as the state’s power was increased, the danger arose that such leaders had a growing capacity to undermine the Politburo. Lukewarm followers were of no use to Stalin. Unequivocal support alone would do.
The firmness shown by Stalin in 1930–1 failed to discourage confidential criticism in the upper echelons of the party. Although the Syrtsov-Lominadze group had been broken up, other little groupings sprouted up. One consisted of Nikolai Eismont, Vladimir Tolmachev and A. P. Smirnov. Denounced by informers in November 1932 and interrogated by the OGPU, they confessed to verbal disloyalty. But this was not enough for Stalin. The joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in January 1933 condemned the leaders for having formed an ‘anti-party grouping’ and took the opportunity to reprimand Rykov and Tomski for maintaining contact with ‘anti-party elements’.30 Yet no sooner had one grouping been dealt with than another was discovered. Martemyan Ryutin, a Moscow district party functionary, hated Stalin’s personal dictatorship. He and several like-minded friends gathered in their homes for evening discussions and Ryutin produced a pamphlet demanding Stalin’s removal from office. Ryutin was arrested. Stalin, interpreting the pamphlet as a call for an assassination attempt, urged Ryutin’s execution. In the end he was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag.31
Stalin never forgot a slight or missed a chance to hit back. He would wait as long as necessary to take his chance. Every tall tree he chopped down satiated an ego which had been injured by years of underappreciation and mockery. His memory was extraordinary, and he had his future victims marked down in a very long list. He extended his distrust to his allies and subordinates. Stalin demanded total loyalty. His daughter Svetlana, writing a reverential memoir in 1967, recalled:32
If he cast out of his heart someone who had been known to him for a long time and if in his soul he had already translated that person into the ranks of ‘enemies’, it was impossible to hold a conversation with him about that person.
This was his way. Once an enemy always an enemy! And even if he was compelled for internal party reasons to show mercy, he always intended to slake his thirst for vengeance in due course.
Bukharin belatedly appreciated this. Until 1928 he had been content to have his rough, aggressive comrade at his side. When he fell out with Stalin, he knew it would be hard to get back into his favour. Still he went on trying to arrange his readmission to public life. He wrote pleading letters to Stalin. He continued to visit and stay in Stalin’s dacha at Zubalovo, talking at length with Nadya Allilueva and playing with their children. Foolishly, however, he went on blabbing about his genuine opinions to other oppositionist leaders. He sometimes did this on the telephone. Little did he suspect that the OGPU provided Stalin with transcripts of its phone-taps. Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were providing material which would make Stalin’s ultimate retaliation truly terrible. He knew their flattery and obeisance were insincere.
His close associates were equally determined to consolidate the authority of their gang. But almost always in the course of the First Five-Year Plan it was Stalin who took the initiative in persecuting or suppressing the group’s enemies. No one was more suspicious and aggressive. Yet his maladjusted personality was not the only factor at work. Although he exaggerated the scale of immediate menace to the leading group, he and his associates had cause for anxiety. Trotski was active abroad. Bukharin became editor of the government’s newspaper
Furthermore, expressions of disgust about ‘peasant questions’ were commonplace in the Red Army. Since the armed forces were imposing official agrarian policy, this had to be a cause for concern. Soldiers widely hated the collective farms. Rumours were rife. In 1930 a story flew around the Moscow Military District that Voroshilov had killed Stalin.33 The implication was obvious: a yearning existed for a change in policy. Having identified himself as the protagonist of radical change, Stalin had made himself the target of unpopularity.
At every level of authority in the USSR there was discontent. The regional party officials felt a growing concern about Stalin’s unpredictable and violent inclinations; they did not warm to the possibility that he might go on putting pressure on them for increased rates of economic growth — and the First Five-Year Plan had made such officials more powerful than under the NEP. The party had been the vanguard institution of the Five-Year Plan. As the state took private economic sectors into its ownership and as the whole economy expanded, so each regional party official acquired enormous authority. With this authority, though, there came massive responsibility. Many officials, harassed by the Kremlin’s imposition of production quotas and acquainted with the enormous disorder and discontent across their regions, yearned for a period of retrenchment rather than continued rapid transformation. The leadership of several People’s Commissariats in Moscow and the provinces felt similar unease about Stalin and the Politburo. The Soviet state, while gaining much from the policies of the First Five-Year Plan, was far from being reconciled to unthinking acceptance of whatever policies were handed down from on high.
Below the stratosphere of party and governmental officialdom there were millions of malcontents. Oppositionists in their thousands were waiting for Stalin’s fall. Outside the ranks of Bolshevism there were still more irreconcilables. Most Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Kadets had ceased political activity; but they were willing to start operating again if the opportunity arose. The same was true of Borotbists, Dashnaks, Musavatists and the many other national parties which had been suppressed in the Civil War. Then there were the priests, mullahs and rabbis who had suffered persecution by the Bolsheviks, and, although up to three million people had emigrated after the October Revolution, there remained plenty of former aristocrats, bankers, industrialists, landowners and shopkeepers who continued to long for the Soviet state’s collapse.
Years of state violence and popular hardship had deepened the reservoir of anger with the regime. Kulaks and their supporters had been killed and deported. Industrial managers and other experts had been persecuted. ‘Bourgeois nationalists’, including Russian ones, had been imprisoned. Remaining religious leaders had been persecuted. Show trials had been organised in Moscow and the provinces. The labour-camp system held a million convicts. Whole zones in north Russia, Siberia and Kazakhstan were inhabited by involuntary colonists who lived and worked in conditions scarcely better than prison. Hostility to the regime was not confined to those who had suffered arrest or deportation. Peasants on the collective farms, especially in the famine areas, hated the agricultural system imposed on the villages. Workers were annoyed by the failure of the authorities to fulfil their promise to raise the popular standard of living. Even the newly promoted administrators in politics and the economy contained many who disliked the harsh practices of the regime. The display of obedience did not tell the whole truth. A multitude of individuals suffered from the punitive, arbitrary workings of the Soviet order and might be counted on to support almost any movement against Stalin and his policies.
This was not the way the official propagandists presented the situation, and fellow travellers around the world replicated their triumphal complacency; indeed the idea that Stalin had no external reason for feeling insecure has become the standard view upon the condition of Soviet politics by the early 1930s. Dictatorships, however, are not immune to political instability, and the Bolshevik leaders sensed that the important strata in society would oust them if the opportunity ever offered itself. Stalin had won several victories. He had instigated forced-rate industrialisation and collectivisation to the accompaniment of massive repression. He had imposed the aims of ‘socialism in one country’. He had harried the former internal party oppositions. He had become the dictator of the USSR in all but name. He and his associates were not without support. Promotees enjoyed their new privileges. Members of the Komsomol and young party activists were enthused by the project of revolutionary transformation. Cultural activists admired the anti-illiteracy campaign. Military personnel relished the strengthening of the armed forces. There was an appreciation that while the Western economies were being disrupted by the effects of the Wall Street Crash, the USSR was making a great industrial advance.
Stalin and his associates would not have lasted in office without such support. It was not yet clear whether the support outweighed the hostility in state and society. For the moment no one could challenge Stalin. He had reached the coveted summit of power. But the summit was an exposed spot, and it remained to be seen whether he would pay for having attained this position of eminence.
