The third phase of the succession produced an unlikely alliance: the ‘united opposition’ of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev in 1926–7. Seeking to offset the support for Stalin (and, to a lesser degree, Bukharin) in the rank and file, these former foes resorted to direct action to achieve what they had been unable to gain in internal party politics. This strategy unravelled even before it was implemented. When one of the opposition’s conspiratorial meetings was easily uncovered in mid-1926, the Central Committee charged Zinoviev with violating the party ban on factions and removed him from the Politburo. In late September, the ‘united opposition’ took their case directly to the factories by staging public demonstrations, but without success. As the party press mobilized its full wrath against them, in early October 1926 the trio capitulated and publicly recanted. Trotsky was removed from the Politburo, and Kamenev lost his place as candidate member. After further machinations and conflicts, in October 1927 the trio was dropped from the Central Committee, followed by the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the party itself in November. One month later, the Fifteenth Congress revoked the party membership of Kamenev. Zinoviev and Kamenev would be readmitted in 1928 following a humiliating recantation, but Trotsky was first exiled and then forcibly deported in 1929.
Hostile as the factional struggle thus far had been, nothing prepared—or could prepare—the country for its final act. In 1928–9, Stalin moved against what he labelled the ‘right opposition’ led by Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov (head of the Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom), and the trade unionist Mikhail Tomskii. Neither the party nor the public had reason to expect this offensive. Certainly the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 had endorsed nothing stronger than greater restrictions on the most prosperous peasants, the gradual and voluntary collectivization of agriculture, and an increased effort to develop heavy industry. The congress gave no strong signal that the party was about to scuttle NEP, yet when this final phase concluded, NEP had ended and the USSR was engulfed in class warfare.
Stalin proceeded cautiously, but as always with a strong sensitivity to the prevailing political opinion. By the late 1920s the belief that the revolution had failed to fulfil expectations of 1917 became widespread in Soviet society; a renewed socialist radicalism pervaded the Central Committee and many rank-and-file communists as well. The population outside the party deeply resented the privileges still accorded to managers, engineers, and technical personnel a full decade after Red October. The fact that such a large proportion of state officials were neither workers nor peasants provided an additional irritant. Many also believed that kulaks (the pejorative term for the most prosperous peasants) were withholding their grain from the market in an economy of scarcity. And everywhere one encountered bitterness and jealousy towards those who had used NEP to enrich themselves.
Stalin did not create this mood or control it, but he knew how to exploit it. His first target was a shortage of grain. Marketings by the end of 1927 were down 20 per cent from the previous year. Due to low prices being paid by the state, peasants with a surplus simply held it back in the hope of better terms, used it to fatten livestock for slaughter, diverted it to the illegal production of grain alcohol, or in some cases shifted to planting more profitable industrial crops. These factors, compounded by poor harvests in several areas, accounted for the drop. Stalin, however, placed the blame elsewhere. On a three-week tour of Siberia that began in mid-January 1928, he repeatedly declared the same culprits to be greedy kulaks and local officials too lenient in dealing with them.
He also fanned class hostilities in industry. In March 1928, at Stalin’s personal invitation, the state initiated a show trial of fifty engineers, the first of several against the ‘bourgeois specialists’. Stalin made the class underpinnings of this Shakhty affair, as it became known, the main theme in a speech to the party in April 1928. The defendants, primarily men who had held responsible posts under tsarism and three Germans working under state contracts, were charged with sabotaging coal-mining in the vital Donets basin and conspiring with foreign capitalists. The Shakhty Trial, held in May-July, became a mass spectacle. Newspapers prominently featured the proceedings and sought to intensify class antagonisms.
The General Secretary broadened his assault on the right opposition. In the second half of 1928, Bukharin worried that Stalin would use the power of the Secretariat to replace the editorial staffs of important national publications with his own appointees. And that is precisely what he did. By the end of the year he had also replaced the leading officials in the Moscow branch of the party and in the national trade-union organizations, both of which had previously eluded his control. In February 1929, Stalin led a Politburo attack on Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii for factionalism; the denunciation came into full public view in August. Bukharin was removed from the Politburo in November 1929; Rykov and Tomskii would suffer the same fate in 1930.
This was not, however, merely an exercise in power politics: vital policy issues played a significant role in the outcome. When he made public the specific charges against the ‘right deviation’ in 1929, Stalin accused his rivals of an excessive and non-socialist sympathy for independent economic development. His own formula therefore called for a more rapid, centrally planned, and avowedly ideological transformation to pure socialism. Against detractors who considered its high quotas and objectives unrealistic, Stalin sponsored the First Five-Year Plan in April 1929 (declared retroactively to have begun in October 1928). Its emphasis on accelerated development of heavy industry was the direct converse of Bukharin’s call for a gradual transition and non-centralized endeavours. With his role as party leader secure, in late 1929 Stalin pressed for the immediate collectivization of agriculture and liquidation of the kulaks as a class.
Stalin had read the national mood correctly. His campaign against gradualists and bourgeois specialists was replicated in practically every administrative and professional institution in the country as impatient radicals attacked their more cautious colleagues and those who remained from the tsarist period. The state taxed the private economic sector out of existence, ended the market experiment, and dispossessed even small-scale entrepreneurs. Workers and peasants received preferential treatment in spheres such as education, and NEP’s permissive social and artistic experiments came under full-scale attack. The succession to Lenin was over, NEP was abandoned, and a cultural revolution had begun.
But consolidating the revolution entailed more than seizing the commanding heights of politics. Better than any other high-ranking Bolshevik, Stalin had understood the significance of the changing size and character of the party in the 1920s. From 23,600 in January 1917 it had expanded to 750,000 at the beginning of NEP. This number contracted to fewer than 500,000 at the time the Lenin Enrolment began in 1924, but by the end of the decade total membership had climbed to 1.5 million (including candidate members). In general, the new recruits were young, urban, male, and poorly educated.
Numbers alone, however, do not tell the full story. The All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)—the party’s official name until 1952—differed significantly from pre-revolutionary Bolshevism. Whereas participation in an illegal, underground cadre required a special revolutionary dedication, the new circumstances demanded other things of those who joined after 1921. Whereas the pre-revolutionary party put a premium on loyalty and proficiency in ideological matters (with sophistication in Marxist theory a prerequisite for a leading position), NEP required different criteria, not always appreciated by the old guard. An ability to carry out assignments, even a certain ruthlessness, proved more important once the party was in power. Indeed, Stalin’s dubious credentials as a theorist, which had first caused experienced Bolsheviks to underestimate him, were not nearly as important to the new recruits. Moreover, Stalin appealed to the idealism that appeared, especially among the young, in the last years of NEP. Appointment powers and the ferocity of Soviet politics notwithstanding, Stalin could not have triumphed had he been supported only by ideologues,
cynics, and opportunists. His supporters also included many idealists who believed that measures like the Five-Year Plan, collectivization of agriculture, and cultural revolution held the key to the transition to genuine socialism. For the young radicals attracted by Stalin’s opposition to NEP, the policy had never been a pragmatic retreat, but a betrayal of the basic ideals and goals of the revolution.
Harnessing such idealism was important. While it is true that party members now held key positions in most institutions and enterprises, this alone did not ensure total control or total obedience. Throughout the decade local officials continued to ignore central directives, formulate policy on their own, behave dishonestly and immorally, and in general to comport themselves in ways that reflected badly on Soviet power. And as late as 1929, the Soviet administrative apparatus barely existed in the countryside. In sum, by 1929 the politics of consolidating Red October and Stalin’s emergence as leader had led to a redefinition of leadership and, by extension, of the party itself. All this provided the immediate background for the different kind of revolution that would commence with the ‘Great Turn’ of 1929–30.
Foreign Policy of an Internationalist State
International politics presented a special challenge for the Soviet state. In the Marxist schema, the Russian Revolution was but the first of a forthcoming wave of proletarian uprisings that the communists would lead and support. In the conditions of 1921– 9, however, the Bolsheviks could furnish little more than encouragement and example; Soviet Russia during NEP needed not the rapid exportation of revolution, but above all time to heal its wounds and strengthen itself militarily. Thus, while by no means abandoning the Marxist vision of the future, the immediate focus of Soviet foreign policy was survival and state interest. Not surprisingly, Bolshevik international behaviour was also entwined with Soviet domestic politics.
The Comintern (Communist International) was founded in 1919 and served as the co-ordinating centre of the world workers’ movement. Although it was based in Moscow, the Soviet state maintained the fiction that the Comintern was an independent body without government ties. The fact that no less a figure than Zinoviev served as its head—from its founding until his disgrace in 1926—belied such claims, however. The Bolsheviks attempted to co-ordinate Comintern activities with the national priorities of the Soviet state, and by the early 1920s it was clear that Moscow was dictating Comintern policy. When, for example, the country needed a breathing spell in 1921, fiery rhetoric from the Comintern gave way to a more diplomatic posture towards Europe. The open promotion of revolution was redirected almost exclusively towards Asia. In 1924 the emergence of Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ further curbed the language of international proletarian revolution. In addition, Zinoviev’s replacement by Bukharin as Comintern head in 1926 was clearly a by-product of Soviet internal politics, as was Bukharin’s replacement with Stalin’s protégé Viacheslav Molotov in July 1929.
The Comintern also tried to define the correct relationship towards right-wing groups and non-communist socialists. In 1928 the Sixth Comintern Congress aroused considerable dismay in foreign ranks by forbidding alliances between revolutionary Marxists and moderate socialists. It asserted that the greatest danger came not from the many emerging fascist groups in Europe, but from the moderate parties on the left. This led to key defections, notably but not exclusively among French communists, who felt that Realpolitik dictated a common cause with other leftist elements in their own countries against the increasingly menacing right. This policy also hampered the German Communist Party by channelling its energy against socialists rather than the Nazis. Thus, by the end of the decade, Bolsheviks had made the Comintern centralized and subservient, but at the cost of reducing its effectiveness abroad.
In its foreign policy, a pragmatic internal logic governed Soviet behaviour. Revolutionary Russia faced a hostile international community in 1921: the overthrow of tsarism by a mass movement had alarmed the ruling élites in the West, giving rise to the Red Scare. The Bolshevik state compounded such fears when it nationalized industry, including foreign-owned enterprises, and repudiated the pre-1917 national debt (much of which was held by foreign creditors).
As Russia entered NEP, Lenin adumbrated the concept of peaceful coexistence. He argued that the capitalist and socialist camps could both compete and co-operate, and that military conflict between them was not necessarily inevitable. Socialist states could interact, especially economically, with the capitalist world because in any long-term competition socialism would ultimately prevail. Such thinking fitted the circumstances of the early 1920s. In the absence of the Western assistance that was to have come from the international proletarian revolution, it was vital that the Soviet republic end its diplomatic isolation and, if possible, attract financial help. This would not be easy. As the decade opened, no major industrial nation had yet given the revolutionaries diplomatic recognition, nor was there any sign of support for providing significant investment.
Pragmatism, within limits dictated by the internationalist element of Marxism, therefore shaped Bolshevik foreign relations. Soviet Russia’s unalloyed hostility to the League of Nations before 1927 contained elements of both. But it was surely economics, not ideology, that led to the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement (March 1921), and to Bolshevik participation in the Genoa Conference (April 1922). The latter, organized by the major industrial powers to discuss the reconstruction of the European economy, produced a rude shock: Germany and Russia, the two pariah states of Europe, independently unveiled their own Treaty of Rapallo, which officially renounced mutual claims and foresaw closer economic ties between the two. The treaty also gave Germany and Russia diplomatic leverage to play England and France off against one another. Perhaps most important of all, it laid the grounds for secret German-Soviet military cooperation: Germany could conduct training and weapons testing (forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles) on Soviet soil, and in return the Russians benefited significantly from the exposure to German military expertise. Rapallo was partially undone in 1925 when the Western powers included Germany in the Locarno Pact, which sought to stabilize European politics by achieving an agreement on permanent borders. The blow of being excluded from Locarno was softened only partially for the Soviets when Germany and the USSR reaffirmed Rapallo in 1926 with the Treaty of Berlin.
Russian relations with the West were mercurial. Britain’s first Labour government granted diplomatic recognition to the USSR in early 1924, and Italy and France—although not the United States—soon followed. By October, however, relations already became strained when the ‘Zinoviev letter’ caused a scandal during British elections. Allegedly a directive on tactics from the Comintern to the British Communist Party, the publication of this forgery played a role in the Conservative victory. By May 1927 matters deteriorated to the point that Britain severed diplomatic ties, and France demanded in October that the Soviet Union recall its ambassador. Stalin capitalized on the furore: although legitimately concerned, he publicly exaggerated the imminent danger of military conflict and deftly exploited the ‘war scare’ against the Trotsky–Zinoviev–Kamenev bloc in the politics of succession.
In the end, the Soviet state achieved little in foreign relations during NEP: nor was it able to ignite international revolution to improve appreciably its standing in Europe. When Stalin ascended to top leadership, he replaced Lenin’s policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with a philosophy that emphasized the link between internal mobilization and foreign threats: the concept of hostile capitalist encirclement. But behaving as if surrounded by enemies bent on the destruction of the country only served further to estrange the USSR. Hence Soviet Russia ended the 1920s much as it had begun the decade—without reliable allies and widely distrusted.
‘Building Socialism with Capitalist Hands’
Economic life in 1921–9 reflected the full measure of the national crisis the Bolsheviks inherited, the consequences of party political struggles, and the limitations that ideology imposed on prop
osed courses of action. The problems were fundamental and ubiquitous; conflict over the correct policy of industrialization left the party deeply divided. An incomplete and inconsistent commitment to NEP both nationally and locally undermined its effectiveness. Ongoing economic chaos and recurrent crises continued to plague the grass roots.
In terms of national development, the leadership felt an acute need for a strategy of industrialization. By 1921 the economy certainly had to be resuscitated for practical reasons, but other important considerations also played a part. Above all, orthodox Marxism had posited that socialism could come into being only in a fully industrialized economy. That was hardly the case in Russia: the Bolsheviks had made a ‘proletarian revolution’ in an overwhelmingly agrarian country. To square the circle, all party leaders accepted as axiomatic that Soviet Russia must industrialize to continue on the road to socialism. But that left the door open for fundamental disagreements over the tempo and short-term priorities. In the event, implementing NEP as a step in this long-term undertaking (what Lenin called ‘building socialism with capitalist hands’) in no way ensured unity even at the highest levels.
There were more pressing matters, however, before industrialization reached the top of the agenda. By 1921 the country faced almost total economic collapse: gross industrial output had fallen to less than one-fifth of the level before the First World War, production in some industries such as textiles was a mere one-tenth. Matters were hardly less catastrophic in agriculture: when the 1921 harvest produced significantly less than half the pre-war average, famine and epidemics ensued, claiming millions of lives. By 1922 hyper-inflation had driven prices, particularly those for agricultural products, to astronomical heights. In response, the government created a new currency backed by gold, the chervonets. This tight-money policy, however, caused difficulties in wage payments at many factories, triggering strikes and disorders.
Russia A History Page 36