Lacking sufficient political strength to simply sweep such realities under the rug, Stalin was forced to bide his time. Evidence from the period after his return from Siberia shows him ready for compromise. Resolutions adopted around that time, while expressing approval for the extreme measures already taken, condemned “distortions and excesses.” Stalin’s handling of objections to tactics used in Siberia foreshadowed the brand of political warfare he would favor in subsequent years, before he achieved complete victory. In essence, his approach was to “agree and ignore.” Wishing to avoid a showdown, he put his faith in stealthy manipulation of the bureaucratic machine and a strategic reshuffling of personnel.
Everything depended on the alignment of forces within the Politburo. In 1928, with help from political intrigues, Stalin managed to weaken the Rykov-Bukharin group and strengthen unity among his friends. He also benefited from the foolish mistakes of his opponents—especially Bukharin—and likely from the use of blackmail. He may have made use of recently discovered compromising evidence against Mikhail Kalinin and Yan Rudzutak, unearthed in prerevolutionary police records in 1928 but never brought to light. A transcript of a February 1900 police interrogation has Kalinin stating: “Having been called in for interrogation as a result of a request I submitted, I wish to give frank testimony on my criminal activities.” The transcript shows that Kalinin gave the police detailed information about the operations of his underground organization. Police records also showed that Rudzutak, who was sentenced to ten years’ hard labor in 1909, apparently gave interrogators the names and addresses of members of his organization. The police then conducted searches and seized weapons and propagandistic literature.
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Similar compromising materials Stalin could have used against other members of the top leadership may remain to be found.
Although there is no hard evidence to show that Stalin used these discoveries in his quest for loyal supporters, his relationship with the secret police was such that he would almost certainly have been informed about them, and his using the crude but powerful tool of blackmail would have been entirely in character. Even his friends on the Politburo understood the reasons for the split within its ranks. Stalin’s pontification on the “rightist threat” did not mask his intention of achieving dominance within the Politburo. The war he was waging was starkly personal. In an attempt to reconcile the sides, Stalin’s old friend and loyal follower Ordzhonikidze wrote a frank letter to Rykov amid clashes in the fall of 1928:
Any more fighting within the party is bound to lead to unbelievably bitter upheavals. That has to be our starting point. I am absolutely convinced that we’ll get over this. In terms of grain and other such issues, we can argue and decide, but it shouldn’t lead to fighting.… There are no fundamental disagreements, and that’s the most important thing. … It seems that the relationship between Stalin and Bukharin has really deteriorated, but we need to do everything possible to reconcile them. It can be done.
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It is unlikely that Ordzhonikidze was attempting to deceive Rykov in order to help Stalin. He was merely describing the moods and views then held by the majority, including many of Stalin’s supporters. The Politburo’s collective leadership was still a viable and functional institution. Even as authoritarian a Bolshevik as Ordzhonikidze understood that it was better to “argue and decide” than to engage in political name calling. All Soviet leaders recognized the need to revise economic policy in favor of accelerating industrialization. Only the details were in dispute. There was no reason friction within the Politburo had to lead to a complete rupture—so long as no member of the collective leadership harbored ambitions of achieving sole power.
Attuned to the prevailing mood, Stalin paid lip service to unity while using others to undermine his opponents. In 1928 he organized rebellions within Tomsky’s trade union apparat and Uglanov’s Moscow party organization. By orchestrating upheavals within these organizations, Stalin managed to deprive both leaders of their “patrimonies.” Furthermore, his opponents were weakened by a fatal political misstep by Bukharin, who in July 1928 secretly met with the disgraced Kamenev and gave him a candid account of conflicts roiling the Politburo. Kamenev’s written account of this conversation was stolen and sent to followers of Trotsky, who, despising both Stalin and Bukharin, were only too glad to print it up on leaflets and distribute them publicly. The true story is still not entirely clear, but even if Stalin and the secret police, which was already under his control, had nothing to do with the theft of the notes, there is no doubt that he did everything he could to ensure that the leaflets were broadly disseminated.
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Bukharin and his supporters were hopelessly compromised.
While branding Bukharin a schismatic who fraternized with the crushed opposition behind the backs of his Politburo colleagues, Stalin prepared his heavy artillery. In mid-1928, engineers from a Donetsk coal mine were subjected to a show trial based on fabricated charges—the so-called Shakhty Affair. They were charged with sabotage, and their trial was accompanied by a powerful propaganda campaign. Meanwhile, as the 1928 grain collections were again turned into a war against the kulaks, Stalin proclaimed a new theory (which he made sure was borne out): the farther socialist construction progressed, the more heated the class war would become as the enemies of socialism intensified their resistance. They would also, he warned ominously, exert influence over the party. Persistently and methodically, he introduced into party documents and propaganda the idea of “danger from the right” and from agents of hostile influence within the party. Keeping constant pressure on “the enemy,” destroying him and his “rightist” allies within the party—that was how the victory of socialism and the long-awaited overcoming of difficulties and conflicts would finally be achieved. These sinister theories may have appealed to poorly educated party functionaries, but they are not consistent with what was happening in the country.
Once he had isolated the Bukharin-Rykov group, Stalin cast his final blow by blaming the two men for the “right deviation” within party ranks. In an atmosphere of political hysteria and growing radicalism, the more moderate forces within the party were compelled to remain silent. When forced to take sides, most Politburo members—each for his own reasons—chose to support Stalin. The entire Politburo became a sort of Stalin faction. One after another in 1929 and 1930, Bukharin, Tomsky, Uglanov, and Rykov were expelled from the Politburo and relegated to the status of second-tier functionaries. None survived the Terror.
Stalin’s victory in the Politburo was due to political intrigues and errors by his opponents. The general secretary made good use of the vast experience building and wielding power and influence he had acquired during the years of struggle against Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Of no small importance was Stalin’s power, as general secretary, to influence appointments. He knew how to manipulate people, how to wait for the right moment and strike with just the right amount of force to avoid scaring off potential supporters or waverers. Masking his true intentions, he presented himself as a reasonable politician and loyal member of the party community, implacable only toward enemies. In a few short years, everything would be completely different. Many who supported Stalin bitterly repented their choice once their turn for destruction came. This was Stalin’s genius: to ensure that his victims developed regrets only after it was too late.
One result of the Stalin faction’s victory was the approval and implementation of the Great Leap policy. Largely due to Stalin’s influence, “class warfare” and “revolutionary spirit” were introduced into the economic sphere. Socioeconomic constraints were discarded as so much rubbish. No objective limits were placed on industrial plans or on capital investments in manufacturing—whatever industry needed, it would get. A tremendous wager was placed on large-scale purchases of Western equipment and even entire factories in the hope that these resources would be quickly up and running, producing an abundance of goods. The historical circumstances were propitious. With their economies languishing from the Great Depression, Western countries were more inclined to cooperate with the USSR than they might have been in times of plenty.
The ambitious five-year economic growth targets adopted in April 1929 were almost immediately rejected as too modest. Targets were increased by 50 percent, then doubled and tripled. The Five-Year Plan was changed to a Four- and even Three-Year Plan. Trying to outdo one another in this frenzy, party and economic functionaries pulled ever higher numbers out of the air. “In ten years at most,” Stalin exhorted, “we must make good the distance that separates us from the advanced capitalist countries.… Some claim that it is hard to master technology. That is not true! There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot capture.”
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Treating the economy as a fortress to be captured plunged the country back into the War Communism of the Civil War period. Political campaigns, an enthusiastic minority, and the compulsion of the majority almost completely took the place of economic incentives and proven practices of manufacturing and labor management. A disordered financial and commercial system and skyrocketing inflation were explained away as predictable obstacles on the path toward socialism, toward the withering away of commodity-money relations and the introduction of product exchange between cities and the countryside. As foreseen by the more moderate party leaders, this mad race to industrialize left no place for the tracking of basic economic indicators. In December 1930 the new chief of Soviet industry, Grigory Ordzhonikidze, reported that even such key industrial sites as the Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk Metallurgical Works, the Nizhny Novgorod Automotive Plant, and the Bobrikov Chemical Works were being built without finalized blueprints. In many cases, he wrote in a memorandum, “money is being spent without any budget.… Accounting is exceptionally weak and muddled. No one has yet been able to say how much construction of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory has cost.” Stalin read this memorandum; his perfunctory notations demonstrate no desire to change the way things were being done.
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Such an extravagant pumping up of industry needed material resources and workers. Both were taken from the countryside.
THE WAR ON THE PEASANTS
Stalin’s costly leap forward was paid for by a sharp reduction in the entire population’s standard of living, but the pain inflicted on rural populations was particularly severe.
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The countryside was treated like a conquered colony to be exploited rather than the country’s mainstay. At first no one doubted that in a primarily agrarian country, the peasantry would have to foot the bill for industrialization. The only disagreements had to do with the size of the bill and how payment would be exacted. The Bolsheviks did not like the peasantry—they considered it a dying class—but during the NEP, cognizant of the economic importance of agriculture, the government tried to maintain reasonable relations with the countryside, even if that meant turning a blind eye to such politically unsavory phenomena as the expanded use of private plots. In the late 1920s, however, the government abandoned such liberalism. The increase in capital investment in industry—a policy the entire collective leadership supported—required changing the relationship between the state and the peasantry. In late 1927 and early 1928, the still unified Politburo continued its leftward drift, mixing repression and strong-armed tactics with the economic incentives that had already been put in place to encourage agriculture. How well this mixed approach might have worked will never be known since Stalin took the initiative and turned the leftward drift into a sudden leap. The radical expropriation of grain began to look very much like the confiscations carried out under War Communism.
As Stalin’s opponents had warned, these measures yielded immediate but unsustainable results. The confiscations took away the peasants’ economic incentive and led to a drop in production. Each harvest was worse than the one before, leading the grain collectors to resort to increasingly ruthless methods. This vicious cycle of extraordinary measures was fraught with political crises, including mass unrest among peasants that spilled over into the army. Those dealing with these problems on the ground looked to Stalin, who had by then taken a leading position within the Politburo, for a way out of this cycle.
Stalin’s options were limited, however, by the various ultra-leftist policies he had advocated during his political battles against the rightists. He chose what for him personally was the simplest and safest path, however ruinous it might be for the country. The fight against kulaks and the expropriation of peasant property were taken to their logical conclusion: lands were confiscated and the peasants were transformed into workers in agrarian enterprises managed by the state. The method by which these changes were achieved, labeled “collectivization,” involved the large-scale forcible movement of peasants to collective farms—kolkhozes. Nullifying the party’s previous decision to make such a transition gradually, in November 1929 Stalin proclaimed that collectivization would be universal and immediate. In December came his call to destroy the kulaks as a class.
In essence, the victorious
vozhd
was intentionally provoking a new and deadly wave of revolution in the countryside. By brandishing slogans about the urgent need to crush the kulaks, he gave local stalwarts a free hand. A fevered and violent collectivization effort gripped the countryside even before the new kolkhoz project could receive serious discussion or be embodied in specific directives. In a signature Stalinist move, the party was confronted with a fait accompli. Collectivization supposedly began “from below,” leaving no alternative but to support and expand the kolkhoz movement, whatever monstrous forms it might be taking. Many party careerists and radicals, sensing Stalin’s strength and decisiveness, responded enthusiastically to his call. Reports of collectivization’s successes poured into Moscow.