Bukharin did not need special permission to publish what he wanted in the hope of neutralising a politician whom he had come to regard as the USSR’s Genghis Khan.26 But he also misjudged Stalin by assuming that all that interested him was to keep power.27 What had started as a crisis over food supplies had acquired other dimensions. Stalin’s group in the Politburo and Central Committee were not going to be satisfied by changes to agricultural measures. They wanted fast industrial progress and military security. They wished to crush nationalism and religiosity. They aimed to eradicate hostility to the Soviet regime, and the remnants of the old propertied classes were to be got rid of. Cities, schools and cinemas had to be established. Socialism was to be spread as an idea and a practical reality.
Stalin and Bukharin clashed every time they met. In his condition of heightened expectancy, Stalin applied his programme to international relations. He now denied that ‘capitalist stabilisation’ prevailed, and he declared that the world economy was facing yet another fundamental emergency. He resolved that this should be reflected in the world communist movement. Before the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in July 1928, Stalin declared that anti- communist socialists in Europe — members of labour and social-democratic parties — were the deadliest enemies of socialism. He called them ‘social-fascists’. Bukharin was horrified: he understood the dangers posed by the European far right. Appreciating the qualitative difference between conservatism and fascism, he wanted Hitler’s Nazis to be the main object of the German Communist Party’s political attack. But Stalin amassed the support required in the Politburo for a change of policy in the Comintern. The internal breach with the NEP obtained an external aspect. Until then it had been the official line that world capitalism had stabilised itself after the Great War. Now Stalin insisted that a ‘third period’ had commenced as capitalism entered its terminal crisis and that revolutionary opportunities were about to present themselves in Europe.
This had been under discussion in the Politburo for a year or two but no serious alteration of the Comintern’s practical instructions to Europe’s communist parties had followed. Wanting to do down Bukharin, Stalin had a personal interest in changing policy. But there was probably more to it. Stalin had had doubts about ‘European socialist revolution’ in 1917–18. Yet his scepticism was absolute and sometimes his Bolshevik instincts took him over. Aiming at the transformation of the USSR, he might have been reverting to radical type. From mid-1928, however, Stain’s group ordered communists throughout the continent to adopt the stance taken by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Extreme radicalism became dominant again and the Comintern, at the Politburo’s instigation, purged the doubters and vacillators — as well as the Trotskyists — from the ranks of its parties. World communism was being readied for the imminent revolutionary upheaval.
Stalin, while insisting that revolutions were about to break out in Europe, continued to stipulate that the Russian Communist Party should concentrate on building ‘socialism in one country’. His enemies took this as proof that Stalin was a hypocrite or a bungler. Trotski reminded everyone of Stalin’s cack-handed instructions to the Chinese Communist Party in 1927; Bukharin was baffled by the turn in policy. There was no fundamental paradox in Stalin’s change of policy. His controversial commitment to socialism in one country did not imply a basic disregard for the necessity of international revolution. Stalin had never ceased to accept that the USSR would face problems of security until such time as one or more of the globe’s great powers underwent a revolution of the Soviet kind. This did not mean, however, that he was willing to risk direct intervention in Europe; he still feared provoking a crusade against the USSR. But he no longer sought to restrain the communist parties in Germany, France and Italy which had made no secret of their frustration with the Comintern’s insistence that they should collaborate with social-democratic and labour parties in their countries.
He seldom did anything for one sole reason. When allied to Bukharin before 1928, Stalin left a lot of the handling of the Comintern to him. Bukharin had many supporters in leading positions in the foreign parties. By altering policy and expelling dissenters, Stalin could bring his own people to the top. Prone to moodiness, Bukharin contemplated resigning as a means of putting pressure on Stalin.28 Stalin had frequently offered his own resignation from posts since the October Revolution; but he would not have treated Bukharin with the indulgence which he himself had received. His only idea of victory involved crushing and humiliating the enemy.
Much ground had already been prepared for him. In moving forward to comprehensive state ownership and regulation, the ascendant party leadership was moving backwards towards the Soviet economic system of the period of the Civil War. The Supreme Council of the People’s Economy had been established to supervise all economic activity after the October Revolution.29 The banking and industrial sectors had been seized by the state in the Civil War and much had subsequently been retained. Gosplan had been created in February 1921. After starting the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin and his associates suggested that they were initiating a calculated strategy from this transformation. The word ‘plan’ implied that this was the case. No such strategy in any definitive form existed and there were many zigzags on the route to transformation. Policies were modified and sometimes abandoned. Once announced, targets for economic growth were frequently altered. Yet Stalin was not without a compass when he threw the NEP overboard. Although he lacked a calculated strategy, he always possessed a set of operational assumptions, and these assumptions were shared by many in the central and local party leaderships.
Sooner or later, as even Nikolai Bukharin thought, the market had to be eliminated from the economy and the social elements hostile to socialism — the kulaks, the nepmen, clergy, ‘bourgeois specialists’, nationalists and supporters of all other political and cultural trends — had somehow to disappear. The need for a wholly state- owned economy and state-directed society was the shared objective of leading Bolsheviks. They did not flinch at the use of force. Hardened by their experiences before and after the October 1917 Revolution, they were more than willing to ensure compliance by crude methods. The frustrations of the NEP were immense. The military threat from abroad did not fade and the technological gap between the USSR and the West was growing. Loyal supporters of the ascendant party leadership, moreover, were embarrassed by oppositionists who declared that they had betrayed the objective of the Revolution led by Lenin. Such a mentality offered a framework of assumptions inside which it was possible for Stalin to make his piecemeal proposals from 1928 and to count upon substantial support in the wider party.
Stalin started with basic assumptions about the world. These came from his peculiar and distorted reaction to his Georgian background, to his experience of the revolutionary underground and to the Bolshevik variant of Marxism. Whatever the matter to be decided, he was never perplexed to the point of vacillation. His axioms did not prescribe policy in detail. By thinking and commanding according to his fundamental ideas, he could be instantly decisive. Any given situation might sometimes require much study — and Stalin worked assiduously even after the Second World War at keeping himself well informed. But most situations could be decided without a great deal of work; indeed Stalin could afford to leave them to his subordinates and demand reports on what had been decided. He surrounded himself with persons such as Molotov and Kaganovich who shared his assumptions, and he promoted others who could be trained to internalise them (or to go along with them out of ambition or fear). It is this inner world of assumptions which gives the clue about Stalin’s otherwise mysterious capacity to manoeuvre in the changing situations of the 1930s.
During the First Five-Year Plan the USSR underwent drastic change. Ahead lay campaigns to spread collective farms and eliminate kulaks, clerics and private traders. The political system would become harsher. Violence would be pervasive. The Russian Communist Party, OGPU and People’s Commissariats would consolidate their power. Remnants of former parties would be eradicated. ‘Bourgeois nationalists’ would be arrested. The Gulag, which was the network of labour camps subject to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), would be expanded and would become an indispensable sector of the Soviet economy. Dozens of new towns and cities would be founded. Thousands of new enterprises would be created. A great influx of people from the villages would take place as factories and mines sought to fill their labour forces. Literacy schemes would be given huge state funding. Promotion of workers and peasants to administrative office would be widespread. Enthusiasm for the demise of political, social and cultural compromise would be cultivated. Marxism–Leninism would be intensively propagated. The change would be the work of Stalin and his associates in the Kremlin. Theirs would be the credit and theirs the blame.
24. TERROR-ECONOMICS
Stalin in 1929 was determined to alter the USSR’s economic structures and practices. Gosplan was put under a political clamp and told to produce ever more ambitious versions of the First Five-Year Plan. The Politburo
