The Penguin History of Modern Russia

plagiarized material from F. A. Ksenofontov in order to complete The Foundations of Leninism was grist to the mill of their condescension.¹⁵ Now that Trotski had been pulled off his pedestal, Stalin had exhausted his usefulness to them; it was time to jettison him.

The struggle intensified in the ascendant party leadership about the nature of the NEP. Bukharin and Zinoviev, despite advocating measures at home that were substantially to the right of Trotski’s, were adventuristic in foreign affairs. Not only had they prompted the abortive March Action in Berlin in 1921, but also Zinoviev had compounded the blunder by impelling the Communist Party of Germany to make a further ill-judged attempt to seize power in November 1923. This attitude sat uncomfortably alongside Stalin’s wish to concentrate on the building of socialism in the USSR.

The issues were not clear cut. Bukharin and Zinoviev, while itching to instigate revolution in Berlin, wanted to negotiate with Western capitalist powers. After signing the trade treaties with the United Kingdom and other countries in 1921, the Politburo aimed to insert itself in European diplomacy on a normal basis. The first opportunity came with the Genoa Conference in March 1922. Under Lenin’s guidance, the Soviet negotiators were not too ambitious. Lenin had given up hoping for diplomatic recognition by the Allies as long as the French government demanded the de-annulment of the loans to Russia made by French investors before the October Revolution. People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgi Chicherin was instructed to seek a separate deal with Germany. And so the two pariah powers after the Great War got together. They agreed, at the Italian resort of Rapallo, to grant diplomatic recognition to each other and to boost mutual trade; and, in a secret arrangement, the Soviet authorities were to help Germany to obviate the Treaty of Versailles’s restrictions on German military reconstruction by setting up armaments factories and military training facilities in the USSR.¹⁶

The Rapallo Treaty fitted with Lenin’s notion that economic reconstruction required foreign participation. But German generals proved more willing partners than German industrialists. Lenin’s scheme for ‘concessions’ to be used to attract capital from abroad was a miserable failure. Only roughly a hundred agreements were in operation before the end of 1927.¹⁷ Insofar as Europe and North America contributed to the Soviet Union’s economic regeneration, it occurred largely through international trade. But the slump in the price of grain on the world market meant that revenues had to be obtained mainly by sales of oil, timber and gold; and in the financial year 1926–7 the USSR’s exports were merely a third in volume of what they had been in 1913.¹⁸

Bukharin by the mid-1920s had come over to Stalin’s opinion that capitalism was not yet on the verge of revolutionary upheaval. The intellectual and political complications of the discussion were considerable. Trotski, despite castigating Stalin’s ideas about ‘Socialism in One Country’, recognized the stabilization of capitalism as a medium-term fact of life.¹⁹ In criticizing the March Action of 1921 and the Berlin insurrection of November 1923, he was scoffing at the Politburo’s incompetence rather than its zeal to spread revolution; and his ridicule was focused upon Zinoviev, whom he described as trying to compensate for his opposition to Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 with an ultra-revolutionary strategy for Germany in the 1920s. Bukharin and Stalin replied to Trotski that their own quiescence in foreign policy by 1924 had yielded an improvement in the USSR’s security. A Soviet-Chinese treaty was signed in the same year and relations with Japan remained peaceful. The Labour Party won the British elections and gave de jure recognition to the Soviet government.

This bolstered the Politburo’s case for concentrating upon economic recovery. A further adjustment of the NEP seemed desirable in order to boost agricultural output, and Gosplan and the various People’s Commissariats were ordered to draft appropriate legislation. After a wide-ranging discussion, it was decided in April 1925 to lower the burden of the food tax, to diminish fiscal discrimination against better-off peasants, and to legalize hired labour and the leasing of land.

Yet the Politburo’s unity was under strain. Zinoviev and Kamenev asserted that excessive compromise had been made with the aspirations of the peasantry. Bukharin stepped forward with a defiant riposte. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 he declared: ‘We shall move forward at a snail’s pace, but none the less we shall be building socialism, and we shall build it.’ Throughout the year Trotski had watched bemused as Zinoviev and Kamenev built up the case against official party policy. Zinoviev had a firm organizational base in Leningrad and assumed he was too strong for Stalin; but the Politburo majority were on the side of Stalin and Bukharin, and in 1926 Stalin’s associate Sergei Kirov was appointed to the party first secretaryship in Leningrad. Zinoviev and his Leningrad Opposition saw the writing on the wall. Overtures were made by Zinoviev to his arch- enemy Trotski, and from the summer a United Opposition — led by Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev — confronted the ascendant party leadership.

The United Opposition maintained that Stalin and Bukharin had surrendered entirely to the peasantry. This was not very plausible. In August 1925 Gosplan took a major step towards comprehensive state planning by issuing its ‘control figures for the national economy’. At the Fourteenth Congress in December, moreover, industrial capital goods were made the priority for longer-term state investment. The Central Committee repeated the point in April 1926, making a general call for ‘the reinforcement of the planning principle and the introduction of planning discipline’.²⁰ Two campaigns were inaugurated in industry. First came a ‘Regime of Economy’, then a ‘Rationalization of Production’. Both campaigns were a means of putting pressure upon factories to cut out inefficient methods and to raise levels of productivity.

The USSR’s industrialization was never far from the Politburo’s thoughts. The United Opposition, for its part, was constantly on the defensive. Stalin sliced away at their power-bases as the Secretariat replaced opponents with loyalists at all levels of the party’s hierarchy; Bukharin had a merry time reviling his leading critics in books and articles. The United Opposition’s access to the public media was continually reduced. Prolific writers such as Trotski, Radek, Preobrazhenski, Kamenev and Zinoviev had their material rejected for publication in Pravda. Claques were organized at Party Congresses to interrupt their speeches. In January 1925 Trotski was removed as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, and in December he lost his Politburo seat. Zinoviev was sacked as Leningrad Soviet chairman in January 1926 and in July was ousted from the Politburo with Kamenev. In October 1926 the leadership of the Executive Committee of the Comintern passed from Zinoviev to Dmitri Manuilski.

The United Opposition leaders fell back on their experience as clandestine party activists against the Romanov monarchy. They produced programmes, theses and appeals on primitive printing devices, keeping an eye open for potential OGPU informers. They also arranged unexpected mass meetings where they could communicate their ideas to workers. They talked to sympathizers in the Comintern. They would not go gently into oblivion.

Yet although the Left Opposition, the Leningrad Opposition and the United Opposition exposed the absence of internal party democracy, their words had a hollow ring. Trotski and Zinoviev had treated Bolshevik dissidents with disdain until they, too, fell out with the Politburo. Their invective against authoritarianism and bureaucracy seemed self-serving to the Workers’ Opposition, which refused to co-operate with them. In any case, no communist party critic of the Politburo — from Shlyapnikov through to Trotski — called for the introduction of general democracy. The critics wanted elections and open discussion in the party and, to some extent, in the soviets and the trade unions. But none favoured permitting the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Kadets to re-enter politics. The All-Union Communist Party’s monopoly, while having no sanction even from the USSR Constitution, was an unchallenged tenet; and oppositionists went out of their way to affirm their obedience to the party. Even Trotski, that remarkable individualist, demurred at being thought disloyal.

Such self-abnegation did him no good: Stalin was out to get the United Opposition and the OGPU smashed their printing facilities and broke up their meetings. Stalin’s wish to settle accounts with Trotski and Zinoviev was reinforced by the debacles in international relations. In May 1927 a massacre of thousands of Chinese communists was perpetrated by Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai. The Soviet Politburo had pushed the Chinese Communist Party into alliance with Chiang, and Trotski did not fail to point out that foreign policy was unsafe in the hands of the existing Politburo.

This time Stalin had his way: in November 1927 the Central Committee expelled Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev from the party. Hundreds of their followers were treated similarly. Kamenev and Zinoviev were so demoralized that they petitioned in January 1928 for re-admittance to the party. They recanted their opinions, which they now described as anti-Leninist. In return Stalin re-admitted them to the party in June. Trotski refused to recant. He and thirty unrepentant oppositionists, including Preobrazhenski, were sent into internal exile. Trotski found himself isolated in Alma-Ata, 3000 kilometres from Moscow. He was not physically abused, and took his family, secretaries and personal library with him; he was also allowed to write to his associates elsewhere in the