The Russian Revolution (21 page)

The new policy tapped into feelings of suspicion and hostility to experts from the old privileged classes that were endemic in the Russian working class and among rank-and-file Communists. It was in part, no doubt, a response to the scepticism of many experts and engineers that the high targets set by the First FiveYear Plan could be reached. Nevertheless, it was a policy that had enormous costs for a regime preparing to embark on a crash programme of industrialization, just as the 1928-9 campaign against `kulak' enemies did in the agricultural realm. The country lacked experts of all kinds, especially engineers, whose skills were crucial to the industrialization drive (the great majority of qualified Russian engineers in 1928 were `bourgeois' and non-Communist).

Stalin's motives for launching the anti-expert campaign have puzzled historians. Because the charges of conspiracy and sabotage were so implausible, and the confessions of the accused coerced and fraudulent, it is often assumed that Stalin and his colleagues could not possibly have believed them. As new data emerge from the archives, however, it looks increasingly as if Stalin (though not necessarily his Politburo colleagues) did believe in these conspiraciesor at least half-believed, realizing at the same time that belief could be turned to political advantage.

When Vyacheslav Menzhinskii, head of the OGPU (previously the GPU), sent Stalin material from the interrogation of experts accused of membership in the `Industrial Party', whose leaders had allegedly planned a coup backed by emigre capitalists and coordinated with plans for foreign military intervention, Stalin replied in terms that suggest that he both accepted the confessions at face value and took the danger of imminent war very seriously. The most interesting evidence, Stalin told Menzhinskii, concerned the timing of the planned military intervention:

It turns out they had intended the intervention for 193o, but then postponed it to 1931, or even 1932. That's quite probable and important. It is even more important because this information came from a primary source, i.e. from the group of Riabushinskii, Gukasov, Denisov, and Nobel' [capitalists with major prerevolutionary Russian interests], which represents the most powerful socio-economic group of all existing groups in the USSR and in emigration, the most powerful in terms of capital and in terms of its connections with the French and English governments.

Now that this evidence was in hand, Stalin concluded, the Soviet regime would be able to give it intense publicity at home and abroad, `and thus paralyse and stop all attempts at intervention in the next one or two years, which is of the utmost importance to us'.6

Regardless of whether, or in what way, Stalin and other leaders believed in anti-Soviet plots and immediate military threats, these ideas became widely disseminated in the Soviet Union. This was not only because of the regime's propaganda efforts but also because such notions, reinforcing existing prejudices and fears, were credible to large segments of the Soviet public. Beginning in the late 1920s, internal and external conspiracies were regularly invoked to explain economic problems such as food shortages and industrial, transport, and power breakdowns. The war danger became equally embedded in Soviet mentalite in this period, with recurrent war scares regularly occupying the attention of the Politburo and the newspaper-reading public right up to the actual outbreak of war in 1941.

Stalin versus the Right

In the winter of 1927-8, the party leadership found itself divided on policy towards the peasantry, with Stalin on one side and a group later known as the Right Opposition on the other. The immediate problem was grain procurement. Despite a good harvest in the autumn of 1927, peasant marketing and state procurement of grain fell far below expectations. The war scare was a factor, but so also was the low price that the state was offering for grain. With the industrialization drive already in prospect, the question was whether the regime should run the political risk of squeezing the peasants harder, or take the economic consequences of buying them off.

During NEP, it was part of the regime's economic philosophy to further state capital accumulation by paying relatively low prices for the peasants' agricultural produce, while at the same time charging relatively high prices for the manufactured goods produced by nationalized industry. But in practice this had always been mitigated by the existence of a free market in grain, which kept state prices close to the market level. The state had not wanted confrontation with the peasantry, and had therefore made concessions when, as happened in the `scissors crisis' of 1923-4, the discrepancy between agricultural and industrial prices became too great.

In 1927, however, the impending industrialization drive changed the equation in a number of ways. Unreliable grain procurements jeopardized plans for large-scale grain export to balance the import of foreign machinery. Higher grain prices would reduce the funds available for industrial expansion, and perhaps make it impossible to fulfil the First Five-Year Plan. Moreover, since it was surmised that a very large proportion of all marketed grain came from only a small proportion of Russia's peasant farmers, it seemed likely that the benefit from higher grain prices would go to `kulaks'-the regime's enemies-rather than the peasantry as a whole.

At the Fifteenth Party Congress, which met in December 1927, the main topics on the public agenda were the First Five-Year Plan and the excommunication of the Left (Trotskyite-Zinovievite) Opposition. But behind the scenes, the grain procurements issue was very much on the leaders' minds, and anxious discussions were held with delegates from the main grain-producing regions of the country. Shortly after the Congress, a number of Politburo and Central Committee members departed on urgent investigative missions to these regions. Stalin himself, in one of his few trips to the provinces since the Civil War, went to investigate the situation in Siberia. The Siberian party committee, led by one of the party's rising stars, the well-educated and efficient Sergei Syrtsov, had been attempting to avoid confrontation with the peasantry over procurements, and had recently been assured by Rykov (head of the Soviet government and a Politburo member) that this was the correct line to follow. Stalin, however, thought otherwise. On his return from Siberia early in 1928, he made his views known to the Politburo and the Central Committee.7

The basic problem, Stalin concluded, was that kulaks were hoarding grain and attempting to hold the Soviet state to ransom. Conciliatory measures like raising grain prices or increasing the supply of manufactured goods to the countryside were pointless, since the kulaks' demands would only escalate. In any case, the state could not afford to meet their demands, because industrial investment had priority. The short-term solution (sometimes referred to as the `Urals-Siberian method' of dealing with the peasantry) was coercion: peasant `hoarders' should be prosecuted under Article 107 of the Criminal Code, originally designed to deal with urban speculators.

The long-term solution, Stalin suggested, was to press forward with agricultural collectivization, which would ensure a reliable source of grain for the needs of the towns, the Red Army, and export, and would also break the kulaks' dominance in the grain market. Stalin denied that this policy implied radical measures against the kulaks' ('dekulakization') or a return to the Civil War practice of forced requisitioning of grain. But the denial itself had a sinister ring: for Communists looking for guidelines, the reference to Civil War policies coupled with the absence of any catchwords associated with NEP amounted to a signal to attack.

Stalin's policy-confrontation rather than conciliation, prosecutions, barn searches, roadblocks to prevent peasants taking their grain to traders offering a higher price than the state's-was put into effect in the spring of 1928, and produced a temporary improvement in the level of grain procurements, together with a sharp increase in tension in the countryside. But there was also a great deal of tension within the party about the new policy. In January, local party organizations had received a variety of often contradictory instructions from the Politburo's and Central Committee's visiting firemen. While Stalin was telling the Siberian Communists to be tough, Moshe Frumkin (deputy Commissar of Finance) was touring the neighbouring region of the southern Urals and advising conciliation and the offer of manufactured goods in direct exchange for grain; and Nikolai Uglanov (head of the Moscow party organization and a candidate member of the Politburo) was giving similar advice in the lower Volga area, and moreover noting that excessive pressure from the centre had led some local party officials to use undesirable `War Communist methods' to get in the grain.8 Whether by accident or design, Stalin had made the Uglanovs and Frumkins look foolish. Within the Politburo, he had departed from his earlier practice of building a consensus and, in the most arbitrary and provocative manner, simply forced his policy through.

A Right Opposition to Stalin began to coalesce in the party leadership early in 1928, only a few months after the final defeat of the Left Opposition. The essence of the Right's position was that the political framework and basic social policies of NEP should remain unchanged, and that they represented the true Leninist approach to the building of socialism. The Right opposed coercion of the peasantry, undue emphasis on the kulak danger, and policies intended to stimulate class war in the countryside by playing the poor peasants against the more prosperous ones. To the argument that coercion of the peasantry was necessary to guarantee grain deliveries (and hence grain exports and the financing of the industrialization drive), the Right responded with the suggestion that the First Five-Year Plan targets for industrial output and development should be kept `realistic', that is, relatively low. The Right also opposed the new policy of aggressive class war against the old intelligentsia exemplified by the Shakhty trial, and attempted to defuse the crisis atmosphere engendered by constant discussion of the imminence of war and the danger from spies and saboteurs.

The Politburo's two major Rightists were Rykov, head of the Soviet government, and Bukharin, chief editor of Pravda, head of the Comintern, and distinguished Marxist theoretician. Behind their specific policy disagreements with Stalin lay the sense that Stalin had unilaterally changed the rules of the political game as it had been played since Lenin's death, brusquely discarding the conventions of collective leadership at the same time as he seemed to be abandoning many of the basic policy assumptions of NEP. Bukharin, a fiery polemicist for Stalin in the battles with the Trotskyite and Zinovievite Oppositions, had a particular sense of personal betrayal. Stalin had treated him as a political equal and assured him that they were the two `Himalayas' of the party, but his actions now suggested that he had little genuine political or personal respect for Bukharin. Reacting impetuously to his disappointment, Bukharin took the politically disastrous step of opening secret discussions with some of the defeated Left Opposition leaders in the summer of 1928. His private characterization of Stalin as a `Genghis Khan' who would destroy the Revolution quickly became known to Stalin, but did not increase his credibility with those whom he had so recently attacked on Stalin's behalf.

Despite this private initiative of Bukharin's, the Politburo Rightists made no real attempt to organize an opposition faction (having observed the penalties for `factionalism' that the Left had incurred), and conducted their arguments with Stalin and his Politburo supporters behind closed doors. However, this tactic also turned out to have severe disadvantages, since the Politburo's closet Rightists were forced to participate in public attacks on a vague and anonymous `rightist danger'-meaning a tendency to faintheartedness, indecisive leadership, and lack of revolutionary confidence-within the party. It was clear to those outside the closed circle of the party leadership that some sort of power struggle was going on, but neither the issues nor the identity of those under attack for rightism were clearly defined for many months. The Politburo Rightists could not seek broad support in the party, and their platform was publicized only in distorted paraphrase by their opponents, and in occasional hints and Aesopian references by the Rightists themselves.

The Right's two main power bases were the Moscow Party organization, headed by Uglanov, and the Central Council of Trade Unions, headed by a Rightist member of the Politburo, Mikhail Tomsky. The first fell to the Stalinists in the autumn of 1928, and subsequently underwent a thorough purge directed by Stalin's old associate, Vyacheslav Molotov. The second fell a few months later, the guiding hand in this case being that of a rising Stalinist supporter, Lazar Kaganovich, still only a candidate member of the Politburo but already renowned for his toughness and political skill on a previous assignment to the notoriously troublesome Ukrainian party organization. Isolated and outmanoeuvred, the Politburo Rightists were finally identified by name and brought to judgement early in 1929. Tomsky lost the leadership of the trade unions, and Bukharin was removed from his positions in the Comintern and Pravda editorial board. Rykov-the senior member of the Politburo Right, a more cautious and pragmatic politician than Bukharin but perhaps also more of a force to be reckoned with in the party leadership-remained head of the Soviet government for almost two years after the collapse of the Right, but was replaced by Molotov at the end of 1930.

The Right's real strength in the party and the administrative elite is difficult to assess, given the absence of an open conflict or an organized faction. Since an intensive purge of the party and government bureaucracy followed the defeat of the Right, it might seem that the Right had (or was believed to have) substantial support.' However, the officials demoted for rightism were not necessarily ideological Rightists. The label of rightism was applied both to ideological deviationists and bureaucratic deadwood-that is, officials who were judged too incompetent, apathetic, or corrupt to rise to the challenge of implementing Stalin's aggressive policies of revolution from above. These categories were clearly not identical: the common label was simply one of the Stalinists' ways of discrediting the ideological Right.