Stalin: A Biography

Either we resolve [this serious question] correctly in the interests of the state and of the workers and the unemployed, whom it would be possible to set up in expanded production or else, if we don’t resolve it correctly, we’ll lose tens of millions — apart from everything else — to the benefit of foreign manufacturers.

Whereas Bukharin advocated industrialisation at a slowish pace and tried to discourage demands for acceleration, Stalin displayed increasing frustration. The partnership of Stalin and Bukharin was disintegrating without either of them yet anticipating that a decisive rupture was about to occur. They still got on well in the Politburo. They also saw each other socially. But Stalin’s ideas were hardening. In December 1926 he denied that the USSR would take fifty or more years to match the volume of the economics of foreign capitalist powers. Indeed he declared that ‘giant steps’ forward could and should be taken.¹¹

Stalin’s contribution to discussions of economic policy until January 1928 had been of a measured nature and — apart from his licensed attacks on the internal party oppositions — his outward behaviour had been calm since Lenin’s death. His rivals had some excuse for misreading the situation; but it was not a mistake they were going to be able to repeat without pain. Stalin was acting craftily. He breathed not a word to Bukharin about the war on the countryside he was about to start. Closeted for two days on the Trans-Siberian Railway with his aide Alexander Poskrebyshev and others, though, he was in a pugnacious frame of mind. (Poskrebyshev was the latest of Stalin’s personal assistants and was to remain in post until 1953.) Anybody who got in Stalin’s way on his trip was going to receive ferocious treatment. On arrival in Novosibirsk, he ordered arrests of ‘anti-Soviet’ kulaks. Grain procurement quotas were to be fulfilled. The campaign started to ‘expand the establishment’ of collective farms.¹² Squads were assembled in west Siberia and the Urals to collect the quotas set for grain collection. They travelled out to the farms armed to the teeth and grabbed whatever produce they discovered. As in 1918–20, Bolsheviks entered villages, summoned peasant gatherings and demanded immediate compliance at gunpoint.

Stalin returned to Moscow on 6 February 1928 with wagons of grain seized from ‘hoarders’. Pravda celebrated the achievement.¹³ It seemed that Stalin’s line had triumphed without resistance in the central party leadership. He and the other leaders insisted that the ‘middle peasants’ as well as the kulaks needed to be coerced into releasing their harvests.¹⁴ Bukharin was outraged. The change in policy had been undertaken in the provinces without prior sanction by the Politburo or the Central Committee. There was no precedent in the party’s history. Stalin had arrived in Moscow like a thief with his loot; instead of acknowledging his crime, he expected to have his virtue commended. The Politburo was in uproar. Its members stopped speaking to each other outside official meetings. When challenged about his policies, Stalin grew angry and imperious. Bukharin complained to him about his demeanour on 16 April. Stalin wrote back: ‘You won’t force me to stay quiet or hide my opinion by your shrieks about “my wanting to teach everybody”. Is an end ever going to be put to the attacks on me?’¹⁵ These words combined self-righteousness and over-sensitivity in a pugnacious mixture.

Stalin understood how to exploit the situation. He wanted faster agricultural collectivisation and state- planned industrialisation. Most party officials had never felt comfortable with the NEP. They itched to go over to a more ‘revolutionary’ line. In the Komsomol — the party’s youth organisation — there were also many militants who yearned for the Politburo to abandon compromise. This trend was also found in the OGPU: many police officials were eager to enforce a regime with greater control over an unruly society. The Red Army had leading commanders eager for economic transformation and an end to the constriction of their budgetary opportunities.¹⁶ Although agriculture had been the focal point of Stalin’s initiative in January 1928, he associated himself with a much larger agenda. Like his supporters in the party and other public bodies, he wanted to accelerate and deepen the country’s transformation. Industry, schooling, urban construction and socialist indoctrination were to be prioritised. The state was to become more penetrative and traditional attachments to religion and nationhood were to disappear. The USSR was to turn itself into a military power which could defend itself.

Moving beyond agricultural policy, Stalin organised a trial of engineers and ‘industrial specialists’, including several foreigners, from Shakhty in the Don Basin. They were charged with deliberate sabotage. Officially the OGPU under Genrikh Yagoda was conducting an independent enquiry. In reality it was Stalin who was accuser and judge. Investigative procedures were ignored. The Party General Secretary ordered the arrested individuals to be beaten into confessing to imaginary crimes. He was resetting the machinery of Soviet politics. He was cracking the resistance of industrial specialists — managers, engineers and planners — to demands for quicker industrial growth. Through the Shakhty plaintiffs he established a case of widespread sabotage. The shadow of suspicion fell over specialists throughout the USSR.

Stalin had let others do his dirty business. He avoided calling for the execution of the accused in the Shakhty Affair. He manoeuvred so as to get his results while protecting a pure reputation.¹⁷ Meanwhile Gosplan was preparing directives for the USSR’s entire economy. Sovnarkom had given instructions to this effect in June 1927 and the work was coming to completion in summer 1928. The first variant of the Five-Year Plan was scheduled for inauguration in October. The output targets were astonishingly high: capital goods were projected to increase by 161 per cent and consumer goods by 83 per cent.¹⁸ All sectors of the economy were to be subjected to state control. Although priority was given to the development of heavy industry, the Politburo anticipated that the popular standard of living in the towns would simultaneously improve. There was also an expectation that a hundred thousand tractors would be manufactured for use in agriculture and put at the disposal of the collective farms which were about to be created. Revenues for this over-optimistic scheme were to come from the main beneficiaries of the NEP. Stalin wanted to exact a tribute from the better-off peasantry. Bukharin described this as ‘idiotic illiteracy’.

Bukharin in April secured a decision at the Central Committee plenum condemning ‘excesses’ in recent practices in procurement. When the Central Committee met again on 4 July, its official resolution gave a commitment to the NEP and even promised a rise in grain prices.¹⁹ The problem for Bukharin, though, was the failure of his measures to restore economic stability. Peasants refused to release grain stocks. The violence had exacerbated relations between the villages and the administrative authorities. In any case the shortage of industrial products for purchase gave no incentive for the peasantry to return to the market.²⁰ The Politburo had hoped to alleviate problems by importing wheat; but this was too little and too late to terminate the food-supplies deficit. Nor did it do anything about the difficulties with the peasants. Meanwhile the towns remained short of grain and vegetables. The Politburo could not ignore the monthly reports: the USSR faced a winter of urban malnutrition.

What Bukharin had not bargained for was the reaction of several powerful leaders. He had expected Voroshilov and Kalinin to criticise what had happened in the Urals and Siberia.²¹ Even Ordzhonikidze was sometimes disloyal to Stalin behind the scenes.²² Bukharin remained hopeful that he could win over individuals such as OGPU leader Yagoda as well as the rest of the party. The reversion to War Communism had to be exposed for what it was.²³ Yet Stalin won all of them to his side. (It was said that Kalinin’s weakness for ballerinas allowed Stalin to put pressure on him.) By summer 1928 Bukharin was becoming frantic. He even started to worry that Stalin would bring Kamenev and Zinoviev back into public politics as useful allies. Bukharin made overtures to Kamenev to prevent this. ‘The disagreements between us and Stalin,’ he told him, ‘are many times more serious than all the ones we had with you. The Rightists… wanted Kamenev and Zinoviev restored to the Politburo.’²⁴ Bukharin’s overtures were a sign of panic. He could not assemble sufficient support at the highest party levels. His sole prominent allies against the General Secretary were Rykov, Tomski and Uglanov.

Yet Bukharin believed that the ‘Urals-Siberian method’ would be disowned and that the market mechanisms of Lenin’s NEP restored. Initially his optimism seemed justified. The ‘excesses’ reported in the expropriation campaign were officially castigated and denials were issued that the ‘extraordinary measures’ implied an abandonment of the NEP. Although Stalin successfully insisted that a stronger commitment to early collectivisation also be inserted into public statements, the feeling was widespread that he had damaged himself politically.

Bukharin did not give up. Having written inscrutable prose for most of his adult life, he came down to earth and published ‘Notes of an Economist’. Bukharin castigated ideas of ‘super-industrialisation’. According to him, these were Trotskyist and anti-Leninist. He claimed that only a balanced, steady relationship between the interests of industry and agriculture would secure healthy economic development.²⁵ There was nothing in the ‘Notes’ that jarred against anything Stalin had said up to 1928; and since Stalin still avoided disowning the NEP,