Stalin: A Biography

republican party leaders in Kiev: he kept his promise to the Politburo that eventually they would be removed.) ¹² Stalin also allowed a lowering of procurement quotas in the Volga, the Urals and Kazakhstan after the 1933 harvest.¹³ But his indulgences were temporary and partial. When Kaganovich in September 1934 requested yet another lowering of the Ukrainian grain quotas, Stalin retorted:¹⁴

I consider this letter an alarming symptom since it shows that we can slip on to an incorrect path unless we switch the matter to a firm policy on time (i.e. immediately). The first lowering was necessary. But it is being used by our officials (not only by peasants!) as a first step, which has to be followed by a second step, towards putting pressure on Moscow for a further lowering.

Politburo member Kaganovich was being reminded that the general orientation of policies was to be sustained.

The palliative measures of 1932–3 had little immediate effect. Even the lowered collection quotas left the peasantry with less wheat and potatoes than they needed for subsistence. They ate berries, fungi, rats and mice; and, when these had been consumed, peasants chewed grass and bark. Probably six million people died in a famine which was the direct consequence of state policy.¹⁵ Further measures were announced. The Kolkhoz Model Statute, introduced in 1935, allowed each household between a quarter and a half of a hectare for its private plot.¹⁶ This additional incentive to the economy’s non-state sector was a signal of the terrible conditions for Soviet consumers. Without private agricultural production, albeit in a very restricted framework, conditions would have been still worse. Peasants eked out their existence in the most severe circumstances even after the famine ended in 1933. But life was only a little better for most workers in the towns. Urban wages remained lower in real terms than before the First Five-Year Plan. Industrialisation and collectivisation had thrown society into the maelstrom of hunger, migration and the Gulag. But Stalin and his Politburo had pulled back from the most extreme of their policies for economic transformation, and many officials and most citizens were hoping that the frenzied chaos of 1928–32 had been terminated.

The Seventeenth Party Congress of January and February 1934 was hailed in advance as the Congress of Victors. On the surface there was unanimity among the delegates. No direct criticism of the ascendant party leadership was made. Stalin’s Central Committee report was met with rapturous acclaim; its contents ranged confidently across both foreign and internal policy. He took pride in the ‘victories’ achieved since 1928. Rapid industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation had been imposed. Bolshevik oppositions on the left and the right had been crushed. Priority had been given to socialism in one country. The Central Committee was distinguished more by its listing of long-term objectives than by its specification of immediate policy.

Delegates confined themselves in public to making pleas on behalf of particular localities or economic sectors. Some asked for adjustments of existing measures; but there was no overt discussion of the Ukrainian famine or general industrial policy.¹⁷ Behind the scenes, however, there were grumbles about Stalin’s methods and ambitions. Republican and provincial party officials had had a rough time in recent years as they strove to implement the demands of the Politburo and Gosplan. They had no objection to the additional powers and privileges all this had brought. But the perspective of a regime of permanent pressure was undesirable for them. Quite apart from their personal interests, they believed that a period of consolidation was required. In the absence of open opportunities some of them — at least according to a few sources — approached Politburo member Sergei Kirov and asked him to consider taking over the General Secretaryship from Stalin. Other memoirs suggest that, when the vote for the Central Committee took place, Stalin did badly and that Kaganovich, who was in charge of the counting, had to fiddle the results to secure Stalin’s re-election. If this was true, then the call of the arrested Ryutin was being answered, and Stalin stood in danger of political oblivion.¹⁸

Stalin gave grounds for worry that the flames of his severity had not been extinguished. While agreeing on the need for economic consolidation, he did not fail to argue the need for vigilance and repression whenever enemies of the people were discovered. He declared that internal party oppositionists had ‘descended into the camp of livid counter-revolutionaries and wreckers in the service of foreign capital’.¹⁹ Former oppositionists had only recently been readmitted to the party. It seemed from Stalin’s Central Committee report than he was not entirely convinced that the settlement should be permanent — and he menacingly linked internal party opposition to traitorous activity at the level of the state. It is no wonder that many delegates thought it dangerous to leave him in post as General Secretary.

Events behind the scenes at the Congress remain mysterious. Those intimately involved in them — Kirov and Kaganovich — never divulged the details. Most of the lesser participants were to disappear in the Great Terror and no formal record was made of what had happened at the Congress. Kirov was to acquire a posthumous reputation as a political moderate in the Politburo. There is little to sustain this beyond a few gestures in the direction of increasing bread supplies in Leningrad where he was City Party Secretary.²⁰ All Politburo members tended to protect their sectors of work against the ravaging effects of general policy, and Kirov was no exception. And if indeed Kirov was approached at the Congress, he is likely to have told Stalin of the kind of support he was receiving from delegates. Kirov did not comport himself as a Leader in the making and gave no sign of this ultimate ambition. It cannot be demonstrated beyond doubt that the Congress vote for the new Central Committee humiliated Stalin. All that may confidently be said is that many officials were disenchanted with him and that they may have registered this on their ballot papers. Stalin for his part had cause to worry regardless of the stories about Kirov and the Central Committee vote. Having won victory on all fronts in the First Five-Year Plan, he had learned that a multitude of fellow victors refused to give him carte blanche to proceed however he wished.

For a while he did little in reaction, and the more moderate face of official policy was maintained. It was made more difficult for the police arbitrarily to arrest specialists working in the economy. The OGPU, moreover, was incorporated in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Some contemporary observers hoped that this would lead to a taming of the repressive zeal of the Chekists. Thousands of individuals arrested in the late 1920s started to return from the labour camps and resume a free life. The economy was steered steadily towards the achievement of the goals of the Second Five-Year Plan in an atmosphere untainted by the previous hysteria.

But then something happened which disrupted the political calm. On 1 December 1934 Kirov was shot by an assassin. Leonid Nikolaev, probably annoyed by Kirov’s dalliance with his wife, walked into the Smolny Institute and killed him stone dead. The Leningrad NKVD had already been reported for sloppiness in September 1934,²¹ and its subsequent incompetence belonged to a pattern. Stalin was shocked white and rigid — or at least this was how he appeared to others at the time. Nikolaev was listed as a former Zinovievite. He was quickly interrogated, including a session in Stalin’s presence, and then shot. Mysterious accidents swiftly occurred to his police handlers — and although the NKVD leadership in Leningrad was disciplined for its oversights, the punishment was far from severe for most of them.²² Stalin issued a decree sanctioning the formation of troiki which could mete out summary ‘justice’ without recourse to the courts. The basis was laid for an extension of state terror. Former oppositionists were arrested and interrogated. Zinoviev privately speculated that Stalin would use the murder as a pretext to undertake his own campaign of repression on the model of Hitler’s activity in Germany.²³ Stalin attended Kirov’s funeral looking grim and determined. Even his close associates wondered how he was going to deal with the situation; but everyone assumed that severe measures would be applied.

Instantly the rumour spread that Stalin had connived in Kirov’s liquidation. He was known for a preference for repressive action, and stories abounded that Kirov had been touted as his replacement as General Secretary. Supposedly Stalin was behind the killing. In fact all the evidence is circumstantial and no proof has ever been found. What is undeniable is that Stalin had no compunction about drastic measures. He had not yet killed a close associate but the assassination of Kirov could have been the first such occasion; and even if he did not order the killing, it was he who most benefited from it. Kirov’s death permitted him to treat the former oppositionists as he had implied he wanted to in his Central Committee report to the Seventeenth Party Congress.

Zinoviev and Kamenev were taken into the NKVD’s custody in Moscow and accused of having organised a terrorist conspiracy with their oppositionist followers. Stalin had never ceased to worry about the capacity of the oppositions of left and right to return to power, especially if their ideas had resonance among current party officials. The suppression of successive groupings under Lominadze, Eismont and Ryutin gave no cheer. There could easily be others lurking in Moscow and the provinces. What is more, Stalin knew that Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev had not lost hope of restoration to power. He maintained surveillance over them through the eavesdropping facilities of