists in Shanghai, the police raid on the Soviet trade mission in London, the assassination of the Soviet ambassador in Poland, the grain procurement crisis in the villages, and the “uniting” of former oppositionists into a secret army of false prophets. Over the next two years, the movement toward the final fulfillment would accelerate at the kind of pace that Lenin could only dream of. All true prophecies are self-fulfilling: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find” (or, in the words of a Soviet song, “those who desire will receive; those who seek will always find”). On closer inspection, recalcitrant grain producers would turn out to be kulaks; skeptical bourgeois experts would turn out to be wreckers; and foreign Socialists would turn out to be Social-Fascists. By “the year of the great breakthrough,” 1929, it would become clear that the last battle would be won within a decade or two. In 1931, Stalin would be able to say: “There are no fortresses that the Bolsheviks cannot take. We have achieved a number of difficult goals. We have defeated capitalism. We have taken power. We have built a large socialist industry. We have set the middle peasant along the path of socialism. We have finished the most important part of our construction plan. There is not much left to do: just to study technology and master science. When we have done that, we will achieve the kind of acceleration we can only dream of now.”61
The great breakthrough was not War Communism because what was appropriate now had been premature then, but it was a war, and it was the last stop before Communism (which Kerzhentsev, in his The Bolshevik’s Pamphlet of 1931, defined as “the only way for mankind to save itself from death, degeneracy, and decline”). The great breakthrough was about the simultaneous violent fulfillment of two different prophecies: the long-overdue one concerning the creation of socialism’s economic base and the medium-range one concerning the complete abolition of private property and total destruction of all class enemies. On the eve of the last war against capitalism, the steel and concrete foundations of socialism were to be laid, the wreckers and bureaucrats were to be routed, the rural kulaks were to be “liquidated,” the rural non-kulaks were to join the workers, the workers were to become “conscious,” and all consciousness was to become socialist. “Either we do it or we will be crushed.”62
Bukharin and Rykov, having just presided over the humiliation and expulsion of the Leftists, were caught off guard. The orthodoxy they represented had suddenly become heresy; hard realism had become “appeasement”; and the center had become the “Right.” Forming an opposition was out of the question, especially at a time when—everyone agreed—war was imminent and enemies were everywhere. As Bukharin said to a hostile Central Committee audience on April 18, 1929 (after the whole point had become moot): “The old forms of resolving intra-Party disagreements by means of quasi-factional struggle are currently unacceptable and objectively impossible.” The “Rightists” argued and schemed behind closed doors and wrote scholarly articles about Lenin’s views on the worker-peasant alliance, but they kept silent in public because they had just defeated the United Opposition by arguing that any disagreement with Party leadership was tantamount to treason. As Bukharin explained, after the fact, “we kept silent because, had we appeared at some conference, rally, or Party cell meeting, a discussion would have started, and we would have been accused of initiating it. We were in the position of people who are hounded for not explaining and not justifying themselves, but who would be hounded even more for attempting to explain, attempting to justify themselves.”63
In July 1928, soon after the magnitude of the coming breakthrough had become clear, Bukharin went to see the disgraced Kamenev and told him, confidentially, that Stalin was intent on imposing “tribute” on the peasantry, unleashing a civil war, and “drowning uprisings in bl
ood.” As Kamenev wrote later that day, “[Bukharin] looks extremely agitated and exhausted…. His tone is one of absolute hatred toward Stalin and of a total breakup. At the same time, he is agonizing, wondering whether to speak openly or not. If he does, they will cut him down based on the schism provision. If he does not, they will cut him down with their petty chess game…. He is extraordinarily shaken. His lips keep trembling from nervousness. Sometimes he looks like a man who knows he is doomed.”64
Stalin won the chess game. While Bukharin was agonizing, Bukharin’s allies in the Trade Union Council and Moscow Party organization (including the organizers of the “Beat the Opposition” raid from the previous year, Riutin and Moroz) were removed and reassigned. Bukharin’s would-be allies from among the former oppositionists were neither able nor willing to offer support. Kamenev’s notes of their secret meeting soon reached the recently exiled Trotsky, who had them published as a leaflet. The text was edited by the recently retired Voronsky.65
Stalin won the argument, too. In a sect that defined itself in opposition to “appeasement,” prided itself on its readiness for violence, and looked forward to an imminent universal slaughter, Bukharin’s “Notes of an Economist” (as he called his September 1928 amillennial manifesto) did not generate much enthusiasm. Many Party members—both Old Bolsheviks and young Civil War veterans—had spent the NEP years suffering from “neurasthenia,” “degeneration,” gothic nightmares, “crawling scum,” spilt milk and honey, and “cozy, worn little slippers under the bed.” Most were ready for the last and decisive battle.
Different reformations hark back to different sacred origins. Christian reformers have nothing but a small egalitarian sect to go back to; radicals insist on replicating the original design; others improvise temporary solutions until such time as “there is neither need nor use for princes, kings, lords, the sword, or law” (as Martin Luther put it). Muslim reformers have a sprawling state to go back to: the question is how faithful to Mohammed’s caliphate that state should be. Lenin, like Mohammed, left behind a sprawling state, but he had called that state a profane compromise in need of future acceleration at a pace he could only dream of. The Bolshevik reformers of 1928–29 (including Bukharin, who did not doubt the need for acceleration) had nothing but Lenin’s state to go back to: the radicals yearned for the “heroic period of the Great Russian Revolution” and urged a better, fuller War Communism; the moderates stuck to “Lenin’s Political Testament” and called for a readjustment of the NEP compromise. The argument was about what Lenin had really meant; the mood of the faithful and most of Lenin’s legacy favored the radicals. On November 26, 1929, after the Central Committee vowed to annihilate peasant agriculture within a matter of months, Bukharin, Rykov, and their ally Tomsky published a formal recantation. “Admitting our mistakes,” they wrote, “we pledge to make every effort to conduct, along with the rest of the Party, a resolute struggle against all deviations from the general Party line, above all the Right deviation and appeasement, in order to overcome all difficulties and bring about the complete and earliest possible victory of socialist construction.”66
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