The NEP model of development was doomed by a range of factors. Allowing market forces to govern the relationship between the peasants and the state violated fundamental Bolshevik doctrine. Despite the tragic experiences of War Communism, the ruling party continued to preach radical socialism and punish private economic initiative. Furthermore, Soviet agriculture was simply incapable of immediately producing the resources the government needed to support industrialization. Every camp within the ruling party—rightists, leftists, and everyone in between—was aware of the need to adjust the NEP and spur industrialization. The problem was finding how to best modify the system. The fierce battle for power severely limited the available options. The economy was once again falling victim to political conflict and the need to adhere to dogma, and no one was more guilty of putting political expediency before the needs of the economy than Stalin.
The reasons for the crisis of late 1927 were perfectly familiar to the country’s leadership. Pricing policy errors and a disproportionate investment in industry, among other factors, had undermined peasant incentives to sell grain to the state and disrupted the overall economic balance. In previous years, the leaders had found successful recipes for overcoming similar crises. Such a recipe was needed again. At first the Politburo searched for solutions as a unified collective. Although they considered economic stimuli, on this occasion members decided to try intensifying pressure on the peasants through “administrative” means. This meant a campaign to expropriate grain by force, and a key component was visits by the country’s leaders to grain-producing regions to inspire greater effort on the part of local officials. Molotov, who was sent to Ukraine, reported to Stalin on the first day of 1928:
Dear Koba! I’m in my 4th day here in Ukraine—and people say I’m doing some good. I’ve pumped up the lazy
khokhols
[derogatory term for Ukrainians].… I managed to get Ukraine’s “chiefs” and “centers” to travel around to local sites and to promise to work hard. Now I’m hanging around Melitopol (a gold mine!) and also arranged a pogrom here with all the usual swearing that goes with grain collection.… Lots of new impressions; I’m really glad to be able to touch earth. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Regards to all.
1
The tone of Molotov’s letter—more lighthearted than hard-line—partially reflected the relatively peaceable mood that still prevailed in the Politburo. Molotov was not yet “unmasking opportunists” or branding “kulaks” and “wreckers.” He asked Stalin to give Ukraine a bonus out of its grain collections to enable the purchase of farm machinery abroad: “This is urgently needed for encouragement (plus to push production) and is expedient in all regards.”
Stalin was not so jovial: he was spending his time thinking up ways to institute extreme policies. What prompted Stalin to take a sharp turn that placed him far to the left of Trotsky and Zinoviev? What drove his sudden opposition to the NEP: a belief that an ultra-leftist course was truly inevitable or self-serving political calculations? The evidence suggests a complex of motives. Some of the NEP’s contradictions were indeed gradually drawing the entire top leadership leftward and leading to a restructuring of the NEP that favored more rapid industrialization. Stalin was among those who were most eager for this new direction. His political and managerial temperament inclined him toward violent measures. Furthermore, he had no expertise whatsoever when it came to dealing with the economy and probably sincerely believed it could be forced into whatever mold politics dictated. The extreme economic measures he mandated served obvious political purposes. In staking his wager on a radical course, Stalin was intentionally destroying the system of collective leadership. The battle within the Politburo that ensued permitted him to create a new majority faction that was unambiguously his to control.
In essence, Stalin was adopting Lenin’s revolutionary strategy, which called for maximally spurring leftist excesses, undercutting “moderates,” and mobilizing radicals with extremist policies. To launch his revolutionary push, Lenin had had to come to Petrograd from emigration in April 1917. Stalin set out for Siberia in early 1928 with a similar purpose: to turn this distant and enormous region into a proving ground for new upheavals. The trip seems to reflect some scheming on his part. The plan had been for the Politburo’s top troika—Stalin, Rykov, and Bukharin—to remain in Moscow to watch over the government, but Stalin took advantage of Ordzhonikidze’s ill health to take his place on the trip to Siberia. He probably assigned Siberia to Ordzhonikidze in the first place realizing that he would not be able to go, given his poor health in late 1927. The very fact that Stalin—who did not like to travel—made such a long trip shows the seriousness of his intentions. After 1928 his official trips were few. He made some stops on the way to his southern vacations; in July 1933 he visited the White Sea–Baltic Canal; and he made one trip to the front during World War II and three to meet with Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. Clearly, he had his reasons for going to Siberia in 1928.
It took three days to reach Novosibirsk by train. The general secretary spent a total of three weeks in Siberia during the latter half of January and the first days of February. Most of this time was spent in meetings with the
aktiv
(local bosses and party stalwarts). Stalin extracted from them a pledge to fulfill an ambitious plan to supply the country with Siberian grain. He told the Siberian officials just how they would achieve this challenging objective, rolling out his plan to bring down the full force of the police state on the kulaks and charge them with the crime of “speculation.”
2
In essence, this plan represented a return to War Communism. Many Siberian leaders objected. The change of course was so sudden that some even permitted themselves to argue with him. On 19 January the head of the Siberian branch of the agricultural bank, Sergei Zagumenny, wrote to Stalin to voice his concerns, saying he doubted the effectiveness of treating peasants like criminals for refusing to sell grain to the state. Peasants would see this as a return to the policy of mandatory sales of surplus grain to the state practiced during the early years of Soviet rule. It could make matters worse. “It seems to me that we are making too sharp a turn,” he wrote. Stalin’s many notations on Zagumenny’s letter (underscorings and derisive comments) attest to his irritation.
3
Stalin continued to pressure the Siberian officials and insisted that repression would be effective. At the same time, he maintained a certain restraint in his interactions. In talking about the failures of grain procurement, he stopped short of making threats and combined confident and decisive authority with displays of comradery. At a meeting in Novosibirsk, in response to a statement that he had caught
krai
officials making mistakes, Stalin answered with a conciliatory “No, I wasn’t trying to catch anyone.” Even the criticism leveled against Zagumenny was fairly gentle.
4
This combination of ruthlessness toward “enemies”—in this case grain-hiding kulaks—and amiability toward his party comrades is one aspect of the strategy that helped him climb to the top of the political hierarchy. It undoubtedly made a favorable impression on local party officials and was an effective way for Stalin to reassure anyone who might have doubted the changing nature of the party under his leadership.
Through pressure and persuasion, Stalin got what he wanted. Dressed in a new sheepskin coat made for him in a local workshop, he spent several weeks crisscrossing the vast expanses of Siberia. Everywhere he demanded the same thing: give us grain. As he put it in a telegram to Moscow, he “got everyone good and worked up.”
5
In a subsequent telegram sent on 2 February, the eve of his return to Moscow, he triumphantly reported that “A turnaround in grain deliveries is beginning. During 26–30 January, 2.9 million poods [approximately 52,400 tons] of grain was procured, instead of the norm of 1.2 million. This is a major turning point.”
6
Stalin also expressed hope that the pace of grain collection would continue to grow. In a single month, Siberia had supposedly fulfilled more than a third of its annual grain quota.
Behind these figures was escalating brutality in Siberian villages. Bands of agents empowered to use an iron fist in demanding the turnover of grain swept through the countryside. Disdaining even to pay lip service to legality, these agents followed a principle openly expressed by one of them: “What kind of bureaucratism is that? Comrade Stalin gave us our motto—press, beat, squeeze.”
7
The countryside was gripped by searches and arrests. Such large quantities of grain were confiscated that peasant families were ruined. Under Stalin’s influence, Siberia received more unsparing treatment than the country’s other grain-producing regions, although probably not by much. Pressure from Moscow and the active involvement of highly placed emissaries subjected villages everywhere to violence and lawlessness. But the precedent for extremism set in Siberia had special significance. Coming straight from the general secretary, the order to wage war against the kulaks was seen as a universal license.
As political theater, Stalin’s Siberian trip had a complex subtext. The first thing it did was change the ideological framework of the crisis. Ignoring the official line that the government had made mistakes (a point reiterated in numerous Politburo directives), Stalin shifted the emphasis onto exposing the hostile actions of kulaks and anti-Soviet forces, thus opening the door to the broad use of repressive measures. At his suggestion (his creative contribution to the 1928 grain requisitions), confiscation was not, as previously, conducted on an extraordinary basis but as part of an ongoing effort to enforce the criminal code. “Speculators” were handed over to the courts for refusing to sell grain that they themselves had planted, tended, and harvested. Such actions made a mockery of justice, but they gave extraordinary measures a legal footing and made them routine and permanent. In essence, Stalin was proposing to jettison the principles that, under the NEP, had governed interactions between the state and the countryside. Finally, Stalin’s trip across Siberia confronted the government’s economic apparat—and Rykov, as premier, personally—with a serious challenge. The party, embodied by Stalin, was taking charge of the country’s most important political and economic problem and thus asserting its primacy.
Stalin knew that some of his colleagues would raise objections to the strong-armed measures he instigated in Siberia. He was provoking conflict with careful calculation. The Siberian trip allowed him to confront his fellow leaders from a position of strength, as an energetic leader who had succeeded by applying revolutionary methods to pressing problems. The results cast moderation in an unflattering light and made radicalism look more effective. Fissures in the Politburo started to show immediately after he returned to Moscow in February 1928. But he was apparently not quite ready for all-out war. To an outside observer it might seem that by failing to force a showdown, he was letting an exceptional opportunity slip by, but Stalin probably did not see it that way. At the time, there was no clear evidence that he would emerge victorious. This was a pivotal moment in his campaign for sole power, and he turned it into a guerrilla operation, using deceit, patience, and subversion.
A SHIFT TO THE FAR LEFT
Circumstances prevented Stalin from quickly and openly asserting primacy over his Politburo colleagues—and preventing them, in turn, from calling him to account for his recklessness. From the standpoint of his political interests, the leadership could be divided into two groups. The first consisted of potential adversaries, leaders who enjoyed a degree of independent power and influence and would oppose his rise to power. This group included Aleksei Rykov, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (the country’s premier); Nikolai Bukharin, the party’s chief ideologue and editor of
Pravda;
Mikhail Tomsky, the leader of Soviet trade unions; Nikolai Uglanov, Moscow party secretary; and Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s parliament.
8
These leaders, proponents of collective leadership and a gradual transformation of the NEP, were not happy about Stalin’s ambitions or his extreme policies. The second group—only a minority of the Politburo—had close personal ties to Stalin: Vyacheslav Molotov, Central Committee secretary; Kliment Voroshilov, chief of the military commissariat; Grigory Ordzhonikidze, head of the party’s Central Control Commission; and Anastas Mikoyan, head of the trade commissariat. They had looked up to Stalin and followed his lead since the revolution and Civil War. Even his friends, however, were not likely to unquestioningly support his efforts to break down the party’s collective leadership and proclaim himself sole leader. In early 1928 the “Stalin faction” could be rallied and counted on only in time of war.
Waging such a war would be complicated and risky. The fevered four-year standoff with the opposition had created a deep desire for unity. The oppositionists had been castigated as schismatics who had put their personal political ambitions before the interests of the party. Any leader who openly threatened the party’s newfound unity would find himself in an unpopular position. How could Stalin fight for dominance without undermining unity? There was only one solution: to surreptitiously provoke a split and then cast himself as an injured adherent of unity and his enemies as schismatics. That is the script Stalin followed.
Another concern was that the radical measures Stalin was proposing, measures close to the hearts of party leftists, had huge destructive potential. Two dangers were immediately evident. First, the peasants, knowing that their harvest would be confiscated, might simply plant less. Second, there were worrisome signals coming from the Red Army. Letters from relatives back home complaining of mistreatment were stoking anti-government sentiment in the barracks. Young peasant recruits underwent military training at bases not far from home, and emissaries streamed from the villages to the bases pleading for help.