I believe that the implementation of a plan of such exceptional difficulty as that which confronts us in 1931 demands solid unity between the top echelons of the Soviet and Party leadership. Not the slightest cleft should be permitted.
— V. V. Kuibyshev, 1930
THESE WERE TERRIBLE YEARS in the Soviet Union. It was the fifteenth year of the Revolution, and the country faced the paradox of rapid industrial expansion combined with the starvation of millions of people. How had things come to such a pass?
In 1917 the Bolsheviks had come to power in a relatively backward country suffering through a wartime crisis. As Marxists, they believed that socialism was the inevitable future for mankind but that it depended on the existence of an advanced economy. As Leninists, they were convinced that this future could be brought about through a highly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries acting as “midwives of history” to guide the masses toward their future. These beliefs associated with the Leninist version of Marxism were understood differently by various groups within the Bolshevik Party, but by and large they were fundamentals of Bolshevism and crucial factors in the futures of both the party and the country.
Almost immediately, the new regime was plunged into the three-year Civil War that pitted the Reds (Bolsheviks and their allies) against the Whites (politically almost everyone else). The Civil War saw not only military intervention by more than a dozen capitalist states against the Bolsheviks, but also almost unimaginable violence and cruelty on both sides. Torture and massacres of prisoners were common, epidemic and famine racked the country, and the economic base of the country was severely damaged.
The Civil War was an important formative experience for the Bolsheviks. To stay in power—to save the Revolution—they had launched a Red Terror and organized a secret police (CHEKA) with unlimited powers to arrest, try, and execute. The war had forced on the Bolsheviks a kind of military discipline that valued obedience, strict party unity, and a combative mentality. Words like implacable and pitiless came into the Bolshevik vocabulary as positive attributes for party members. Moreover, the life-and-death struggle against domestic and foreign enemies of the Revolution had nurtured in their minds a kind of siege mentality that saw enemies and conspiracies everywhere and allowed little in the way of compromise or toleration. Concerns for legality and civil rights were seen as “rotten liberalism” that was dangerous to the Revolution, and it was in this period that the Bolsheviks banned other parties and took monopolistic control of the press. Even after 1921, when the Civil War was won, these wartime measures were extended indefinitely. The regime never felt confident about its hold on power; domestic and foreign enemies were still out there, and to weaken the state seemed an unnecessary risk. Intolerance, quick recourse to violence and terror, and generalized fear and insecurity were the main legacies of the Civil War. The ends justified the means, and it was the Civil War that turned revolutionaries into dictators.1
Indeed, so concerned were they with maintaining iron discipline in their own ranks that at the very moment of victory they passed a resolution banning the formation of factions within their own party. Lenin’s ideas of party organization, known as “democratic centralism,” held that party policies should be adopted democratically, but once a decision was taken it was the duty of all party members publicly to defend and support those policies whether or not they personally agreed with them. Rather loosely observed in the party before and during 1917, these norms received strong reinforcement in the desperate emergency of the Civil War, and party leaders of all kinds had little trouble institutionalizing them as a “ban on factions” at the Tenth Party Congress in early 1921.
Economically, the Bolsheviks faced a bleak outlook at the end of the Civil War. During that struggle, their policies had been a patchwork of nationalizations, labor mobilizations, food requisitions, and state-sponsored barter known as War Communism. The Russian peasants, a large majority of the population, had in their own spontaneous revolution seized and redistributed the land during 1917. They tolerated Bolshevik forced grain requisitions during the war only because the alternative was a restoration of the Old Regime with its landlords. But with the passing of the wartime emergency the peasants were unwilling to sacrifice their harvests for the Bolshevik state, and a series of revolts convinced Lenin of the need to placate peasant farmers to save the regime.2
The result was the New Economic Policy (NEP), adopted in 1921. Free markets were allowed in agriculture and in small and medium industry (the Bolsheviks retained nationalized heavy industry in their own hands). Lenin saw this concession to capitalism as a necessary measure to appease the peasants and to allow market forces to help rebuild the shattered economy. NEP always enjoyed mixed popularity among the Bolsheviks, depending on their political views.3
For some “moderate” or “rightist” Bolsheviks, NEP was a strategic “retreat” that implied a fairly long road to the eventual socialist goal. Traversing that long evolutionary path would require patient socialist indoctrination of the population, education, and above all maintaining the goodwill of the peasant majority as it “grew into” socialism. For “leftist” Bolsheviks, NEP was more of a tactical “breathing spell,” a temporary rest period before restarting the socialist offensive. For these leftists, NEP was always a dangerous concession to capitalism, and they believed that reaching socialism was a revolutionary process that would inevitably involve a “class struggle” with “capitalist elements” among the peasantry.
Regardless of their political disposition toward the mixed economy of NEP, virtually all Bolsheviks agreed that the basic problem was an economic one. If Russia was to reach socialism, it would have to undergo a dramatic industrial expansion. Marx had taught that socialism followed developed capitalism and was based on a modern technological and industrial base. Nobody in the party believed that Russia was anywhere near that stage, so the question was how (and how fast) to industrialize.
Rightist Bolsheviks, who clustered around the economic theoretician and Pravda editor Nikolai Bukharin (and eventually around the trade union leader Mikhail Tomsky and Premier Aleksei Rykov), saw NEP as a long-term strategy in which the party should maintain its alliance (smychka) with an increasingly prosperous peasantry. Funds for industrialization would be generated by rational taxation and the general growth of the economy. Leftist Bolsheviks, on the other hand, favored “squeezing” resources from the peasantry at a faster rate. Led by the Communist International chief and Leningrad party boss Grigory Zinoviev, Moscow party chief Lev Kamenev, and the brilliant Lev Trotsky, the leftists, impatient with what they considered coddling of the peasantry, pressed for a more militant and aggressive industrial policy. Rightists accused them of courting disaster by provoking the peasantry. Leftists retorted by arguing that the rightist version of NEP was a sellout to capitalist elements that were holding the Bolsheviks hostage and delaying industrialization.
Overlaying and sharpening these disagreements was a classic struggle for succession that followed Lenin’s death in 1924. Responding to personal loyalties, patron-client networks, and sometimes policy platforms, Bolshevik leaders began to gravitate to various high personalities of the party who contended for Lenin’s mantle. Bukharin spoke for the pro-NEP rightist Bolsheviks. Zinoviev became the leading spokesman for the more aggressive economic leftists. Trotsky, always an iconoclast, took varying—although generally leftist—positions on economic questions but was best known as an advocate of antibureaucratism and increased party democracy.
Iosif Stalin, as general secretary of the party, had influence among the growing apparat, or full-time corps of professional party secretaries and administrators. The party had grown tremendously from its relatively humble size in early 1917. As it became larger and more complex and took on the tasks of government rather than those of insurrection, Lenin and other leaders saw the need to regularize the party’s structure. Toward the end of the Civil War the party’s governing body, the Central Committee (CC), formed three subcommittees to carry out the party’s work between sittings of the full body. The Political Bureau (Politburo) was to decide the grand strategic questions of policy. An Organizational Bureau (Orgburo) was to organize implementation of these decisions by assigning cadres to the necessary tasks. Finally, a Secretariat was charged with the day-to-day mundane matters of handling correspondence and communication, moving paperwork through the party bureaucracy, and preparing agendas for the other bodies. Stalin, pushed forward by Lenin as a good organizer, sat on all three subcommittees.4
Most party leaders believed that the Politburo would be the locus of real political power, and to a great extent it was. But as the struggle for personal power heated up in the 1920s, real power—as is always the case in a large organization—was as much a question of patronage as of theory, and from his vantage in the Orgburo and Secretariat, Stalin was able to influence personnel appointments throughout the party. While the other leaders stood on economic policy platforms and theoretical formulations, Stalin’s power was that of the machine boss. Throughout the country, territorially based party committees were led by a network of party secretaries who, in theory, carried out the Politburo’s policy in the provinces. More and more in the 1920s, this full-time party secretarial apparatus looked to Stalin as its leader.5
And he was an attractive leader for many reasons. Unlike the other top leaders, Stalin was not an intellectual or theoretician. He spoke a simple and unpretentious language not unattractive to a party increasingly made up of workers and peasants. His style contrasted sharply with that of his Politburo comrades, whose complicated theories and pretentious demeanor won them few friends among the plebeian rank and file. He also had an uncanny way of projecting what appeared to be moderate solutions to complicated problems. Unlike his colleagues, who seemed shrill in their warnings of fatal crises, Stalin frequently put himself forward as the calm man of the golden mean with moderate, compromise solutions.
The personal struggle for power among the Olympian Bolshevik leaders was complicated but can be summarized quickly. Beginning in 1923 Trotsky launched a trenchant criticism of Stalin’s “regime of professional secretaries,” claiming that they had become ossified bureaucrats cut off from their proletarian followers. Trotsky also argued that the survival of the Bolshevik regime depended on receiving support from successful workers’ revolutions in Europe, and he accused Stalin and other leaders of losing interest in spreading the revolution. To the other Politburo leaders, Trotsky seemed the most powerful and the most dangerous. By common recognition he was, after Lenin, the most brilliant theoretician in the party. More important, he was the leader of the victorious Red Army and regarded as personally ambitious, a potential Napoleon of the Russian Revolution.
Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin closed ranks to isolate Trotsky, accusing him of trying to split the party because of his personal ambition to lead it. They argued that Trotsky was only using “party democracy” as a phony political issue: during the Civil War he had never been for anything less than iron discipline. Now, they charged, his criticism weakened party unity. Stalin in particular played a nationalist card by noting that the world revolution was not coming about as soon as they had thought, and in any case “we” Bolsheviks and “we” Soviet people do not need the help of foreigners to build socialism. “Socialism in One Country” was a real possibility, he argued, and Trotsky’s insistence on proletarian revolutions abroad betrayed a lack of faith in the party’s and country’s possibilities. Faced with the unity of the other Politburo members, the party’s near-religious devotion to party unity and discipline, and Stalin’s influence among the party apparatus, Trotsky could not win. He was stripped of his military post in 1924 and gradually marginalized in the top leadership.6
The following year, in 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev split off from the “party majority” by launching a critique of NEP from the leftist point of view. They said that the NEP policy of conceding constantly increasing grain prices to the peasantry was depriving the state of capital for industrialization, bankrupting industry, confronting the proletariat with high bread prices, and indefinitely postponing the march to socialism. In 1926 Trotsky joined Zinoviev and Kamenev in the “New” or “United Opposition.” To the Leningrad and Moscow machine votes controlled by Zinoviev and Kamenev, Trotsky brought the remnants of his supporters.
Stalin and Bukharin denounced this United Opposition as another attempt to split the party by challenging the existing policy and violating the centralism part of democratic centralism. Moreover, they defended NEP as the only viable and safe policy. Their arguments seemed far less incendiary than those of the left. Bukharin’s impressive pragmatic and theoretical defense of “Lenin’s” NEP, combined with Stalin’s low-key pragmatic approach, made a formidable combination. The votes from the party secretarial apparatus, loyal to Stalin and not eager to provoke a dangerous turn in party policy, won the day, and the United Opposition went down to defeat in 1927.7
In a final bid for power, followers of Trotsky organized a street demonstration on the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1927 to protest the Central Committee majority and defend the leftists. Stalin and Bukharin used the police to break up this demonstration, characterizing it as an illegal and disloyal blow against the party. It was one thing to disagree with the leadership by voting against it in conferences and congresses, but quite another to take to the streets. Such a move horrified the party majority because it threatened to take the inner-party struggle into the public eye, where real (“White,” “counterrevolutionary”) enemies, disgruntled workers, and discontented “elements” of all kinds could take advantage of the friction in the party to threaten the regime as a whole. Trotsky seemed to be putting his own interests above those of the Bolshevik government, thereby endangering the entire Revolution. As we shall see, any attempt to carry politics outside the confines of the party was the one unpardonable sin. Zinoviev and Kamenev were stripped of their most powerful positions. Trotsky was expelled from the party and exiled to Central Asia. Two years later, in 1929, he was deported from the country.
Bukharin and Stalin were in charge. Bukharin handled theoretical matters and the powerful party press. His associates Tomsky and Rykov ran the trade unions and the government ministries. Stalin, for his part, led the growing party apparatus, aided by a corps of Old Bolshevik lieutenants that included Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, and Sergo Ordzhonikidze. By all accounts, Stalin and Bukharin became close friends in this period. They called each other by familiar nicknames neither of them had used for Trotsky, Zinoviev, or Kamenev, and their arduous but successful struggle against the left certainly was a source of personal bonding. Their families saw each other socially, and Bukharin was a frequent guest in Stalin’s home, sometimes spending entire summer months at Stalin’s country house.8
But their political victory did not mean that the economy of NEP was working satisfactorily. Paying high prices for the peasants’ grain drained the treasury and was not increasing the market for industrial goods by raising peasant buying power. After the industrial base was repaired and returned to the level of 1914, industrial growth was stagnating. Workers faced high food prices and intensification of labor discipline from various “labor rationalizations” designed to increase efficiency. By the late 1920s unemployment had reared its head, threatening the Bolsheviks’ social base of support among the working class. The real and immediate threat, however, and the factor that would change everything, came from agriculture.
Despite what the Bolsheviks considered to be favorable prices, the Russian peasantry was not marketing an adequate quantity of grain to satisfy urban and military needs. The reasons for this were complicated and included poor agricultural technology, bad harvests, and market manipulation by peasants who held back grain to force higher prices. To Stalin in particular, all this smelled of peasant sabotage, and, while never admitting it outright, he doubtless began to wonder whether perhaps the leftists had not been right about the impossibility of allying with the peasants forever.
Beginning in 1927 Stalin sponsored a series of forced grain requisitions across the country. Squads of Bolshevik loyalists fanned out across the countryside, and local party officials were mobilized to force peasants to market their grain reserves at fixed prices. Bukharin was horrified. He was not a blind partisan of the market and had been in favor of a controlled squeezing of the well-to-do peasant (kulak). But Stalin’s “extraordinary measures” went too far, striking at the “middle peasant” as well; such radical and voluntarist campaigns threatened to alienate the peasantry as a whole and destroy the market foundations of NEP. Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky protested in the Politburo.9
Tempers flared, positions hardened, and the gulf between Stalin and Bukharin widened quickly. Neither side would compromise and a break became inevitable. The Stalin faction accused Bukharin and his comrades of forming a pro-peasant “Right Opposition” against the “majority policy” of the Central Committee. In a series of Politburo and Central Committee meetings in 1928 and 1929, Stalin was able to mobilize enough votes to defeat the rightists by portraying the situation as a potentially fatal crisis for the regime. By 1930 Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were stripped of their key positions. But unlike the leftists, the Right Opposition went quietly. They did not take the struggle outside the party corridors and never attempted to mobilize support “outside” in society. Rykov later said that the rightists had been afraid of provoking a civil war.10 Accordingly, their treatment in defeat was much milder. They recanted their “mistakes” in party forums and with good party discipline affirmed their support for Stalin’s line. Although they were removed from the Politburo, they remained on the Central Committee and were not expelled from the party. Those of their followers who refused to recant were expelled, and a few of most recalcitrant were arrested.
Their power now unchallenged, the Stalinists plunged ahead with a truly radical “Second Revolution,” sometimes called the Stalin Revolution. In agriculture, the “extraordinary measures” of 1927–28 became a violent campaign of “dekulakization,” in which hundreds of thousands of peasant families were deprived of their farms and deported to distant regions. By 1930 dekulakization had become the “full collectivization” of agriculture. Private farming and private property were ended, and agricultural production was organized into state-controlled collective farms. The public goal was to end capitalism and bring about the long-awaited socialism. The private goal was to end the economic power of the peasantry and establish control over food production.11
At the same time, the Stalinists abolished capitalism in industry and trade. All production was nationalized, and growth was to be planned without market mechanisms according to “Five-Year Plans” of the national economy. Based on the notions that socialism could be built immediately and that national defense required quick growth, industrialization was to be carried out at a breakneck pace. Production targets were set extremely high, and the country was mobilized for the campaign of development. A new “Soviet technical intelligentsia” was to be created to staff industry. Professional engineers trained under the old regime but still working in industry (“bourgeois specialists”) were pushed aside, removed, and arrested in large numbers to make way for a new generation of rapidly trained and politically loyal Red Engineers. Factory workers were taken from production and sent to school in large numbers to staff this new cadre in a kind of massive affirmative action program for the proletariat.12
The Stalin Revolution was an enthusiastic campaign, not a policy. Scientific industrial “norms” and rational calculations of agricultural potential were cast aside in favor of enthusiastic mobilization. “Bolsheviks can storm any fortresses” became a watchword of the new revolution; speed and quantity rather than accuracy and quality became the criteria for success. Cautious warnings were denounced as sabotage or “capitalist wrecking,” and careful analysis was suspect. No one could stand aside in the great push for modernization and socialism. And few did. The period of the first Five Year Plan (1928–32) was one of exuberance and excitement. Millions of workers went to school and moved into management. Millions of young peasants escaped the villages and flocked to new lives in construction. Young people volunteered in large numbers to work for the common effort, to help with collectivization, and to improve their work qualifications. For the young Nikita Khrushchevs and Leonid Brezhnevs, this was the best of times. It was the period of optimism and dynamism and the era that launched their careers. The enthusiastic upward mobility for plebeians looked very much like the fruition of the Revolution: the workers were taking power and building socialism!
The Bolsheviks believed that they were involved in a life-or-death “class war” against the remaining “capitalist elements” in society. They issued slogans about class warfare and constantly stressed the need to win a quick victory, not only for the sake of socialism but to prevent an expected foreign intervention by capitalist states eager to protect their kulak and capitalist class allies. Party discipline took on an even more military character than before; party “mobilizations” on this or that “front” were always in the air. Even the military tunic of Civil War days came back into fashion for party leaders and militants.
The first Five Year Plan was a resounding success. Production indexes in mining, steel, and chemicals increased severalfold in four years. Factories and mines sprang up everywhere, and the country was proud of the new giant dams, plants, and railroads whose construction contrasted so sharply with the industrial doldrums of the Great Depression in the West. Unemployment disappeared, and although real wages actually fell (another casualty of capital accumulation), education, opportunity, and mobility were available to everyone willing to work. In the lives of the rapidly increasing urban masses, on the factory wall charts of production, and in the rapidly growing network of educational institutions, everything was onward and upward.
But taken on the basis of its effect on the lives of the peasantry, the agricultural part of the Stalin Revolution was an unqualified disaster, provoking one of the greatest human tragedies of modern times. Wild radical collectivizers descended on the villages, closing churches and attacking priests and other traditional village leaders. Grain was seized without any regard for peasants’ need for food and seed. Any resistance was attributed to “kulak sabotage” and was punished with deportation to Siberia, arrest, or execution. Many peasants were unable to plant because the seed had been taken; others, in protest, refused to plant. Rather than give up their animals to the new collective farms, peasants slaughtered horses, cows, pigs, and sheep in huge numbers. When the meat was gone, the peasants starved. Soviet meat production would not recover for decades. The loss of animal traction power and the regime’s inability to provide tractors in adequate numbers paralyzed agriculture. The regime’s inability or unwillingness to calculate rational targets for planting and harvesting combined with chaos in the countryside and bad weather to produce mass starvation. Millions died from hunger, disease, or the terrible conditions of remote exile.
By and large, party militants had responded loyally to the Stalinist “socialist offensive” of 1929–34. Believing that they were fighting the final battle for the communist millennium, masses of party members responded enthusiastically to the leadership’s calls for rapid collectivization and escalating industrial production targets. In some cases, local militants’ zeal outstripped the plans of the center, and Moscow often had to rein in excessive “dekulakizations,” forcible collectivization, and ultraleftist zeal in persecuting religion. At other times, local party officials and activists balked at the grain requisitions and more extreme forms of dekulakization and collectivization. Most of the time, though, the hard-line activities of party collectivizers on the ground were a reflection of the extreme policies of the Stalin leadership. The result was a disastrous famine and social violence and persecution on an unimaginable scale.
As we have noted, the Right Opposition of N. I. Bukharin, M. P. Tomsky, and A. I. Rykov had bucked the leftist course of collectivization back in 1928. But it had been defeated by 1929, and its leaders had recanted their mistakes in order to remain in the party. These mandatory recantations were designed not only to show a united face to the world but also to “disarm” the lower-level followers of the leading oppositionists. Former dissident leaders were required to show their agreement with the Stalinist party line in order to demonstrate to their former adherents that resistance was wrong. One scholar has aptly described such public apologies as a ritual payment of “symbolic taxes” or “symbolic capital”: public display of acceptance of error in order to reaffirm the status quo.13
The former dissidents were further expected to work loyally and diligently to fulfill that line and to combat the party’s enemies. This was the essence of party discipline, as the Bolsheviks understood it. The following document is one of N. I. Bukharin’s recantations. In 1930, however, such rituals did not have the solemnity that they would take on later. Oppositionists could still recant in a virtual colloquy with the Stalinist audience; Bukharin’s text contained puns, and his reference to executing dissidents drew laughter.
BUKHARIN: The Party leadership had to crush [razgromit’] the most dangerous rightist deviation within our Party.
VOROSHILOV: And those infected with it.
BUKHARIN: If you are talking about their physical destruction [razgrom], I leave it to those comrades who are, to one degree or another, given to blood-thirstiness. (Laughter) … I feel compelled to show my wit by recalling a certain ditty [chastushka], which was published in its time in the now defunct Russian Gazette [Russkie Vedomosti]: “They may beat me, they may beat me senseless, they may beat me to a pulp, but nobody is gonna kill this kid, not with a stick, a bat or a stone.” (Laughter breaks out throughout the room). I cannot say, however, that “nobody is gonna kill me.”
KAGANOVICH: Who, may I ask, is the kid here and who the person wielding a stone?
BUKHARIN: Oh, how witty you are! Obviously, it was I who was struck and beaten with a stone. And now not a single member of the Plenum—I dare say—thinks that I am concealing some sort of a “stone” of resentment, not even the stone-faced Kamenev.14
In his speech, Bukharin, addressing the ruling Stalinist group, observed that “all power and authority are in your hands.” Shkiriatov and Molotov chided him for this breach of party etiquette: Bukharin’s remark contradicted the party unity he was preaching and suggested a hierarchy within the nomenklatura leadership, the very situation his recantation and profession of support was supposed to end, or at least hide. Even though such passages were not released publicly, it was necessary for the elite to maintain a unified rhetorical affirmation of power and solidarity to and for themselves. As James Scott has noted, such apologetic transcripts and rituals were meant not only for subordinates. They served to affirm unanimity within and for the elite itself, because “the audience for such displays is not only subordinates; elites are also consumers of their own performance.”15
Despite the generally light tone of Bukharin’s confession, Kaganovich had pointedly interrupted him with the demand that the oppositionists must not only recognize their mistakes but must sincerely convince others among their former followers. This was the real purpose of recantation. V. V. Kuibyshev, speaking for the Stalinist majority, laid down this law in no uncertain terms in a December 1930 speech: “It is absolutely clear that at such a time it should be demanded of a leader of the Party or Soviet state, first and foremost, that he lead the battle for the general line, that he take his place in the front ranks of this campaign. It is not enough that he should say that he ‘is doing the best he can.’”16
Kuibyshev’s terms were tough. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Stalin’s lieutenants took a more aggressive stance toward the opposition than he did. One month before Bukharin and Kuibyshev spoke, a Politburo meeting had considered punishments for two high-ranking Central Committee members (Syrtsov and Lominadze) who had taken a “right-opportunist” line against the excesses of collectivization. In the Politburo, Stalin proposed demoting them to the status of candidate members of the Central Committee. The majority, however, “strongly” disagreed and voted to expel them from the CC.17
By 1932 there was no formal organized opposition faction in the party’s highest leadership. The vast majority of the leading leftist and rightist oppositionists had recanted. Although it seems that the majority of the party, both in the leadership and the rank and file, dutifully implemented the Stalin Revolution, the chaos of 1932 produced doubts, grumbling, and eventually outright opposition among some veteran Old Bolsheviks. And below the very top level, among the second- and third-rank oppositionists, resistance to Stalin’s policies was still strong; in 1932 it began to coalesce. We can document three such groups: the Riutin group, a reactivated Trotskyist organization, and the Eismont-Tolmachev-Smirnov group.
M. N. Riutin had been a district party secretary in the Moscow party organization in the 1920s and had supported Bukharin’s challenge to Stalin’s policy of collectivization. But unlike Bukharin and the other senior rightist leaders, he had refused to recant and to formally support Stalin’s course. As a result, he had been stripped of his party offices and expelled from the party in 1930 “for propagandizing right-opportunist views.”18Riutin remained in contact with fellow opponents inside the party, and in March of 1932 a secret meeting of his group produced two documents. One of these was a seven-page typewritten appeal “To All Members of the VKP(b),” which gave an abbreviated critique of Stalin and his policies and called on all party members to oppose them in any ways they could.19 At the bottom of the appeal from the “All Union Conference ‘Union of Marxist-Leninists’” was the request to read the document, copy it, and pass it along to others.
By far the most important document drafted at the March 1932 meeting was the so-called Riutin Platform, formally entitled “Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship.” This manifesto of the Union of Marxist-Leninists was a multifaceted, direct, and trenchant critique of virtually all of Stalin’s policies, his methods of rule, and his personality. The Riutin Platform, drafted in March, was discussed and rewritten over the next few months. At an underground meeting of Riutin’s group in a village in the Moscow suburbs on 21 August 1932, the document was finalized by an editorial committee of the Union. (Riutin, at his own request, was not formally a member of the committee because at that time he was not a party member.)20 At a subsequent meeting, the leaders decided to circulate the platform secretly from hand to hand and by mail. Numerous copies were made and circulated in Moscow, Kharkov, and other cities.
It is not clear how widely the Riutin Platform was spread, nor do we know how many party members actually read it or even heard of it. The evidence we do have, however, suggests that the Stalin regime reacted to it in fear and panic. The document’s call to “destroy Stalin’s dictatorship” was taken as a call for armed revolt.
One of the contacts receiving the platform turned it over to the secret police. Arrests of Union members began as early as September 1932. The entire editorial board, plus Riutin, was arrested in the fall of 1932; all were expelled from the party and sentenced to prison for membership in a “counterrevolutionary organization.” Riutin himself was sentenced to ten years in prison. There is a persistent myth that Stalin unsuccessfully demanded the death penalty for those connected with the Riutin Platform but was blocked by a majority of the Politburo.21 At any rate, by early 1937 all the central figures in the Riutin opposition group had been shot for treason.
At the end of 1932 many of the former leaders of opposition movements, including G. E. Zinoviev, L. B. Kamenev, Karl Radek, and others, were summoned to party disciplinary bodies and interrogated about their possible connection to the group; some were expelled anew from the party simply for knowing of the existence of the Riutin Platform, whether they had read it or not. Indeed, in coming years having read the platform, or even knowing about it and not reporting that knowledge to the party, would be considered a crime. In virtually all inquisitions of former oppositionists from 1934 to 1939, this “terrorist document” would be used as evidence connecting Stalin’s opponents to various treasonable conspiracies. By providing a cohesive alternative discourse around which rank-and-file party members might unite against the elite, the platform threatened nomenklatura control:
To place the name of Stalin alongside the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin means to mock at Marx, Engels and Lenin. It means to mock at the proletariat. It means to lose all shame, to overstep all bounds of baseness. To place the name of Lenin alongside the name of Stalin is like placing Mt. Elbrus alongside a heap of dung. To place the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin alongside the “works” of Stalin is like placing the music of such great composers as Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner and others alongside the music of a street organgrinder….
Lenin was a leader [vozhd’] but not a dictator. Stalin, on the contrary, is a dictator but not a leader….
The entire top leadership of the Party leadership, beginning with Stalin and ending with the secretaries of the provincial committees are, on the whole, fully aware that they are breaking with Leninism, that they are perpetrating violence against both the Party and non-Party masses, that they are killing the cause of socialism. However, they have become so tangled up, have brought about such a situation, have reached such a dead-end, such a vicious circle, that they themselves are incapable of breaking out of it.
The mistakes of Stalin and his clique have turned into crimes….
In the struggle to destroy Stalin’s dictatorship, we must in the main rely not on the old leaders but on new forces. These forces exist, these forces will quickly grow. New leaders will inevitably arise, new organizers of the masses, new authorities.
A struggle gives birth to leaders and heroes.
We must begin to take action.22
To those who defended the monopoly version of political reality, this text inspired fear and anger. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Riutin Platform began the process that would lead to terror, precisely by terrifying the ruling nomenklatura. Why did this document provoke such fury in the highest levels of the party leadership? First of all, it was a text, and to those who took such pains to produce political documents, the appearance of an actual alternative written text carried special significance. So anxious was the regime to bury the Riutin Platform that it has proved impossible to find an original copy in any Russian archive. (The surviving text is taken from a typescript copy made by the secret police in 1932.) Indeed, it seems that the words themselves were considered dangerous. Reaction to them recalls Foucault’s description of the speech of a “medieval madman” whose utterances were beyond the limits of accepted speech but at the same time had a power, a prescience, and a kind of magic revealing a hidden and dangerous truth.23 Similarly, Trotsky’s writings in exile were sharply proscribed but were carefully read by Stalinist leaders in the 1930s.24 To the Stalinists, the words of Riutin and Trotsky seem to have had a special kind of threatening quality, and the reaction of the elite to them seems to reflect a fear of the language itself.
Second, the Riutin Platform subjected the Stalin leadership to a sustained and withering criticism for its agricultural, industrial, and innerparty policies that remained the most damning indictment of Stalinism from inside the Soviet Union until the Gorbachev period. Even Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” was neither as comprehensive nor as negative in its assessment of Stalin. The language was bitter, combative, and insulting to anyone in the party leadership.
Third, the Riutin Platform could not have come at a more dangerous time for the party leadership. The industrialization drive of the first Five Year Plan had not brought economic stability, and although growth was impressive, so were the chaos and upheaval caused by mass urbanization, clogged transport, and falling real wages. The situation in the countryside was even more threatening. Collectivization and peasant resistance to it had led to the famine of 1932; eventually millions of “unnatural deaths” from starvation and repression would be recorded. Faced with this disaster, the Stalinist leadership held its cruel course and refused to abandon its forced collectivization of agriculture. On lower levels of the party, however, many in the field charged with implementation began to waver. Reluctant to consign local populations to mass death, many local party officials refused to push relentlessly forward and actually argued with the center about the high grain collection targets. The country and its ruling apparatus were falling apart. In such conditions, any dissident group emerging from within the besieged party was bound to provoke fear, panic, and anger from a leadership that worshiped party unity and discipline.
Finally, and politically most important, the platform threatened to carry the party leadership struggle outside the bounds of the ruling elite, the nomenklatura. The leftist opposition of the mid-1920s had attempted to do this as well by organizing public demonstrations and by agitating the rank and file of the party. The response of the leadership at that time— which included not only the Stalinists but also the moderate Bukharinists and indeed the vast majority of the party elite—had been swift and severe: expulsion from the party and even arrest. Although leaders might fight among themselves behind closed doors, any attempt to carry the struggle to the party rank and file or to the public could not be tolerated. Such a struggle not only would open the door to a split in the party between left and right but would raise the possibility of an even more dangerous rift between top and bottom within the party. Such a danger was particularly acute in 1932, with the reluctance of some local party members to press collectivization as hard as Moscow demanded. Such a split would almost certainly destroy the Leninist generation, which saw itself as the bearers of communist ideology and as the vanguard of the less politically conscious working class and the mass of untutored new party members inducted since the Civil War. But the idea of Leninism was not the only thing at stake. Isolated as they were in the midst of a sullen peasant majority—relatively few communists in a sea of peasants who wanted nothing more than private property—the Bolsheviks realized that only military discipline and party unity could keep them in power, especially during a crisis in which their survival was threatened. The nomenklatura was therefore personally threatened by opposition movements that sought to set the rank and file against the leadership. Back in the 1920s the Trotskyist opposition had taken the argument outside the party leadership and literally to the streets; Trotskyists had organized a public demonstration against the party leadership. After this dangerous experience, the elite at all levels understood the dangers posed by a politicization of the masses on terms other than those prescribed by the elite.
It was this understanding of group solidarity that had prevented the rightist (Bukharinist) opposition from lobbying outside the ruling stratum. The risks were too high, especially in an unstable social and political situation where the party did not command the loyalty of a majority of the country’s population. Accordingly, the sanctions taken against the defeated rightists were much lighter than those earlier inflicted on the Trotskyists. Although some of the rightists were expelled from the party, and its leaders lost their highest positions, Bukharin and his fellow leaders remained members of the Central Committee. They had, after all, played according to the terms of the unwritten gentleman’s agreement not to carry the struggle outside the nomenklatura.
Although the Riutin Platform is notable for its assault on Stalin personally, it was also attacking the ruling group in the party and the stratified nomenklatura establishment that had taken shape since the 1920s. That elite regarded the platform as a call for revolution from within the party. After the Riutin incident, the ruling stratum reacted more and more sharply to any criticism of Stalin, not because they feared him—although events would show that they should have—but because they needed him to stay in power. In this sense, Stalin’s interests and those of the nomenklatura coincided.
Although the Riutin Platform originated in the right wing of the Bolshevik party, its specific criticisms of the Stalinist regime were in the early 1930s shared by the more leftist Lev Trotsky, who also had sought to organize political opposition “from below.” Trotsky had been expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1927 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Since that time, he had lived in several exile locations, writing prolifically for his Bulletin of the Opposition. Like the Riutin group, Trotsky believed that the Soviet Union in 1932 was in a period of extreme crisis provoked by Stalin’s policies. Like them, he believed that the rapid pace of forced collectivization was a disaster and that the hurried and voluntarist nature of industrial policy made rational planning impossible, resulting in a disastrous series of economic “imbalances.” Along with the Riutinists, Trotsky called for a drastic change in economic course and democratization of the dictatorial regime within a party that suppressed all dissent. According to Trotsky, Stalin had brought the country to ruin.25
At the same time the Riutin group was forging its programmatic documents, Trotsky was attempting to activate his followers in the Soviet Union. Most of the leaders of the Trotskyist opposition had capitulated to Stalin in 1929–31, as Stalin’s sharp leftist change of course seemed to them consistent with the main elements of the Trotsky critique in the 1920s. Trotsky himself, however, along with a small group of “irreconcilables,” had refused to accept Stalin’s leftist change of course and remained in opposition.
Sometime in 1932 Trotsky sent a series of secret personal letters to his former followers Karl Radek, G. I. Sokolnikov, and E. Preobrazhensky and others in the Soviet Union.26 And at about the same time, he sent a letter to his oppositionist colleagues in the Soviet Union by way of an English traveler: “I am not sure that you know my handwriting. If not, you will probably find someone else who does…. The comrades who sympathize with the Left Opposition are obliged to come out of their passive state at this time, maintaining, of course, all precautions….I am certain that the menacing situation in which the Party finds itself will force all the comrades devoted to the revolution to gather actively about the Left Opposition.”27
More concretely, in late 1932 Trotsky was actively trying to forge a new opposition coalition in which former oppositionists from both left and right would participate. From Berlin, Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov maintained contact with the veteran Trotskyist I. N. Smirnov in the Soviet Union. In 1932 Trotsky accepted Smirnov’s proposal of a united oppositional bloc that would include both leftist and rightist groups in the USSR. Trotsky favored an active group: “One struggles against repression by anonymity and conspiracy, not by silence.”28 Shortly thereafter, Smirnov relayed word to Sedov that the bloc had been organized; Sedov wrote to his father, “It embraces the Zinovievists, the Sten-Lominadze group, and the Trotskyists (old ‘ _____ ’).”29 Trotsky promptly announced in his newspaper
that the first steps had been taken toward formation of an illegal organization of “Bolshevik-Leninists.”30
Back in the Soviet Union, the authorities smashed Trotsky’s bloc before it got off the ground. In connection with their roundup of suspected participants in the Riutin group, nearly all the leaders of the new bloc were pulled in for questioning. Many of them were expelled from the party and sentenced to prison or exile. Sedov wrote to his father that although “the arrest of the ‘ancients’ is a great blow, the lower workers are safe.”31
As with the Riutin episode, it was these “lower workers” that troubled the leadership the most, and Trotsky no doubt knew this. A few months later Trotsky wrote a letter to the Politburo. Trotsky pointed out that he had tried to make the Stalinist leadership see the error of its ways and invite him back into the fold. This having failed, he offered Stalin one last chance to make peace and to integrate the Trotskyists back into the ruling elite. Speaking as one nomenklatura member to another, he issued the ultimate threat: if the Stalinists refused to deal with him, he would feel free to agitate for his views among rank-and-file party members.32 As with the Riutinists, Trotsky’s new initiatives promised to take the political struggle outside the elite and thereby strike at the heart of the nomenklatura.
The Stalinist leadership was well informed about the dissident and “conspiratorial” activities of the Riutin and Trotsky groups. It was in possession of the Riutin Platform weeks after it was written and managed to neutralize the group in short order. We also know that senior leaders in Moscow read Trotsky’s Biulleten’ oppozitsii and were aware of I. N. Smirnov’s secret communications with Trotsky. Two years later, when N. I. Yezhov had become head of the NKVD, he disclosed that the secret police had been aware at the time of Smirnov’s 1932 connections with Trotsky through Sedov.33 But what about the “lower workers,” as Sedov had called them? As the preceding documents show, both Riutin and Trotsky had practically given up on the well-known leaders of the oppositions of the 1920s and had pinned their hopes on rank-and-file members to carry the banner against Stalin.
From the point of view of the elite, the climate “out there” gave little cause for optimism. Secret police reports on the mood of the population in the larger cities showed that many common folk thought of themselves as “us” and the regime as “them.”34 Popular poems, songs, and ditties (chastushki) expressed hostility to the regime:
Stalin stands on a coffin
Gnawing meat from a cat’s bones.
Well, Soviet cows
Are such disgusting creatures.
How the collective farm village
Has become prosperous.
There used to be 33 farmsteads
And now there are five.
We fulfilled the Five Year Plan
And are eating well.
We ate all the horses
And are now chasing the dogs.
Ukraine!
Breadbasket!
She sold bread to the Germans
And is now herself hungry.
O commune, O commune,
You commune of Satan.
You seized everything
All in the Soviet cause.35
We know very little about actual lower-level dissidence. The archives contain only sporadic evidence of such activity. We know, for example, that underground Trotskyists in the Bauman district of Moscow (the “Moscow Group of Bolshevik-Leninists”) published a newsletter called “Against the Current” in 1931.36 We also have ambiguous evidence of the existence of other underground groups.37
It is possible that the organizations in question were simply inventions of zealous police investigators who rounded up some marginal people and beat false confessions out of them. As an institution, the secret police had a vested interest in periodically producing “conspiracies” to justify their position and funding. Similarly, hard-liners within the party at various levels, anxious to show the need for repression, also had an interest in magnifying the importance of such “organizations,” which could be portrayed as a real threat to the nomenklatura elite. Nevertheless, given the chaos and hardship that Stalin’s policies provoked in the country at the time, it would be surprising if such groups were a complete figment of the police imagination.
It is clear that the Stalin regime was not very popular among certain segments of the political public, and it knew it.38 Among “Old Bolsheviks” of both left and right, rank-and-file party members, and students there was anti-Stalin grumbling. And outside the politically articulate strata, the regime was still waging virtual civil war with the majority of the peasantry. There can be no doubt that the regime was worried about the discontent and the implications for its continued rule. The very fact that the highest leadership would solicit and circulate reports on clumsy groups of students (whose “platform” could not even be produced and whose criticisms had already been voiced and acknowledged semipublicly) is in itself symptomatic of the nomenklatura’s malaise.
Still, from the point of view of internal party self-representation, it was possible for Stalinist Bolsheviks to rationalize this opposition and reconcile it with their Leninist self-image. Thus the Trotskyist and rightist oppositions had long been categorized not as deviant tendencies within Bolshevism but as representatives of hostile class and political forces, usually the kulaks or White Guards. Their proposals to remove Stalin and change the party leadership could thus be branded as un-Leninist and outside the pale of the Lenin-Stalin orthodoxy that was the ideological pillar of the regime.
It was more difficult to rationalize the massive discontent, resistance, and famine among the peasantry in terms of orthodoxy and regime legitimacy. Of course, the enemy class attribute was always available: acts of resistance were attributed to kulaks—“bourgeois” peasant ringleaders—or to their “influence,” just as “Trotskyist” would become an attributive category later for any form of political deviation. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, the regime maintained (and perhaps even believed) that the middle and poorer peasants were on their side. This public position allowed the Bolsheviks to claim that a majority of the country was behind them. Even within the party’s secret counsels, their “hidden transcript” was the same as their public one. Mechanisms and explanations were found to rationalize peasant resistance and even a widespread famine that the Bolsheviks were anxious to hide and to deny even to themselves. The mental gymnastics of rationalization—not only in public propaganda but also in the top secret documents of the regime—made it possible to avoid questioning the basic policy both out loud and even to oneself. All the problems were the result of conspiracies or incompetent local officials. Even hunger was a kulak conspiracy.39
A regime that feels it necessary to arrest groups of marginal students in small towns or that panics about a dissident program that was narrowly circulated and never published is not a confident one. This government and its leaders were afraid of their own shadows and of anything that might challenge their political monopoly and privilege. As former revolutionaries who had used propaganda to come to power, they feared the printed word. The attentive efforts and technical workings of Bolshevik censors to control the production of texts have been well documented.40What has been perhaps less well known is the extent to which the top leadership was preoccupied with such questions. Typewritten pamphlets by student groups attracted the attention of the Politburo and found their way into its files.41 The Politburo reviewed individual books and decided on their removal from libraries. Lists of such books were prepared as official orders of the Politburo.42
At the same time, though, leaders’ fear was not accompanied by self-doubt about policies or means. What alternatives did the Bolsheviks have for interpreting and understanding the situation in the country? One way—perhaps the most rational way—to grasp the situation would have been in terms of mistaken policies. It is obvious to us today that collectivization and breakneck industrialization were ill advised and reckless. Of course, this interpretation of events was not available to the general population or even to most layers of the party-state administration; articulation of this view brought instant repression. But in a different way it was also impossible for leading Bolsheviks within the Stalinist faction to accept that their policies were wrong. Everything in their background and intellectual baggage told them that there was a “correct” solution to every situation and that they had in Stalin’s General Line found the correct solution to Russia’s backwardness, to class oppression, and to the problems of capitalism. Their nineteenth-century rationalist faith in scientific solutions to human problems, combined with their facile understanding of Marx’s stages of historical development, told them that they were on the right track. Their victory in 1917 and dramatic rise to power seemed to validate them and their place as midwives of history. Aside from the desire to protect their privileged position, they really believed in socialism and their own key importance in realizing it. It was genuinely impossible to imagine that their policies were wrong. Nevertheless, their conviction was no doubt strengthened consciously or subconsciously by the recognition that their personal positions and collective fortunes were tied to those policies.
So when things went wrong, when disasters occurred, it was necessary for them to find answers and solutions that avoided self-questioning. The most available explanation for problems, and one with resonance in Russian culture, was that conspiratorial “dark forces” were at work to sabotage the effort. If the policies were correct and if they were being implemented by the right people, there could be no other explanation. Schooled in the brutal Civil War of 1918–21, when there were real conspiracies, Stalinist leaders and followers found it easy to believe that enemies of various kinds were responsible for every problem. Of course, for the top leaders, there was a convenient element of scapegoating in blaming everything on “alien enemy forces.” At the same time, reading the transcripts of closed party meetings, Central Committee sessions, and even personal letters among the senior leaders gives the strong impression that it was more than scapegoating. To a significant extent, even Politburo members seemed to have genuinely believed in the existence of myriad conspiracies and considered them real threats to the regime.
The regime’s fear of everything from elite platforms to gossiping students was conditioned by a silent recognition that its control was in fact weakly based in the country. The leaders’ recourse to spasmodic mass violence in place of ordered administration would be another proof of weakness disguised by brute force. This fragility was combined with a fanatical lack of self-doubt, a belief in conspiracies, a traditional Russian intolerance of opposition, and a conditioned recourse to violence to produce the Stalinist mentality.
The Stalinist leadership in the coming years would refer repeatedly to the “new situation” that began in 1932. In the repression of 1936–39, many party leaders would be accused of involvement in the “Riutin affair.” This was a key accusation against Bukharin in 1937, and even his last letter to Stalin from prison dealt with the charge. Yezhov, the head of the secret police, would frequently refer to the Riutin Platform and the Trotskyists’ 1932 activities as evidence of a massive plot against the government. The fear that such “plots” could set the party membership and the population against the regime would haunt the nomenklatura for years after the plots themselves had been smashed.
To insure themselves against the perceived threat of party splits based on either ideology or status conflict, the party’s leading stratum began in 1932 a series of measures to protect their monopoly on power. These measures included stiffening party discipline in the nomenklatura itself, screening the party’s membership for “dubious elements” of all kinds, strengthening the repressive apparatus (both police and party organizations), reforming the judiciary in various ways, tightening ideological and cultural conformity, redefining the “enemy” in broader and broader ways, and eventually blind, mass terror. These are the subjects of the chapters that follow.
These measures often evolved in a series of contradictory oscillations, moves and countermoves, rather than in a straight-line trend toward a particular goal. At the same time, however, the twisting road to terror was paved by an amazing group consensus within the nomenklatura, bordering on paranoia, about the need to tighten controls and generally to “circle the wagons” against a variety of real and imagined threats from the peasantry, the former opposition, rank-and-file members, and even their own ranks.