Stalin wanted total control of his group. He wanted to be kept abreast of developments and relayed regular instructions to his subordinates. But he had created a system which permitted him to be the master even while he was on vacation. He asserted himself to an ever greater extent. In September 1926 he wrote to Molotov indicating substantial reservations about his ally and supposed friend Bukharin: ‘Bukharin’s a swine and surely worse than a swine because he thinks it below his dignity to write a couple of lines.’17 Around that time he also said of his associate Mikoyan: ‘But Mikoyan’s a little duckling in politics, an able duckling but nevertheless a duckling.’18 From all this it appeared that Stalin saw himself as the single indispensable force in the campaign against the United Opposition. In his own eyes, no one else could successfully coordinate and lead the ascendant party leadership in the coming factional conflicts. He made it his aim to send Trotski and Zinoviev down to permanent defeat.
Yet the strain of constant polemics took its toll on him. Free in his accusations against the United Opposition, he was hurt by the tirade of personal abuse he himself had to endure. He was an extremely sensitive bully. When the situation got too much for him, he followed his pattern in the early years after October 1917 and sought to resign. On 27 December 1926 he wrote to Sovnarkom Chairman Alexei Rykov saying: ‘I ask you to release me from the post of Central Committee General Secretary. I affirm that I can no longer work at this post, that I’m in no condition to work any longer at this post.’ He made a similar attempt at resignation on 19 December 1927.19 Of course he wanted to be persuaded to withdraw such statements of intent — and indeed his associates did as he wished. But the mask of total self-control and self-confidence had slipped in these moments.
Stalin’s vacillation was temporary and fitful. The United Opposition had yet to be defeated and he returned to work as Party General Secretary with the pugnacity for which his associates admired him. Stalin and Bukharin were ready for the fight (although Bukharin had the disturbing tendency to go on talking to their opponents in a friendly fashion). The political end for Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev came surprisingly quickly. In spring 1927 Trotski drew up an ambitious ‘platform’, signed by eighty-three oppositionists (including himself), offering a fulminating critique of the sins of the ascendant party leadership. He demanded a more ‘revolutionary’ foreign policy as well as more rapid industrial growth; and whereas previously he had expressed concern about the ‘bureaucratisation’ of the party, he and his supporters now insisted that a comprehensive campaign of democratisation needed to be undertaken not only in the party but also in the soviets. The claim was made that only through such a set of measures would the original goals of the October Revolution be achievable. For the United Opposition, then, the Politburo was ruining everything Lenin had stood for. A last-ditch fight was required for the re-elevation of the party’s principles to the top of the current political agenda.
Stalin and Bukharin led the counter-attacks through the summer of 1927. Their belligerent mood was strengthened by their acute awareness that the United Opposition, while hurling accusations about the Politburo’s dereliction of revolutionary duty, was also indicting its members for simple incompetence. The Politburo was determined to hold firm as international complications intensified. The British Conservative government had been looking for a scrap for some months and when a police search of the Anglo-Soviet trading company Arcos came up with compromising evidence, the United Kingdom broke diplomatic relations entirely and expelled the Soviet ambassador in May. Next month the Soviet ambassador to Poland was assassinated. Not for the first time there were war scares in the USSR. The OGPU reinforced its vigilance against subversion and sabotage. Troubles came thick and fast. In mid-July the news had come from China that the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had massacred communists in Shanghai in April. Whereas nothing which happened in London and Warsaw was the Politburo’s fault, Stalin and Bukharin were directly responsible for the policies imposed by the Comintern on the Chinese communist leadership. Until recently they had insisted on an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek against the wishes of the Chinese communists; now, in August 1927, they licensed them to organise an uprising against Chiang Kai-shek. The United Opposition upbraided the Politburo for a total lack of effective supervision of the USSR’s foreign policy.
Stalin, however, went off as usual to the south for his vacation. His assumption was that he could leave the Central Control Commission, chaired by Ordzhonikidze, to handle the disciplining of the Opposition. Papers were couriered to him regularly. What he read threw him into a rage. Somehow Zinoviev and Trotski had succeeded in turning the Central Control Commission’s enquiries into an opportunity to challenge the Central Committee. And Ordzhonikidze seemed to have lost control of developments. ‘Shame!’ wrote Stalin to Molotov in anticipation of a more aggressive stance being taken by the men he had left in charge of Moscow.20
In June and July he peppered his letters with detailed instructions on both Britain and China.21 Yet he did not lift his eyes from the internal threat: Trotski had to be dealt with. Stalin raised with Molotov and Bukharin the question of whether their enemy would be best deported to Japan.22 The decision was taken to proceed in stages. At the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in October 1927, some of Trotski’s followers shouted out that the Politburo was burying Lenin’s Testament. Stalin was ready for them:23
The Opposition is thinking of ‘explaining’ its defeat by personal factors: Stalin’s crudity, the uncompromising attitude of Bukharin and Rykov and so on. It’s a cheapskate explanation! It’s less an explanation than superstitious nonsense… In the period between 1904 and the February [1917] Revolution Trotski spent the whole time twirling around in the company of the Mensheviks and conducting a campaign against the party of Lenin. Over that period Trotski sustained a whole series of defeats at the hands of Lenin’s party. Why? Perhaps Stalin’s crudity was the cause of this? But Stalin was not yet secretary to the C[entral] C[ommittee]; [Stalin] at that time was cut off and distant from foreign parts, conducting the struggle in the underground whereas the struggle between Trotski and Lenin was played out abroad. So where exactly did Stalin’s crudity come into that?
His handling of the plenum was a masterpiece of persuasion. He reminded the Opposition that previously he had rejected calls for the expulsion of Trotski and Zinoviev from the Central Committee. ‘Perhaps,’ he waspishly suggested, ‘I overdid the “kindness” and made a mistake.’
The joint plenum excluded Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Central Committee. On 14 November 1927 Trotski and Zinoviev were expelled from the party entirely, and this decision was ratified by the Fifteenth Party Congress in December. The Stalin–Bukharin axis had triumphed. Their version of revolutionary policies at home and abroad had prevailed after a decade of constant factional strife among Bolsheviks. Bukharin maintained friendly relations with his defeated adversaries. But Stalin refused to compromise. At the Fifteenth Party Congress the further exclusion of seventy-five oppositionists, including Kamenev, was announced. Stalin and Bukharin had seen off the acute threat to the NEP. No one imagined that within a month the political settlement would be destroyed and that the two victors would become enemies. In January 1928 the New Economic Policy was about to be torn apart by the Party General Secretary.
PART THREE
Despot
23. ENDING THE NEP
Suddenly at the end of the 1920s Stalin trampled on the New Economic Policy like an angry bull. The economic compromise inaugurated by Lenin’s Politburo seven years earlier was rejected. Massive violence was used to introduce a system of collective farms. Forced-rate industrialisation began. Persecution of kulaks, nepmen and ‘bourgeois specialists’ was intensified. Politics too underwent change. The internal party regime was further tightened and show trials were resumed against surviving leaders of the moribund rival parties. An offensive began against every kind of nationalist tendency.1 The boundaries of cultural expression were drastically reduced and organised religion became the object of violent assault. The controversial settlement that had held since 1921 fell apart.
