They miscalculated. Even those party leaders who may have felt opposed to the NEP knew on which side their bread was buttered: all power flowed downstream from the Politburo. Everything was decided by this supreme body and transmitted to the local level through the top leaders’ client networks. During the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925, when Zinoviev and Kamenev launched a determined attack against the Politburo majority in general and Stalin in particular, they were able to count on only the Leningrad delegation, which had been handpicked by Zinoviev, the region’s party boss. This backing was not enough: they suffered a crushing defeat. Furthermore, the move cost Zinoviev his Leningrad fiefdom. Immediately after the congress a large group of Central Committee members was sent to Leningrad to make sure that Stalin’s protégé, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, became Leningrad’s new boss. Kirov’s letters indicate that this takeover did not go particularly smoothly:
The situation is heated. There’s a lot of work to be done, and even more yelling.
Here, you get nothing without a battle. And what battles! Yesterday we were at Triangle [a reference to the party organization of the Triangle rubber factory], a collective of 2,200 people. The fighting was incredible. I haven’t seen a meeting like that since the days of October, and I never even imagined that there could be such a meeting of party members. At times, it even came to fistfights in some corners of the meeting!
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Zinoviev’s loyal party followers in Leningrad and the local party apparat were dealt with ruthlessly—although by the standards of the time, “ruthless” did not extend beyond large-scale firings and transfers to remote regions of the country. This heavy-handed purge escalated the conflict between the opposition and the majority, which continued through 1926 and 1927. After a period of relative calm, in the spring of 1926 the majority found itself confronted with a newly unified opposition headed by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. This “marriage of convenience” (though no more so than the other alliances within the top leadership) was doomed to failure, but it made life difficult for the majority. The united opposition provided a rallying point for the dissatisfied, of whom there was no shortage. Keeping the opposition at bay demanded time, effort, and resourcefulness. Someone had to make this struggle his primary focus. By position and temperament, the best man for the job was Stalin.
The full range of intrigues perpetrated by both camps deserves a thorough study, which remains to be undertaken. Particularly worthy of attention is one basic and potent ingredient in this toxic brew: the use of state security to suppress the opposition. Gradually, with increasing frequency, the party opposition was branded the “enemy,” a label the Bolsheviks had previously reserved for outsiders such as the bourgeoisie, Mensheviks, or SRs. The historical record allows us to trace the origins of this practice to Stalin, who employed it not just in the mid-1930s, when the fight against the opposition reached its bloody apogee, but also much earlier.
On 6 June 1926, approximately seventy Moscow Bolsheviks with oppositionist sympathies gathered in a dacha community outside the capital. They chose this setting because they had been banned from holding meetings and needed to gather out of sight of the authorities. The gathering was addressed by a supporter of Zinoviev, Mikhail Lashevich, a longtime Bolshevik who had managed to keep his post as deputy head of the military commissariat. As might have been expected, an undercover agent was present at the meeting, possibly a specially infiltrated agent of the OGPU. The matter was placed in the hands of the party’s investigative commission, which, try as it might, was not able to prove that the opposition’s leaders had helped organize the meeting. This did not stop Stalin. In a 25 June 1926 letter to the Politburo, written while on vacation, he proposed using the “Lashevich Affair” as a pretext for destroying the Zinoviev group and expelling Zinoviev himself from the Politburo.
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The ideological justification for this cynical move rested on the idea that the opposition was breaking the party apart. An exceptionally stormy Central Committee plenum in July 1926, during which the opposition attempted to make a decisive stand, ended in accordance with Stalin’s script. The plenum passed a resolution asserting that “the opposition had decided to cross the line from legally advocating its views to creating an all-union illegal organization.”
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The next step—casting this “all-union illegal organization” as an “all-union counterrevolutionary and terrorist organization”—would take Stalin another ten years, by which time his hold on power would be firm and his opponents executed.
Stalin’s plan to expel only Zinoviev from the Politburo was a diversion, an attempt to divide the opposition and demonstrate objectivity. Just months later, in October 1926, Trotsky and Kamenev were also removed. Yet the oppositionists did not lay down their arms: they used every opportunity to do battle, denouncing the Politburo majority and its policies. The mutual animosity finally reached its pinnacle when, with no other options left to them, the oppositionists resorted to an underground propaganda campaign, to which the Politburo responded with a sting operation. In September 1927 the OGPU sent an agent posing as a former officer from Wrangel’s army to a printing press that, despite the official prohibition, was still publishing opposition materials. Fabricated materials were used to charge the oppositionists with belonging to a “counterrevolutionary organization” that was supposedly plotting a military coup. The OGPU carried out the arrests. This police operation was organized by Stalin. While other Politburo members were vacationing in the south, he remained in Moscow and kept the others informed.
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In October 1927, Zinoviev and Trotsky were removed from the Central Committee in a particularly ugly plenary session. When Trotsky attempted to address the plenum with a question, he had a book and a glass thrown at him and was forcibly pushed from the podium as shouting erupted in the hall. On 7 November, the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, the oppositionists attempted to hold their own demonstrations in parallel with the official ones but were forcibly dispersed. These demonstrations served as an excuse for new reprisals: many opposition members were arrested and sent into exile. In December, the crushing of the opposition was officially sanctioned at the Fifteenth Party Congress. Some publicly capitulated, but Trotsky and his closest associates did not back down. Trotsky was sent to Kazakhstan and later expelled from the USSR. The majority of oppositionists, both those who had relented and those who had not, were killed during the second half of the 1930s. In 1940, on Stalin’s orders, Trotsky was killed by a Soviet agent in Mexico.
The repression of the late 1920s, though relatively mild, still made a gloomy impression on the party’s old guard and marked an important turning point in the party’s development. As had happened during the French Revolution—whose history the Bolsheviks knew well—the Russian Revolution had begun to eat its own children. The similarities provoked a sense of dejection and unease. On 1 January 1928, soon after the opposition had been definitively crushed, Valerian Osinsky, one of the Old Bolsheviks, wrote an anxious letter to Stalin reflecting the sense that an injustice had been committed.
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Dear Comrade Stalin,
Yesterday I learned that V. M. Smirnov
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is being sent somewhere in the Urals (evidently to Cherdyn District), and today, when I met Sapronov
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on the street, I heard that he is heading for Arkhangelsk Province for the same term. Furthermore, they have to leave by Tuesday, and Smirnov only just had half his teeth removed so they can be replaced with false teeth, and now he’ll have to leave for the Ural north toothless.
In his day, Lenin kicked Martov
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out of the country in comfort, first making sure that he had a warm coat and galoshes. This is because Martov was once a revolutionary. Our former party comrades who are being sent away are deeply mistaken politically, but they are still revolutionaries—there’s no denying this.… The question therefore arises: is it really necessary to drive them all up north and essentially pursue a policy of their spiritual and physical destruction. I don’t think so. And I don’t understand why we can’t (1) send them abroad the way Lenin did with Martov or (2) settle them within the country in places with a warm climate.…
These sorts of banishments only create unnecessary bitterness.… They intensify whisperings about similarities between our current regime and the old police state.
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On 3 January Stalin sent a curt response: “Com. Osinsky! If you think about it you’ll probably understand that you have no grounds, either moral or any other kind, for putting down the party or taking up the role of some sort of arbiter between the party and opposition. I’m returning your letter as insulting to the party. As for concern for Smirnov and other oppositionists, you have no grounds for doubting that the party is doing everything possible and necessary in this regard.”
Was Stalin’s promise to do “everything necessary” for the oppositionists a kind of black humor, a hint at the coming moral and physical destruction of his opponents? There is no evidence that in 1928 Stalin was planning the purges or terror of the late 1930s. How are we to interpret the apparently genuine anger with which he responded to Osinsky? Was it merely that he was sick of talking about the opposition, worn out from years of tense struggle during which he had to watch every step, exercise unrelenting caution, make no false moves, hide his intentions, and conceal his actions? At the time he corresponded with Osinsky, Stalin was evidently making a critical decision that no opposition would be tolerated and no collective leadership was needed. Perhaps he was curt with Osinsky because he was anxious. Or perhaps he was confident and felt no hesitation in making it clear to Osinsky that they were no longer on the same level and “heart to heart” talks between them were no longer appropriate.
THE CHOICE
Stalin’s alliance with Rykov, Bukharin, and other Politburo members, first against Trotsky and later against Zinoviev, was a tactical move in a struggle for power and influence. It is probably safe to say that the primary forces driving this struggle were the personal ambitions of Lenin’s heirs, their confrontational characters and outsized political ambitions, their nasty revolutionary habit of fighting for the sake of fighting, and a propensity to see enemies at every turn. That said, in their constant skirmishes the Bolshevik leaders were also guided by certain political ideas.
The Politburo majority, including Stalin, adhered to the so-called “rightist course.” This was a logical continuation of the NEP of 1921–1922. Once they saw that it would be impossible to immediately introduce a socialism free of money and markets, the Bolshevik leaders, with Lenin at their forefront, took a step backward. Keeping political power and heavy industry in the hands of the government, they allowed small industry and business owners (peasants first and foremost) relative freedom. Markets and money were rehabilitated. Nobody knew how or in what directions they should be moving. Only the general principles were clear: there would be a mixed economy combining market mechanisms, a strong state, and a monopoly on political power. There was also general agreement on the timetable: all shared Lenin’s vision of the NEP as a long-term policy lasting through the 1920s.
The issue of the NEP was bound to become entangled in intraparty squabbles. Trotsky, later joined by Zinoviev and Kamenev, criticized the NEP strategy that had been devised by the Politburo majority. While not urging a total abandonment of the NEP, the oppositionists felt too many concessions had been made to the peasants and the urban bourgeoisie, and they called for greater emphasis on the development of major industries. This criticism was typical of the opposition movement in its struggle to undermine the power of those in charge and gain more for themselves: it exploited popular desires for greater equality and nostalgia for a “heroic epoch.” Most important, it was short on details. Had they achieved power, the “leftist” leaders, who were fundamentally pragmatic, would most likely have shifted imperceptibly onto the “rightist” path, abandoning their radicalism under the force of the objective need to develop the economy. This assumption is supported by the past behavior of “leftist” leaders. During the Civil War, did not the ultra-revolutionary Trotsky use the tsarist officer corps as a foundation for the Red Army? Did not all the Bolshevik leaders originally support the NEP? While a member of the government, Kamenev, one of the leaders of the left opposition, always gravitated toward moderation and followed a perfectly “rightist” course. Grigory Sokolnikov, another member of the opposition, was a brilliant finance commissar under whose leadership the country stabilized its currency.
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Often it was not principled programmatic differences that spawned conflict but ties of friendship, sore feelings, or ambition.
The consequences of this battle of political wills were devastating. The Bolshevik party endured irreparable losses of personnel. The disinclination to show mercy or compromise and the desire to decimate opponents not only took time and energy away from real problems, but it also undermined the collective leadership’s will to conduct needed reforms and adjust social and economic policies. Every decision was examined under a magnifying glass, not only with an eye toward viability, but also to detect the slightest ideological vulnerabilities. Such an approach deprived the country’s leadership of the flexibility and initiative it needed.
Many of the decisions made in 1926–1927, a time of fierce struggle against the opposition, were politically motivated and destructive for the economy. Measures against “capitalist elements” were primarily targeted at relatively prosperous peasants and small-scale traders. Reckless and misguided economic decisions undermined stability. Yet these measures were not catastrophic or irreversible. The NEP, like any economic strategy, demanded constant adjustments, the elimination of mistakes, and an agile response to disparities as they arose. Lacking were the political preconditions for effective decision making. And the party infighting was only making the atmosphere worse.