policy of grain requisitioning was replicated later in 1928 across the USSR. Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev, Andrei Zhdanov, Stanislav Kosior and Stalin’s newly-discovered supporter in mid-Siberia, Sergei Syrtsov, were instructed to lead campaigns in the major agricultural regions. Over the next two years the New Economic Policy was piece by piece destroyed. In agriculture it was replaced by a system of collective farms. In industry it gave way to a Five- Year Plan which assigned both credit and production targets to factories, mines and construction sites. Private commercial firms vanished. Force was applied extensively. Kulaks were repressed, managers were persecuted, wages were lowered.
Planning as a concept acquired a great vogue around the world. The instability of capitalism after the Great War had an impact upon the attitudes of many people in the West, especially when the foundations of the global financial system were shaken by the Great Depression in autumn 1929. Mass unemployment afflicted all capitalist countries. There was a slump in trade and production across Europe. Bankrupt financiers leapt out of the windows of New York skyscrapers.
Central state direction of economic development gained in favour as politicians and journalists reported that the Soviet Union was avoiding the financial catastrophe that was engulfing the Western economies. Outside the global communist movement there continued to be abhorrence for the USSR; but the use of authoritarian measures to effect an exit from crisis acquired broader respectability. Dictatorship was not uncommon in inter-war Europe. Benito Mussolini, an ex-socialist, had seized power in Rome in 1922 for his National Fascist Party, and right-wing dictatorships were established in countries such as Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. In Germany, too, democracy was under threat in the 1920s from a Nazi party which — like the German Communist Party — did not disguise its contempt for due legal process. Confidence in the old — and not so old — ways of conducting politics was widely being eroded.
Yet Stalin, while talking of the virtues of planning, did not have detailed projects in mind when changing policy in 1928–32. If he had a Grand Plan, he kept it strictly to himself. Nevertheless he was not behaving at random: his activities occurred within the framework of his prejudices and ambition; and there was an internal logic to the step-by-step choices that he made.
Stalin attracted much support from fellow communist leaders. The use of force on ‘kulaks’ was welcomed as an end of ideological compromise: Stalin seemed to be fulfilling the commitments of the October Revolution and ending the frustrations of the NEP. In particular, several central politicians warmed to his initiative: Central Committee Secretaries Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich; Supreme Council of the National Economy Chairman Valeryan Kuibyshev; and Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate Chairman Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Their enthusiasm for Stalin was replicated in many local party bodies. Favour was also shown by low-level functionaries in the OGPU, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, the Komsomol and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Personnel in those institutions with an interest in increasing their control over society were in the forefront of his supporters. In Stalin they found a Politburo leader who gave them the opportunity they had been seeking.
Certain economists, too, backed his case. S. G. Strumilin argued that it did not matter if the setting of economic targets was not based on the normal extrapolation of statistics; his demand was always for the party to aim at achieving the impossible. This ‘teleological’ school of economic planning signified a determination to make the data fit any desired objective. Supporters such as Strumilin treated Stalin’s programme like a priceless photographic film waiting to be exposed to the light by their eager professional chemistry.
Stalin’s actions appalled his ally Nikolai Bukharin. The NEP had entered a critical phase by the winter of 1927–8; but whereas Bukharin wished to assure peasants that the party aimed to foster their immediate interests, Stalin had lost patience. Ostensibly Bukharin was in a strong position. The list of communist party luminaries who supported the NEP was impressive: Aleksei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Chairman of Sovnarkom; Mikhail Tomski, Chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions; Nikolai Uglanov, Moscow City Party First Secretary. The fact that Bukharin, Rykov and Tomski also belonged to the Politburo meant that they could press their opinions at the summit of the political system. Moreover, they had privileged access to the media of public communication. Through the pages of
Stalin dared not contradict this. The NEP was closely associated with the name of Lenin, and Stalin always saw the point of identifying his policies as a continuation of Lenin’s intentions. Even in later years, when the NEP had been completely jettisoned, Stalin went on claiming that his new measures were merely an incremental development of the NEP.
His sensitivity had been acute upon his return from the Urals and Siberia; for he knew that he could not yet count on being able to convince the central party leadership that his requisitioning campaign should be extended to the rest of the country. In January 1928 he had already been contemplating the rapid collectivization of Soviet agriculture as the sole means of preventing the recurrent crises in food supplies.1 But he was still unclear how he might achieve this; and his need at the time was to withstand criticisms by Bukharin and his friends. The Politburo met in April 1928 to discuss the results of the requisitioning campaign. Bukharin was unsettled by the violence; but he, too, was reticent in public. Having just seen off the United Opposition, he did not wish to reveal any divisions in the ascendant party leadership. Thus although the Politburo condemned ‘excesses’ of local grain- seizing authorities, the resolution did not appear in the newspapers and did not mention the main culprit, Stalin, by name.
For some weeks it seemed to many who were not privy to the balance of authority in the Politburo that Bukharin was getting the upper hand. The July 1928 Central Committee plenum debated the party’s attitude to the agrarian crisis, and Bukharin proposed that conciliatory measures were overdue. The plenum decided to raise prices paid by governmental agencies for grain. The hope was to revive the willingness of rural inhabitants to trade their surpluses of wheat and other cereal crops. The restoration of voluntary trade between countryside and town seemed to have become the central party’s goal yet again. But the plenum’s decision had little impact on the availability of food supplies and tensions in the Politburo did not abate. In September a frantic Bukharin published ‘Notes of an Economist’, an article which summarized the arguments for the party to abide by the NEP. The impression was given that official policy had reverted to its earlier position and that the emergency situation would shortly be brought to an end.2
In reality, Stalin and Bukharin were barely on speaking terms and Stalin had in no way become reconciled to rehabilitating the NEP. Bukharin was accustomed to standing up for his opinions. As a young Marxist in 1915, he had argued against Lenin on socialist political strategy. In 1918 he had led the Left Communists against signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In 1920–21 he had criticized not only Trotski but also Lenin in the ‘trade union controversy’; and he had held his ground when Lenin had subsequently continued to attack his views on philosophy and culture.
He was intellectually inquisitive and rejected the conventional Bolshevik assumption that only Marxists could contribute to knowledge about history and politics. He lectured at the Institute of Red Professors, and brought on a group of young Bolshevik philosophers as his proteges. His mind had a cultural sophistication; he loved poetry and novels and was a talented painter in oils: he would always come back from his summertime trips to the mountains with freshly-finished canvases. He also liked a bit of levity in his life: he did cartwheels on a Paris pavement in order to impress a new wife.3 Bukharin identified himself with the country’s youth, often wearing the red necktie sported by teenage adherents of the Komsomol. Born in 1888 to a schoolmaster’s family, he was nearly a decade younger than Stalin. As Lenin once remarked, he was ‘the golden boy’ of the Bolshevik party. Even oppositionists found it hard to dislike him.
Bukharin was no saint. In the 1920s he had shown his nasty side in internal party polemics about the NEP. In the universities, moreover, he imperturbably ruined the career of many non-communist academics. But he also had more than his fair share of naivety. In particular, he had been taken in by Stalin’s gruff charm. They appeared to get on famously together, and Bukharin did much to make Stalin respectable again after the brouhaha over Lenin’s testament. By 1928 it was too late for Bukharin to admit to Kamenev and Zinoviev that they had been right — however belatedly, even in their case — about Stalin’s personal degeneracy.
This was not a politician who had the insight or skills to defeat Stalin. By the last months of 1928 the spat between them was resumed when the results of Bukharin’s defence of the NEP became apparent. The increase in prices offered by the state for agricultural produce failed to induce the peasantry to return to the market on the desired scale. At the Central Committee plenum in November, Stalin went back on to the offensive and demanded a comprehensive policy of requisitioning. From the Urals and Siberia there also came a proposal that the grain
