CHAPTER 15

Internalization of the Russian Revolution: Terror in One Country

STALIN, LIKE NAPOLEON, should not benefit from comparison with Hitler. The rule of Stalin was an uneven and unstable amalgam of monumental achievements and monstrous crimes. There is, of course, an angle of vision which completely shuts out the former for fear that to take note of anything positive about Stalin is to extenuate his unpardonable sins and mistakes. But for a historian of my background and generation it is difficult, if not impossible, to take such a narrow field of view and equate Stalin with Hitler, to see them as identical twins. Historians are themselves “products of their society and their period,” very much like historical actors.¹ Soviet Russia’s unequaled and uncontested contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany was closely bound up with Stalin’s willful Second Revolution, starting with the Great Turn of the late 1920s. This judgment is all the more compelling inasmuch as in the 1930s the diplomacy of Moscow toward the Third Reich was neither more cynical nor more shortsighted than that of London, Paris, and Warsaw. Besides, in the 1930s, and again after 1945, the policies of the great powers furthered the consolidation and hardening of Stalin’s power.

The moral deadness of Stalin is self-evident, and so is his psychological iciness, even if it remains unfathomable. Nevertheless, by now the ritualized demonization of Stalin—unscrupulous, deceitful, secretive, cruel, paranoid, tyrannical—hinders rather than advances the critical study and understanding of the Soviet regime during his close to thirty-year rule. Evidently Stalin—not unlike Napoleon and Hitler—simultaneously shaped and exploited the forces which carried him to power: he was “at once a product and an agent of the historical process, at once the representative and the creator of social forces which change the shape of the world and the thoughts of men.”2

Eastern Europe, 1939 to 1948

Stalin was the heir and executor of the Russian Revolution. Although in this regard he was very like Napoleon, in another he was radically dissimilar: whereas Napoleon turned the French Revolution outward to spread it far and wide by force of arms, Stalin virtually turned the Russian Revolution inward, to build Socialism in One Country. Both rulers suffered from an acute deficit of legitimacy: Napoleon bolstered his authority by fighting triumphant military campaigns abroad; Stalin sustained his by winning the battle to self-strengthen Russia through willful industrialization and collectivization. This internalization of the Revolution was dictated by the utter backwardness of the Soviet Union relative to the other great powers, which were hostile. Ironically, although Stalin’s project was not Bonapartist, he eventually secured his and his regime’s legitimacy by reason of the Red Army’s spectacular victory over the German Wehrmacht.

Stalin is inseparable from the dual context which conditioned his rise and ascendancy: Russia’s protracted time of troubles following seven years of grueling foreign and civil war; and the peril of renewed general war growing out of the spiraling instability in the surrounding world. During the epoch of the French Revolution the post-Thermidorean governments faced nothing remotely approaching this dual imperilment. To be sure, judging by its frequent and unpeaceful “regime changes,” France’s constitutional system was unsteady. But after mid-1791 France was not a polity, society, and culture in random and consuming chaos, nor was its great-power status ever seriously endangered.

By contrast, during the interwar years the leaders of the Soviet party-state understood that they were condemned to solidify Russia’s new foundation in an unfavorable international environment, especially once they realized that in central and east-central Europe the end-of-war crisis of 1918–19 would not turn to revolution. At the start of the New Economic Policy internal conditions were catastrophic. Since 1914 the country is estimated, as noted, to have suffered well over 10 million military and civilian deaths. This demographic and psychological hemorrhage was compounded by the rush to emigration of a substantial part of Russia’s educated elite and by the collapse of the state apparatus. In addition, both the economy and exchequer were wasted. The railway system was run down, the production of vital raw materials, especially of coal, was at an all-time low, and industrial production was a mere 20 percent of its prewar level. With hunger and unemployment stalking many cities and towns, the anomalous flight of workers back to the countryside continued.

This return of factory hands to their villages and hamlets, along with millions of demobilized soldiers, furthered the reagrarianization of Russia, set in motion by the land settlement of 1917–18. Although this reform had appeased and neutralized the peasantry, it had done so at the price of falling agricultural output. Overwhelmed by homecoming soldiers and homebound workers, and incensed by forced requisitions of grain and food, peasants tended to withdraw into subsistence farming, turning their back on domestic and international markets.

In essential respects Russia’s civil society was even more “pre-capitalist” and less ripe for socialism at the start of NEP than in 1914 or 1917. The Bolsheviks were weighed down by this massive burden of backwardness when they turned to restoring the economy to its prewar level, a precondition for building a new order. To the extent that the new men of power shared a consensus, it was the conviction that there was no alternative to a fast-paced economic modernization entailing a rapid and massive rollback of the refractory countryside.

The Bolsheviks were in a weak position to take on this Herculean task. Theirs was a minority party without a substantial popular mandate or solid social base. Although the Communist Party built up a basic institutional network across the land, it was not up to filling the vacuum left by the extinction of state and local government. Admittedly, the Soviet authorities could rely on the Red Army and the Cheka, though both were radically curtailed after the civil war. Still, with at best limited support or sympathetic understanding among the peasantry, the Bolsheviks continued to be strangers in their own land. They had difficulties inventing a substitute for the Orthodox Church and religion which had cemented the hegemony of yesterday’s tsars and governing class. Nor could the Bolsheviks unfurl the national flag: besides running counter to their worldview and precepts, such a stratagem would have been out of season in a country that was in neither mood nor condition to hearken to a levée en masse for diversionary war. This assessment was validated by the war with Poland in 1920, which confirmed that in the short run the Revolution could not reach beyond Russia’s truncated western borders, especially with the great powers on the watch.

Lenin intended NEP to repair the damage of foreign and civil war as well as to reduce Russia’s crying backwardness. Not that he and his supporters, including Stalin, framed and followed a grand design. Like War Communism, NEP was an improvisation, though much less focused: it lacked not only the equivalent of the military imperative, which had driven the war economy, but also the basic elements of planning. Just as in early 1918, to secure their survival, the Bolsheviks had beaten a strategic diplomatic retreat at Brest-Litovsk, so now, with the shattered economy taking another turn for the worse in the fall and winter of 1920–21, they opted for a strategic economic retreat, or a “peasant Brest.”3 Indeed, Lenin concluded that there was no saving the revolution of the workers without, once again, placating the peasants. He and his associates appreciated that even with the streamlining of agriculture it would take several generations to transform rural Russia’s fixed mentalities and customs. In the meanwhile, however, the emergency dictated trying to win over the indomitable community-rooted smallholders by relaxing state controls and offering material incentives. Above all, the free market now replaced mandatory quotas, levies, and prices. NEP was premised on the idea that the steady procurement of food for the cities and grain for export was the master key to economic reconstruction and modernization. To make small-scale farming the locomotive of economic recovery meant encouraging petty retailing and light manufacture, largely to meet the widespread hunger for consumer goods, also among the urban lower middle class and the professional and technical cadres, who were in short supply. All in all, NEP marked a turn toward a mixed economy in which the state retained ownership and centralized control of large-scale industry, mining, and banking. But by virtue of the continuing predominance of agriculture, this modern sector was not the “commanding” but the “beleaguered” heights of the Russian economy.

By 1926 leading sectors of the economy were approaching their prewar levels. Although impressive in its own right, this recovery was contested and frail: in the countryside nepmen, or hard-driving businessmen, became a focus of jealous suspicion; in the industrial and mining centers workers chafed at their declining living standard. But above all, the economic backwardness of before 1914 persisted. Be that as it may, in a transnational perspective NEP was Soviet Russia’s counterpart of the capitalist world’s fragile Indian summer of peace, prosperity, and political tranquillity. Whereas before long in Russia a severe contraction of grain production and supplies, complicated by a war scare, would precipitate the termination of the improvised NEP, abroad an unprecedented stock market crash would undermine the makeshift edifice of the Dawes Plan, Locarno Pact, and Weimar Republic. At first essentially unrelated, these two breakdowns were destined to fatally bear on each other.

From the outset Stalin belonged to the innermost circle of revolutionary Russia’s governors. He alone was a member of each of the “small overlapping groups of high officials [of party and state who] made the most important and wide-reaching decisions.”4 In the time that Lenin was primus inter pares, Stalin headed three People’s Commissariats, belonged to the Politburo and Orgburo, served as political commissar with the Red Army during the civil war, and sat on several major task forces. In 1922, when the Eleventh Party Congress elected him member of the party secretariat with the prosaic title “general secretary,” his appointment was widely considered “trivial,” most likely by Stalin as well.⁵

With Lenin’s health failing as of mid-1922, as may be expected, the struggle for succession started behind the scenes, before his death on January 21, 1924. At first Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin pulled together to block Trotsky, perhaps Lenin’s most ambitious would-be heir. While his three rivals suspected him of Bonapartist pretensions, Trotsky, in turn, distrusted them for their uncritical support of NEP, which he considered excessively Thermidorean or unrevolutionary. This unexceptional political in-fighting had a potentially explosive subtext: dissonant appreciations of the correlation of agrarian and industrial policy. Although both Stalin and Trotsky were “industrializers without any special tenderness for the peasantry, in the mid-1920s Stalin’s public stance was more moderate than Trotsky’s.”⁶ Eventually Trotsky lost this first round, with the other three members of the Politburo—Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky—siding with Stalin. Before long the latter turned against Kamenev and Zinoviev, who now joined Trotsky in a short-lived “United Opposition.” Having tightened his hold on the party, by 1926 Stalin felt strong enough to force the removal of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky from the Politburo in favor of his own associates, among them Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kalinin.

By this time there was a growing internal debate about the prospects of NEP achieving not merely economic recovery but comprehensive industrialization. This debate was nourished by the emergence of the idea of planning in several government bureaus, particularly in Gosplan. Strange to say, this idea, including the guidelines for translating it into action, owed more to advances in macroeconomics and to recent wartime planning in Germany than to the theoretical and ideological writings of Marx and his epigones. In any case, the concept of economic planning clashed with that of a market-driven mixed economy. So did the concurrent appointment of Dzerzhinsky to also be chairman of the Supreme Economic Council: he was charged with “molding it into a powerful ministry of industry which, like its tsarist predecessors, would focus largely on the development of the metallurgical, metalworking, and machine-building industries”7—only now this agency would operate within the parameters of Socialism in One Country.

As previously noted, the miscarriage of revolution in Central Europe and Russia’s ensuing isolation left a deep scar on the Bolshevik psyche. In the mid-1920s, when adumbrating the notion of building Socialism in One Country, Stalin merely articulated an idea that had for some time been circulating in inner party circles. Besides, beginning with War Communism the Bolshevik leaders practiced national self-reliance less by choice than necessity, owing to the well-nigh quarantine by the outside world. Of course, the end-purpose of the incipient idée-force of Socialism in One Country was at once intelligible and indeterminate. But at the time the only rival idée-force was equally general: the precept of “Permanent Revolution,” espoused by Trotsky and his associates, which postulated that socialism could not triumph in a single country, particularly not in one as backward as Russia, without a simultaneous breakthrough to socialism in other countries, or without an all-European revolution. Of the two formulas, which un-wittingly emerged in radical antithesis, Stalin’s appeared more down-to-earth and practicable as the discussion of planning reached its season. During the time that they debated the link or passage between a revised NEP and embryonic Five-Year Plan, the Bolshevik leaders faced a pressing situation calling for policy choices fraught with “the enormous evils … of dreadful innovation” or the “strange pathos of novelty”: the willful and rapid industrialization of a whole country, according to a would-be plan, substituting administrative for market controls, in peacetime, but in a volatile international environment.

Of course, like any great turn in history, the turn from NEP to the First Five-Year Plan will forever remain open to debate.8 The outrageous costs of forced collectivization, which were neither anticipated nor intended, raise the question whether the overexploitation of the peasants was an essential precondition for purposeful and high-speed industrialization. In addressing this issue it is important to distinguish between, on the one hand, how this linkage of industry and agriculture was perceived, theorized, and portrayed by the actors of the time and, on the other, how it is seen, calculated, and constructed by historians and economists who dispose of empirical data and analytic tools—as well as retrovisions—which were not available in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It may well be that, in hindsight, in strictly economic terms the collectivization of agriculture “did not, in fact, contribute resources to the industrial sector,” and that rapid industrialization under the first two Five-Year Plans took place “without any net accumulation from agriculture.”⁹ This thesis begs the question, however, of where and how the surplus product for industrial growth was generated in a predominantly agrarian economy without access to large-scale foreign loans or investments. At any rate, such retrovisionary estimates and judgments tend to presume that, except for Stalin’s wiles, NEP could and would have been continued with revisions to allow for industrial growth at the same rate as that achieved by a command-and-control economy, without betraying the promise of the October Revolution.

The deliberations about industrialization and collectivization were at once complex and heated, and this despite an underlying consensus that the growth of industry and construction of socialism could not be left to the play of supply and demand alone. The in-party disputes and cleavages were less about objectives than means: the mix of market and state command, of capital and consumer industry, of persuasion and coercion of the peasantry. There was, in addition, not to say above all and increasingly—as we shall see—the critical issue of pace. Without theory or practice to guide them in the face of this terra incognita, none of the principals were consistent or self-confident, and not a few advanced unsound and rash arguments. By and large the “left” advocated maximum investment in heavy industry as the locomotive for comprehensive modernization, to be fueled by a combination of iron will, raw enthusiasm, and fierce coercion reminiscent of the difficult if heroic days of the civil war. This faction did not conceive planning, which was as yet opaque, in primarily or purely economic terms. The “right,” for its part, called for economic development mindful of the merits of a dynamic equilibrium between heavy and consumer industry, as well as industry and agriculture. Its protagonists trusted the scientific calculation of “objective” economic forces and tendencies to fix the limiting conditions for intervention in support of balanced economic but chiefly industrial growth.

Above all, however, neither side—nor anyone in between—looked through rose-colored glasses or fitted them with restrictive blinkers. Stalin and Bukharin were equally aware of the peculiar Russian obstacles to rapid modernization aggravated by Moscow’s virtual banishment from the international economy. Presently it was clear that the new course would work toward several objectives at once: to catch up to the West; to lay the foundations for the socialist transformation of society; to improve living standards; to consolidate the party-state; to inspire foreign Communists and sympathizers; and to develop a modern arms industry.

Before 1934 there was nothing to suggest that by opting for the pursuit of the breakneck noncapitalist modernization of Russia, Stalin was more intensely bent on reaching for personal power than his chief rivals. Like everyone, he was “neither a consistent moderate, nor radical”: he “shifted from center-right (during his alliance with Bukharin in the mid-1920s) to left (during the period of so-called cultural revolution at the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s), and then back to a more moderate position in 1931–32.”10 Of course, beginning in 1929 the forced collectivization of agriculture left no doubt about his readiness to use extreme violence to bring to heel the recalcitrant world of the peasants. By then the reason for the maximalist position began to be reinforced by the end of the Indian summer in the capitalist world, which seemed likely to foreclose foreign loans and bring war closer.

Although Stalin was one of the least cosmopolitan of the veteran Bolsheviks, he very much shared the ambient scorn for and impatience with the muzhik. At the same time, he all but discounted the prospects for foreign aid. As a “conservative revolutionary” Stalin proposed to combine the furious modernization of Russia with the “reestablishment of hierarchies, the affirmation of certain traditional values like patriotism and patriarchy, and the creation of political legitimacy based on more than victorious revolution.” While the Revolution was “powerfully present in the First Five-Year Plan period” the revival of things past “dominated in the middle thirties,” with all the tensions inherent to this strange symbiosis.11

Even if he had not fixed his defiance on Trotsky, whose internationalism informed the rival precept of Permanent Revolution, Stalin was as unlikely to look for help from foreign revolutionaries as he was to order the Red Army to march to their support. The forced and linked industrialization and collectivization unfolded as something in the nature of an internal military campaign. At the time “war metaphors were even more common than revolutionary ones: Communists were ‘fighters’; Soviet forces had to be ‘mobilized’ to the ‘fronts’ of industrialization and collectivization; ‘counter-attacks’ and ‘ambushes’ were to be expected from the bourgeois and kulak class enemy.” This imagery was intended to at once evoke the “spirit of the Civil War and War Communism” while simultaneously discrediting the “unheroic compromises of NEP.” It was consonant with a Soviet Union which “during the First Five-Year Plan, in fact, resembled a country at war.” There were constant calls for unity and self-sacrifice, as well as for “vigilance against spies and saboteurs.” With Stalin at the helm and setting the tone, “political opposition and resistance to the regime’s policies were denounced as treachery” and imaginary internal enemies were charged with doing the bidding of hostile foreign powers.¹² Under Stalin the terror, both functional and—as we shall see—political, was directed against domestic enemies behind the front of an internal war to catch Russia up to the other great powers.

This predisposition to fuse despotic rule and catch-up modernization had deep roots in Russia’s past.13 Peter the Great (1682–1725) stood out as at once a pacesetter and emblem of Russia’s ingrained autocratic tradition. He had strengthened the central state at the expense of the council of the hereditary boyar nobility at the same time that he had forced the buildup of the army and navy, with help from the West. As part of his effort to reduce Russia’s military backwardness, Peter the Great also had seen to the state-directed development of war-related manufacture. He had furthermore impressed convict and serf labor to advance his grand design. This urge and necessity to measure up to the West continued through the reign of Nicholas II, with military imperatives driving the government-supported development of railways, heavy industry, and arms production.

In the time of the late empire, Peter the Great was a notorious foil for discordant criticisms by Slavophiles, reformists, and socialists. But as early as 1928, shortly after propounding the precept of Socialism in One Country, Stalin began to advance a more positive reading: “When Peter the Great, having to deal with more developed countries in the West, feverishly constructed factories and mills to supply the army and strengthen the defense of the country, this was a unique attempt to break the constraints of backwardness.”¹⁴ At the same time, Stalin remained critical of the old elites who for reasons of class had turned to modernization to strengthen the ancien régime without conquering underdevelopment and furthering social reform. It was not until the mid-1930s that Peter the Great, along with Ivan the Terrible, began to be officially praised, as if to satisfy the Russian people’s alleged predisposition to see even their most autocratic rulers as good tsars and to prepare the ground for Stalin’s emergence as vozhd, the supreme leader or “tsar with a populist aura.”¹⁵

All things considered, Stalin had the advantage over his rivals, which is not to say that his rise was foreordained. There certainly were other alternatives of both person and program. But there were confining conditions as well: the logic of the situation precluded a liberal political and economic course free of violence. One possibility was to rethink rather than discard NEP, with an eye to foster a measured economic development with industrialization as focal point. But then again, much of the sworn political class of the roughhewn party-state suspected “a long-term basic incompatibility between Bolshevism and NEP” and became increasingly reluctant “to tolerate the logic and consequences of a market economy [at the mercy of recurrent] stresses and strains,” perceptible starting in 1925–26. Even then, the Five-Year Plan with the moderate targets of the first hour emerged as a credible option. But the unexpected domestic reverses and international perils of the late 1920s narrowed the corridor of time and room for maneuver. Much argues for the view that Socialism in One Country increasingly became “a slogan of survival, of national defense.” Even allowing for a certain conscious exaggeration of the impending dangers to country and regime, the situation was urgent.16

Besides calling for a vigorous forward policy, the critical convergence of events called for a strong leader. On essential questions—priorities, pace, coercion of kulak and peasant, and foreign aid—the disagreements between and among the major contestants and factions were too ambiguous and inconstant to clearly set them apart. A Machiavelli might well have found it more difficult to consider Trotsky or Bukharin a credible alternative to Stalin than to “imagine Stalin himself acting differently … [or] adopting different policies.”¹⁷ At the time, none of the leading Bolsheviks either conceived of relaxing the grip of regime and party dating from the civil war or foresaw “the possible consequences of the total power [accruing to] the party apparatus, a total power which they all sought.”¹⁸ Certainly Lenin’s parting warning about Stalin’s “rudeness” was too circumspect to help focalize the personality factor.¹⁹ Apart from Trotsky and Bukharin not making a stand against violence and terror, and notwithstanding Stalin’s decisive use of his powers of general secretary, there were as yet few portents of his blunted sense of limits. With a different psychology or mentality, or both, Stalin “could have sent Bukharin off to teach marxism-leninism in the provinces, and left Kamenev to work in the ‘Academia’ publishing house, and not issued instructions about harsher conditions in labour-camps, or to kill the bulk of senior army officers.”²⁰

Although Russian industry recovered its prewar level in 1926–27, in both industrial production and technology the gap between Russia and “the advanced capitalist nations [remained at least] as wide as in 1913.”21 There was, in addition, the hopelessly low productivity of the bulk of peasants and artisans. By the mid-1920s, hence “two or three years before the grain crisis,” leading “Soviet politicians and economists, whatever their school of thought,” were debating not the need for radical modernization but the speed at which it should and could proceed.²² At first Evgenii Preobrazhensky and Trotsky urged a faster tempo than Bukharin. For one and all the comparison of Russia’s industrial development with that of the advanced capitalist countries was second nature, and in November 1926 the Fifteenth Party Congress resolved to overtake the First World “in a relatively minimal historical period.”²³ The grain crisis of 1927–28 merely intensified the industrialization debate. By 1928–29 not only Bukharin but Trotsky urged momentarily slowing the pace of development for fear of perturbing the economy, particularly the market relationship between city and country, worker and peasant.

By contrast Stalin, standing on his new-wrought but inchoate platform of Socialism in One Country, “increasingly insisted that the pace of industrialization must be accelerated even if this caused difficulties on the market.” He and his supporters in the Supreme Economic Council and Gosplan stressed not only the danger of Russia falling further behind in technology and productivity but also the urgent need to provide an industrial base for both the mechanization of large-scale agriculture and the modernization of weapons production. The war scare of 1927 renewed the concern about military vulnerability, to become nearly an obsession following the Great Crash.

Indeed, diplomatic and military considerations were crucial in the constellation of preconditions and causes for the Great Turn of the late 1920s. Of course, as we saw, from the very start world politics bore significantly, if not decisively, on the Revolution and the new regime. At the outset the Bolshevik leaders assumed that they could simultaneously spread the contagion of the Revolution they had raised, and protect the national interest of the Russian state they had inherited. By early 1918, however, they began to subordinate the ideological and crusading temptation to the reason of power politics, with an eye to saving and consolidating their rule.

The war with Poland did not mark a change in course. Without provocation Pilsudski invaded Ukraine in late April 1920. The Red Army counterattacked by midyear, driving enemy troops out of Ukraine and Belorussia and pursuing them to the outskirts of Warsaw. Having winked at Pilsudski’s attack, the Allied powers were confounded by the efficacy of Moscow’s counterattack. Although at the Paris Peace Conference Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George had resisted pressures for large-scale military intervention in support of the Whites, they had agreed to the continuation of indirect aid and to the establishment of a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe, with Poland as its center of gravity. The direct interventionists considered the lands making up this buffer zone equally suited to shut in or invade the Soviet Union. In any case, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, advocate of a greater Poland pointed against the new Russia, approved Pilsudski’s eastward reach beyond Kiev and Minsk. Winston Churchill, like Foch, considered Poland “the linch-pin of the Treaty of Versailles.” Ever since 1918, in terms reminiscent of Burke and the Duke of Brunswick, Churchill flayed revolutionary Russia for being “a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin” and insidious proselytizers.24

In the summer of 1920 Lenin and nearly all his top associates were not about to risk the life of the Soviet regime on a battle for Warsaw in which, should the Red Army prevail, the Allies would be likely to rush to Pilsudski’s side. Indeed, very few of them looked to using bayonets to establish a sister republic in Poland as a point of departure for conquests further west, where the prospects for revolutionary risings were negligible. Besides, and above all, conscious of the regime’s extreme weakness, Lenin gave full priority to fighting General Wrangel and repressing the indomitable Greens.²⁵

Only two major figures stand out for having peered to the far side of the Vistula, and they were linked: Trotsky and Tukhachevsky. Certainly Trotsky was more favorable to a “tough, risky, and adventurous” course than Lenin. But apparently his stance was less a function of his own “personal preference than … of pressure exerted by Tukhachevsky’s independent initiative.”²⁶

It is noteworthy that unlike France’s revolutionary government, which following the fall of Longwy and Verdun in 1792 had hurled defiance at Europe’s old regimes, Sovnarkom exercised self-restraint when Pilsudski pushed back Tukhachevsky in 1920. Compared to the Girondins and Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, ruling over a wasted country, lacked the muscle and self-confidence to simultaneously end the civil war, fortify their regime, and engage the great powers. By signing the Treaty of Riga ending the war with Poland on reasonable terms, the Kremlin also meant to reassure Allied Wilsonians who advocated lifting the quarantine. Indeed, with the outside world much less monolithic than in 1792, Lenin sought to encourage the forces favoring peaceful coexistence.

Of course, had Tukhachevsky managed to take Warsaw, and this without Lenin’s approval, he “might very well have become the Bonaparte of the Bolshevik Revolution,” backed by impatient internationalists. It would have been difficult for Soviet leaders to “retain civilian control over the Red Army,” since Tukhachevsky had defied and “dangerously weakened” the commissar system. Forever on the lookout for analogies with the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks were “aware that a Napoleonic figure might arise in the Army to challenge their rule,” and their system of dual command “was designed, in part, to prevent [this].”27 One time, when Lenin discussed such a possibility with Trotsky, who himself was later taxed with Bonapartist ambitions, Lenin said to him, “very seriously, almost threateningly, ‘Well, I think we’ll manage the Bonapartes, don’t you?’ ”²⁸

The resolution of the Russo-Polish war marked an important milestone in the internalization of the Russian Revolution. Extricated from foreign war, the Bolsheviks proceeded to complete the defeat of the Whites, to repress the peasant rebellions in Ukraine and Tambov, and to crush the sailors’ rebellion on Kronstadt. This reestablishment, after four years, of a single and unifying sovereignty coincided with the conclusion of the Treaty of Riga and the Anglo-Russian Trade Treaty in March 1921. In turn, the signature of these two treaties concurred with the adoption of NEP by the Tenth Party Congress that same month. It was as if an unspoken introversive Socialism in One Country had stolen the march on the extroversive Permanent Revolution, with its millenarian acclaim.

NEP was premised on “peaceful coexistence” between a shallow-rooted socialist regime and a speciously stabilized capitalist world. Although the First Cold War between the opposing camps momentarily gave way to peaceful coexistence, neither side disarmed ideologically. The Soviets were caught in a contradiction: through the Comintern they encouraged revolution in Europe and Asia, at the same time that they looked abroad for loans, for markets for grain and timber, and for technology transfers. In turn, in reality, the great powers refused to recognize the revolutionary regime. For the Kremlin, the search for foreign loans and imports for economic reconstruction and development was a matter of foreign policy and diplomacy. Lenin and Chicherin appreciated the importance of moderating the Comintern’s foreign agitation in order to better exploit the divisions in the concert of nations. For a couple of years Moscow turned to good account Berlin’s resolve to circumvent and obstruct the Versailles Treaty, starting with the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922. But by 1925 the Locarno Treaties and the Dawes Plan radically narrowed this avenue: Germany ceased to be the great diplomatic spoiler to become the pivot of the American-brokered restabilization of the capitalist world. Indeed, the danger of “capitalist encirclement” resurfaced at the same time that economic prosperity sapped the European forces pressing for a new deal and for understanding with Russia.

In any case, during this period of peaceful coexistence, with the Red Army’s command held to a defensive strategy, NEP made no special provision for arms production, which was to grow along with the economy, with emphasis on improving old weapons systems rather than forging new ones. Evidently NEP’s design to expand heavy industry, the key to military production, with foreign capital and technology, was contingent on an extended period of relative normalcy at home and abroad. Should peaceful coexistence break down suddenly, ahead of major industrial advances, the old-new Russia would be reduced to mobilizing a peasant army and backward economy to face one or more of the world’s most modern military powers. Political and military leaders took stock of this security predicament at the very time that discussions of planned industrialization and Socialism in One Country came to a head.

Even at the peak of NEP, there were latent fears of renewed economic and diplomatic isolation accompanied by rising international tensions. As of mid-1926 the first clouds appeared on the horizon: in England the General Strike, which the Comintern had cheered on, triggered fierce anti-Sovietism in the Conservative party and press; and Pilsudski’s coup d’état in Poland could not help but cause concern. This renewed anxiety may well have born upon the previously mentioned party resolution of November 1926 stressing the urgency of closing the industrial gap with the capitalist powers “in a relatively minimal historical period.”

But it was in the year 1927 that a series of foreign events put political and military leaders on edge: in April Soviet advisors were attacked in Peking, and in Shanghai Chiang Kai-shek arrested and persecuted thousands of Communists and trade unionists; in May the Baldwin government raided the Soviet trade mission in London; in June a Soviet diplomat was assassinated in Warsaw.29 Most seriously, there was a break in Anglo-Soviet relations, and the Poincaré government lashed out at the Comintern and set upon the French Communists. On the instant Moscow feared an untimely end of makeshift coexistence, which would complicate the industrialization that was about to be given first priority.

Europe’s conservative chancelleries and parties overestimated and overstated Moscow’s anti-capitalist plot as much as the leaders in the Kremlin and Comintern overestimated and overstated the capitalist world’s anti-Soviet counterplot. Presently the latter publicly claimed that the latest anti-Soviet and anti-Communist thrusts were part of a concerted campaign, directed by London, to tighten the quarantine. On June 7 the explosion of a bomb in Leningrad believed to have been masterminded by Russian émigrés further heated the atmosphere of fear and suspicion, with the press conjuring up the twin specter of foreign war and domestic subversion.

Although leading Bolsheviks at once exaggerated and exploited the foreign danger, it was not entirely spurious. Profoundly marked by the Allied intervention in the civil war, they were acutely aware of the uncertainty of external relations; of the anti-Communist consensus omnium spanning the outside world; and of Russia’s military weakness. Needless to say, Moscow was anything but innocent, even if it was David facing Goliath. Chicherin kept cautioning that the Comintern’s strident encouragement of rebellious Chinese peasants and striking British coal miners, coupled with groundless repression inside Russia, was feeding the fires of hostility in the outside world.

Naturally the renewed urgency of international politics precipitated a major debate within the party, with the result that foreign policy once and again became intensely politicized. With broadened support among impatient gadflies, the United (Left) Opposition, led by Trotsky and Zinoviev, renewed the attack on Stalin and Bukharin. Trotsky’s denunciation of the failure of Moscow’s China policy served as cutting edge for a critique of the bid for peaceful coexistence, which he cast as bound up with Socialism in One Country. The United Opposition’s arraignment of Stalin and Bukharin was rather incongruous: on the one hand, it charged them with being unduly sanguine about the stabilization of capitalism and failing to adopt measures to attract foreign loans and investments to speed up industrialization; on the other, it criticized them for not doing enough to incite the workers of the world to rise up against their governments. Ultimately, even with war presumably around the corner, Trotsky held fast to his precept of Permanent Revolution. He looked to rouse particularly the European working class to liberate itself while at the same time saving the Revolution in Russia from itself.

The debate between the Trotskyites and Stalinites had some of the elements of the debate over war and peace between Girondins and Jacobins in 1791–92: Girondins and Trotskyites tended to argue the primacy of foreign policy, which presumed to raise the European revolution in support of the “national” revolution; Jacobins and Stalinites stressed the primacy of domestic policy, and on this score Stalin bore resemblance to Robespierre before the Convention’s peremptory rush into general war. In 1927 Trotsky unintentionally facilitated Stalin’s task by fostering the polarization of the political and rhetorical field. To be sure, Stalin stepped forth as a sober patriot and instrumentalized the war danger. But for him, as for Trotsky, the external menace served to frame and set forth a clear-cut policy choice. Rather than feed an anxiety hysteria, Stalin, along with Bukharin, argued that although not imminent, war was inevitable by virtue of the intrinsic incompatibility between capitalism and socialism. Under the circumstances Moscow needed to play for time to develop Russia’s industrial and military muscle.

This foreign-policy debate, triggered and focused—as well as dramatized—by the war scare, predated the decision for forced-draft industrialization and collectivization. The expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist Party in November 1927 coincided with an access of doubt about the continuance of peaceful coexistence; of skepticism about the staying power of capitalist prosperity; of awareness of military inadequacy; and of fear of diplomatic isolation. Not that on the eve of the Great Turn there was no revolutionary excitement and impatience, especially among true-believers who considered NEP a betrayal of the millenial promise of 1917–18. But to neglect or minimize the swelling disquiet about the international situation is to make light of a key argument in the urgent resolution of the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, following the Politburo’s decision to embark on systematic industrialization: “Bearing in mind the possibility of a military attack … it is essential in elaborating the Five-Year Plan to devote maximum attention to a most rapid development of those branches of the economy in general and industry in particular on which the main role will fall in securing the defense and economic stability of the country in war-time.”30 As of this moment, military considerations weighed heavily on the political debates and economic decisions bearing on the pattern, method, tempo, and financing of deliberate industrialization.

NEP’s premise of trusting the future of military preparedness to gradual industrialization was abandoned in favor of the party-state’s intervention to promote both in proportions which aroused heated controversy. Encouraged by the heightened sensitivity to the war problem, senior generals asked to be heard. In early 1928 Tukhachevsky, the chief of staff, submitted a report urging rearmament, with emphasis on a rapid buildup of armored and air power. True to his position during the Russo-Polish war, he combined this recommendation with a summons to “use the Red Army as a spearhead of world revolution.”³¹ When Voroshilov and Stalin demurred, Tukhachevsky resigned to assume a lesser command, but not without continuing to press his views. Under his influence Soviet strategic doctrine shifted from preparing to fight “a protracted defensive war with full-scale mobilization” to acquiring a defensive-offensive capability turning on the combined use of armored and air power. This strategy was, of course, contingent on an industrial sector capable of sustaining the production of modern armaments in peacetime, to be deployed before the start of hostilities.32 Obviously, these military requirements would compete for scarce resources with urgent civilian needs.

In July 1929 the Politburo resolved that under the Five-Year Plan “a modern military-technical basis for defense must be established.” The Sixteenth Party Congress endorsed this injunction in mid-1930. On this occasion Voroshilov exhorted planning officials to stress military factors, since in every major respect “our war industry, and industry as a whole … is still hobbling quite badly.”³³

By the end of 1930, although the growth of war industries had quickened, “they were … still of lower priority in practice than the tractor or iron and steel industries.”³⁴ Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership continued “to tilt the delicate balance between long-term and immediate military strength toward construction of a powerful heavy industry as a basis for future defense.”³⁵

Meanwhile, Tukhachevsky kept arguing for a comprehensive military overhaul: “the successes of our socialist construction … pose the urgent task of reconstructing the armed forces, taking into account all the latest technical factors, the possibilities of military-technical production and developments in the countryside.”³⁶ Not unlike Heinz Guderian and Charles de Gaulle, his contemporaries, Tukhachevsky swore by mobile warfare and cried for the coordinated use of airplanes, tanks, and artillery. Rejecting “the strategy of defense in depth” on the model of 1812, he disputed two tenets: “that it was ‘better to give up Minsk and Kiev than take Bialystok and Brest’ … ; [and] that the proletarian state had no right to overthrow the bourgeoisie of another country by [armed] force.” Once again Stalin and Voroshilov demurred, with Stalin insisting that to follow Tukhachevsky’s recommendations would be to open the door “to ‘Red militarism’ ” and to the militarization of society at the expense of the construction of socialism.³⁷

Despite this rebuff, for which Stalin apologized after eventually embracing parts of Tukhachevsky’s ground plan, the imperatives of the new warfare began to leave their imprint on the discussion of economic policy and allocation of resources for the production of modern armaments. Hereafter the emphasis was increasingly on creating a separate modern arms industry to equip the armed forces and build up strategic stores before the start of hostilities. Under the First Five-Year Plan, defense considerations unexpectedly at once drove and warped industrialization.

Stalin emerged as Russia’s absolute despot by virtue neither of the egregious miscalculations of his sponsors or rivals, nor the irresistible force of his calculating and ruthless will to power, but by reason of the cunning of history. Circumstances were particularly propitious to his becoming the embodiment of the shift to accelerated industrialization and rearmament, a shift that was necessary but not inevitable in an increasingly uncertain and hostile international environment. But by itself the war scare of 1927, including its political exploitation by Stalin, might not have provided a sufficient rationale for an irreversible switch, from peaceful coexistence and NEP to galloping industrial development and military modernization predicated on the compulsory collectivization of agriculture. The Great Crash of the American Stock Market in October 1929, which mushroomed into the Great Depression of the 1930s, was a godsend for Stalin, consolidating his political hold by vindicating his general stance.

At the Sixteenth Party Congress, which met seven months after Black Friday, Stalin artlessly counterposed the failing capitalist system to the promise of the Five-Year Plan. In his rendering, the world was at a crossroad: “for the USSR … a turn in the direction of a new and bigger economic upswing; for the capitalist countries … a turn towards economic decline.” Stalin noted that until yesterday “a halo formed around the United States as the land of full-blooded capitalism,” and the world over “groveling to the dollar” was accompanied by “panegyrics in honor of the new technology … [and] of capitalist rationalization.” He mockingly recalled that yesterday’s celebration of capitalism’s roaring prosperity was punctuated by a “universal noise and clamor about the ‘inevitable doom … and collapse’ of the USSR.” The reverse was now happening, exactly as the Bolsheviks had predicted “two or three years ago.”38

Indeed, the perils of contingent novelty were about to be compounded by a flush of hubris fueled by the conceit of “correct” prediction. Building on Eugen Varga’s forewarnings about the impermanence of the capitalist revival and the likelihood of a major downward cycle, many Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, now prophesied that world capitalism was fated to enter a terminal crisis.39 Compared to past crises, this one was expected to be universal, deep-seated, and chronic. To boot, with Keynesian economics still unsuspected, the Marxist diagnosis presumed that the panic-stricken governments had no remedial therapies: they were obliged to fall back on protective tariffs and autarky, thereby aggravating the situation, but also vindicating the precept of Socialism in One Country.

But perhaps most important, in Marxist readings there was no confining the runaway depression to the economic and financial realm. At the Sixteenth Party Congress Stalin forewarned that “in a number of countries the world economic crisis will grow into a political crisis,” with the “bourgeoisie seeking a way out … through further fascistization in the sphere of domestic policy” and “utilizing all the reactionary forces, including Social Democracy, for this purpose.” At the same time, “in the sphere of foreign policy the bourgeoisie will seek a way out through a new imperialist war.”⁴⁰ For a little while the buffeted capitalist governments would again play at cross-purposes, providing Moscow some room for diplomatic maneuver. But this favorable prospect was offset by heightened fear of isolation as war clouds threatened to thicken and burst over Eastern Europe. Stalin was more than ever convinced of the necessity to buy sufficient time to further industrialization and military preparedness before the inevitable clash of arms. By early February 1931 Stalin averred that if the “socialist fatherland” was not “to be beaten and lose its independence,” it would have to “end its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy.” He cautioned that to proceed at anything less than full speed would be to perpetuate the protean backwardness responsible for Russia’s string of military defeats in modern times. Stalin concluded on an ominous but rousing note: being “fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries,” Soviet Russia had to “make good this distance in ten years, and either we do it, or we shall go under.”⁴¹

The idea for a major backward power to gain upon, nay overtake, the most advanced industrialized nations, overnight, was as novel as it was brazen and contested. It was not adumbrated in either the Communist Manifesto or any of the other socialist scriptures. Presently the unknown notion of planned and telescoped economic development, incorporated and expressed in the Five-Year Plan, eclipsed the venerable Communist idea in the prophecy and eschatology of the Russian Revolution. The fact that the crystallization of the untried precept of Soviet planning fortuitously coincided with the dramatic breakdown of free-market capitalism made it all the more compelling, as well as threatening.

There was something preposterous about the Soviet leaders’ presumption to radically transform a vast agrarian society of endemic scarcity and poverty in less than a third of a generation. Ironically and fatally, agricultural production came to hold the key to this mad rush to industrialization: surplus grain would be essential to provision the cities and armed forces as well as to sell abroad for advanced capital goods and technologies. Even in the mid-1920s, under NEP, poor harvests and grain exports had forced a rift in the party on this critical nexus: one faction advocated a momentary deceleration of industrialization compatible with the preservation of NEP; the other favored staying the course, even at the risk of dangerously straining it.

The die was by no means cast when untoward international developments broke in upon the situation and debate in Russia. It became increasingly difficult for Bukharin to keep arguing for a slowdown, possibly a pause in industrialization, especially since his sober estimate of the stabilization of world capitalism was being refuted by the course of events. All things considered, the new disquiet about defense, foreign loans, and falling grain prices on world markets played in favor of the maximalists. Though not discounting foreign trade and loans, Stalin was not prepared to allow them to dictate the pace of industrialization, a fortiori since he was prepared to resort to a “military-feudal exploitation” of the peasantry, which Bukharin reproved.42

At the direction of the Politburo and in cooperation with concerned government departments, Gosplan worked out general guidelines for a Five-Year Plan for submission to the party congress. Against the background of the intensifying industrialization debate of the mid-1920s, the yearly growth rates of Gosplan’s first draft of March 1926 kept being revised upward. The version of the plan accepted in April 1929 projected a 230 percent increase of industrial production over the level of 1927–28 within five years, with the growth rate of heavy industry two and a half times that of consumer manufacture. The bulk of capital investment was earmarked for plants to produce iron and steel, machine tools, and tractors—plants of potential military value. Overriding cautionary voices within Gosplan, the plan of 1929 was premised on five years of good harvests and exports as well as commensurate foreign loans. Furthermore, in 1930 it was decided to meet the projected production targets in four years, instead of five.

Without the benefit of a precedent in the planning of a national economy to guide them, both experts and politicians were at once unsure and reckless. Not cast in stone, the First Five-Year Plan kept being revised to take account of rampant imponderables and bottlenecks. There were inadequate provisions for the development of transport, hydroelectric power, and coal production, as well as for the training and deployment of engineers and skilled workers. But above all, the first plan did not reckon with the headlong collectivization of agriculture, which, as we shall see, was not adopted and forced until 1929–30, and which in the short term proved disastrous. Even so, the Five-Year Plan became myth overnight.

Leaving aside the human costs, the economic achievements of the First Five-Year Plan were astonishing. By increasing industrial production by 250 percent, Soviet Russia took giant steps toward becoming a major industrial power. The average annual rate of industrial growth was close to 20 percent. Some of the old economic centers grew by leaps and bounds, and so did new ones, like the steel center at Magnitogorsk in the southern Urals and the hydroelectric complex on the Dnieper.43 Factories were being built to produce agricultural machines, tractors, and machine tools. Characteristically, by “the early 1930s the cult of steel and pig-iron production exceeded even the emerging cult of Stalin,” with everything being “sacrificed to metal in the First Five-Year Plan.”⁴⁴ The Second Five-Year Plan (1933–37), with an annual industrial growth rate of 17 percent, consolidated and built upon the achievements of the first, which involved raising living standards and real wages, which had fallen by 50 percent during the previous plan. Because of ominous international developments, particularly the belligerence of Japan and Germany, the second plan kept being revised to increase the scale and pace of arms production. Indeed, during the 1930s military expenditures and investments weighed “ever more heavily upon the Soviet economy.” Between 1934 and 1936 the armed forces more than doubled in size to 1,300,000 effectives, and they continued to grow at the same rate for the rest of the decade, along with their equipment with tanks, trucks, and aircraft. Whereas at the end of the First Five-Year Plan only “3.4 percent of the [total] Soviet state budget went [directly] to the military,” the proportion rose to 16.1 percent in 1936 and to 32.5 percent in 1940.45 Obviously, the “great leap forward” in Soviet Russia’s industrial economy entailed a “great leap forward” in its military sector, armaments expenditures rising fivefold between 1929 and 1940. No doubt this enormous military effort and burden added significantly to the exorbitant costs and monstrous sacrifices of the domestic side of the battle to protect the regime and nation, which, of course, involved maintaining the power of the ruling elite. There is nothing to suggest that Stalin pushed the military build-up in preparation for either the export of the Revolution by force of arms or the discharge of Soviet Russia’s—the Communist regime’s—staggering domestic problems into the international environment. Meanwhile, the steep growth of the military, including its industry, increased the political weight of the army.

While city and industry were the womb of socialist construction, village and agriculture were at once its lifeblood and nemesis. Russia was nearly as much a country of peasants, wooden ploughs, and sickles at the creation of the First Five-Year Plan as at the time of the October Revolution. The cultural and social abyss separating city and country remained forbidding, and in vital respects the latter held the former hostage. With the Socialist Revolutionaries cast out, Russia’s new political class was at one in considering the peasants unwieldy and troublesome at the same time that it realized, increasingly, that without their grain surpluses, taxes, and labor power the party-state would flounder. Ultimately the idea of modernizing and shrinking the agrarian sector through instant and wholesale collectivization with a view to harnessing it for forced-draft industrial development was no less audacious than the idea of planned industrialization. Besides destroying the fabric of private, small-scale, and communally interwoven landholding and farming, collectivization entailed the massive and convulsive transformation of an age-old peasant culture and society. Stalin’s impatience with the unbending peasant was peculiar neither to him nor to most Marxists far and near. As we have seen, it was rooted in the Enlightenment.

Following the land decrees of 1917–18, which sanctioned the peasants’ spontaneous land seizures, only about one percent of Russia’s cultivated surface survived as large estates. This remnant was confiscated to be exploited by peasant communes, collectives, or cooperatives. Under NEP this embryo of “collectivized” agriculture was all but ignored. Like the military sector, it was expected to develop along with the growth of a mixed economy. By 1928 “the socialized sector of Soviet agriculture … was responsible for only 2.2 percent of gross farm production, the rest being produced by some 25 million individual peasant households.”46

All this time Bolsheviks of all schools continued to reject small- and middle-sized family farming, emboldened by the belief that eventually, with greater efficiency and reduced human toil, large-scale collectivized agriculture would and should become the norm. Stalin’s project of Socialism in One Country could not avoid confronting the peasant conundrum. By contrast, Trotsky’s precept of Permanent Revolution may be said to have sought to sidestep it by holding fast to a concept, rooted in Western Europe’s experience, of industrial workers and large cities becoming ascendant in the time that an “enclosure movement” or its equivalent reduces the weight and resistance of the awkward peasantry. To be sure, Lenin had all along insisted on the exigencies of the peasant-worker alliance. But neither he nor any of the other Bolshevik leaders had ever put forth a credible analysis of the simultaneity of Russia’s two radically unsimultaneous cultures and societies which was to vastly complicate the furious breakthrough into noncapitalist modernization, and drench it with blood.

Agricultural production, like industrial production, recovered its prewar levels around 1926–27, with a strong performance in grains, livestock, and industrial crops. But productivity was as low as ever when the issue of rapid industrialization came to a head. Indeed, the incipient Five-Year Plan would be heavily dependent on a sluggish and inconstant agrarian economy dominated by unchanging peasants. The harvest of 1927 was average. But deliveries of grain and industrial crops fell off sharply during the winter, and so did grain exports. Although these complications were not out of the ordinary, they were difficult to reconcile with the logic of economic planning, and called in question the optimistic assumptions about the contribution of the undisciplined agrarian sector to forced-march industrialization.

In early 1928 the Politburo decided to spur collectivization and rationalize grain collection by means of inducement and exhortation rather than coercion. By this time, however, the party leadership was becoming torn, not to say polarized, over the peasant question, specifically about how to extract rising and reliable deliveries of grain for both the short and long term. Presently Stalin insisted that, especially with foreign loans highly problematic, the pace of industrialization should not continue to hinge on the vagaries of peasant agriculture which the NEP’s market mechanisms could not keep in bounds. He began to argue for forced collectivization and forced procurement at the same time that he charged the kulaks, or prosperous peasants, with playing the market for reasons of personal, class, and political advantage.

Stalin and his closest associates did not stand alone. Their “new approach … was welcomed enthusiastically by an influential group of party intellectuals, by some of the party rank and file, by many young communists and students, and by an unknown number of industrial workers.” But above all, “support from most members of the party central committee, and from many local party officials, provided the basis for Stalin and his group to prevail over the Right in the course of a protracted struggle between July 1928 and April 1929.”47

Less alarmed than Stalin about the worsening domestic and international situation of the late 1920s, the Right Oppositionists favored adjusting rather than discarding NEP, as well as revitalizing rather than abandoning the worker-peasant alliance. Overall, however, their affirmations were less forceful than their negations: rejection of coercion and class war in the countryside; opposition to quickening the tempo of industrialization; and disapproval of the absolute priority for heavy industry.

The Right Opposition had three emblematic leaders: Rykov, Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars; Tomsky, head of the Central Council of Trade Unions; and, above all, Bukharin, now editor of Pravda and head of the Comintern. Only yesterday all three had sided with Stalin against Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Bukharin sought backing in the upper echelons of the party, but without diffusing the Right’s arguments or reaching out for broader support. His forte was the arbitrament of the word, not political infighting and leadership. Still, Bukharin’s position was backed “by a substantial group of senior party officials and by virtually all the leading non-party experts in the major government departments; and it found ready sympathy among one section of the party rank and file, and among most peasants and many workers—when they had the opportunity to hear about it.”48

In the heated debate of the main issues, control of the party and fixity of purpose gave Stalin the edge over his rivals. But he did not prevail by strong-arm tactics and craft alone. This inner-party struggle, unlike previous ones, bore upon “clear-cut issues of principle and policy.” The Right, compared to the Left, projected a certain complacency. Its “platform involved less danger of social and political upheaval, and did not require party cadres to change the habits and orientation of NEP.” But this also meant that it promised “much less in the way of achievement” at a time when the party “was hungry for achievement,” as well as unsuspecting of its costs. Indeed, the Right proposed “a moderate, small-gains, low-conflict program to a party that was belligerently revolutionary, felt itself threatened by an array of foreign and domestic enemies, and continued to believe that society could and should be transformed.”⁴⁹

Stalin did not have a clear blueprint and timetable for mandatory agricultural and industrial development in defiance of the laws of the market. The original plan of December 1927, before its successive radicalizations, projected the collectivization of about 20 percent of the land over five years, without specifying either the form collectivization would take—state or cooperative farms—or the level of financing for the projected mechanization of agriculture at a time when Russia counted only about 25,000 tractors. The plan’s intentions and instructions being overly general, at the start its implementation in the countryside here and there reflected “historical class hatreds, Civil War legacies, zealotry, personal rivalry, and the needs of official ‘family circle’ cliques.”⁵⁰ Although the critical decisions were made at the center, there was no power structure fitted to direct and control their implementation in distant towns and villages. Besides, when Stalin first resorted to force to meet the stubborn difficulties of grain procurement, he “did not know where the process set in motion by his ‘emergency measures’ would ultimately lead him.”51

Industrialization set the pace, not collectivization: in 1928–29 the intensification and speed-up of the former spurred the latter. Party leaders, and not only Stalin’s votaries, more and more doubted that the peasants, for want of material incentives, would be able and willing to step up production. Faced with growing resistance in the village, by the summer of 1929 the Politburo fixed mandatory quotas for grain procurement. Instead of blaming the continuing shortfalls on the breakdown of the market and the defects of official price policy, Stalin denounced the hoarding and stockjobbing of the kulaks. In December the Politburo braced itself to forge ahead with collectivization: it established a special commission headed by Molotov; and Stalin announced a “turn toward the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.”⁵² On January 5, 1930, the Central Committee, in a decree “On the Tempo of Collectivization,” vowed to all but complete the collectivization of agriculture in 1931–32. The authorities claimed that over 60 percent of peasant households were collectivized within about two months. Even though vastly overstated, this figure suggests the fury of the operation, including the attendant chaos, resistance, and violence. To be sure, there were no peasant risings on the order of those of the Greens in 1919–20. There was, however, formidable passive resistance: peasants slaughtered and sold their animals rather than hand them over to their village kolkhoz, with the result that between 1928 and 1934 Russia’s stock of cattle, horses, and sheep was halved.

But it was primarily the kulaks who were subjected to brute force and violence. Unlike the poor and middle peasants, they had prospered by using hired labor, renting out agricultural machines and draught animals, or engaging in commerce. In the late 1920s the kulaks probably constituted slightly less than 4 percent of all peasant production units. But in association with nepmen, they provided a disproportionate share of the marketable surplus of food for the cities, raw materials for industry, and commodities for export. Although there undoubtedly were “genuine exploiters” among the kulaks, more than likely most of them were “simply successful and hard-working peasants.”53 In any case, by proclaiming that they were to be eliminated as a class and kept out of the village kolkhozy, Stalin set the stage for their forced expropriation, deportation, and relocation.

In no time the campaign, which was unprepared and unmindful of village solidarity, gave rise to a surfeit of disorder, unrest, and resistance which alarmed the center. On March 2, 1930, Pravda carried Stalin’s article “Dizzy with Success”: blaming all excesses on overzealous local officials, he countermanded the collectivization of livestock and suggested a moratorium. Presently commissions were charted to examine the grievances of dekulakized peasants, and not a few dispossessed families recovered their property. In addition, 25,000 true-spirited industrial workers were mobilized to go to the countryside to enlighten the peasantry about the merits of collective farming. They were, however, unable to penetrate the “all-pervasive backwardness” of the world of their fathers, which turned a deaf ear to the Siren of progress.⁵⁴ Meanwhile many peasants took advantage of the pause to back out of “their” kolkhozy. But even after this withdrawal, in March and April 1930 “6 million peasant households, 24.6 percent of the total number, belonged to 86,000 kolkhozy, compared to less than 4 percent in June 1929, … the size of the average kolkhoz [having] increased from 18 to 70 households.”⁵⁵

A month after he had issued his stay, Stalin declared it to have been “not a retreat but a temporary consolidation,” and in mid-1930 the Sixteenth Party Congress reaffirmed the principle of collectivization.⁵⁶ This was the same conclave which approved completing the First Five-Year Plan in four years and accelerating the production of tractors. Full-scale collectivization resumed in early 1931, with the result that 62 percent of peasant households were collectivized by 1932, and 93 percent by 1937.

The socialization of agriculture was well-nigh completed in less than ten years. In the major agricultural regions the “traditional pattern of peasant agriculture … was in large part destroyed,” the machine tractor station, symbol of the modernizing impulse, playing a major role.⁵⁷ Still, the break was not nearly as radical as appears at first sight: by and large “the typical kolkhoz was the old village, with the peasants … living in the same wooden huts and tilling the same fields as they had done before.”58 Even so, the cake of custom was being cracked. In many villages “the mir ceased to exist … and the church was closed,” the local priest having “fled or been arrested.”⁵⁹ The enormous and unforeseen out-migration was no less disruptive: during the 1930s, with the number of cities of over 100,000 inhabitants rising from thirty-one to eighty-nine, between 16 million and 19 million peasants left their villages to enter the urban and industrial workforce. This vast migration “was part of the dynamics of Russia’s industrialization … [and was] as much a part of Stalin’s revolution in the countryside as collectivization itself.”⁶⁰ But what was good for the city and industry was not necessarily good for the village and agriculture. The out-migrants were mostly “the young, the skilled and educated, the more enterprising peasants fearful of dekulakization, and, in general, a greater percentage of males than females,” bleeding the provinces of vital forces.⁶¹

Such a sweeping and feverish transformation, dictated from above and afar, could not be carried through peacefully. With the Bolshevik leaders resolved, as during the civil war, to persevere at any cost, the human cost was horrendous. In their quasi-military campaign they fixed and revised objectives—targets—as well as strategies and tactics with little regard for casualties—peasant victims—and material losses—declining production and wasted livestock. Victories, such as the bumper harvest of 1930, bred overconfidence; defeats, such as the famine of 1932–33, further hardened the mailed fist. Winning through on the agrarian front was considered crucial for winning through on the industrial front.

This campaign, especially its battle against the kulaks, raged with particular ferocity in 1930–32. The number of kulak family households to be dekulakized was arbitrarily set at about one million out of a total of about 25 million households, or between 5 million and 6 million individuals. In 1930–31, of this total some 63,000 heads of household were arrested, expropriated, and deported to remote regions for being “counterrevolutionary activists.” About another 150,000, after being dispossessed of their land, but not of all their non-landed property, were forcibly relocated, along with their families. The remaining 400,000 to 700,000 families were turned out of house and home and forced to settle on less fertile land in or near their village. Naturally dekulakization took the greatest toll of life among the heads of households and families deported for either confinement to camps or resettlement in distant climes. In early 1932 Stalin was informed that “since 1929 … 540,000 kulaks were deported to the Urals, 375,000 to Siberia, more than 190,000 to Kazakhstan, and over 130,000 to the far northern region.” In all, it is estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of them, or between 315,000 and 420,000, lost their lives, mostly from disease, hunger, exhaustion, and exposure. Many of the deported kulaks were put to work in industry and public works.62

In part the ranks of victimized kulaks were so large because, the category of kulak being vague, they were “joined by other intended and unintended victims of repression, most notably byvshie liudi, outsiders, and marginal people within the villages,” including real and suspected counterrevolutionaries of the civil war as well as members of outlawed leftist parties. In any case, in villages and country towns “the campaign against byvshie liudi often merged with and became indistinguishable from dekulakization.” This conflation fed upon the collectivization-induced chaos, poverty, and starvation, with party and state officials looking for scapegoats. The spiraling repression, cause and consequence of the trumped-up denunciations of kulaks and outsiders, “seems also to have been shaped by the dynamics of a traditional rural political culture and to have resulted in a kind of traditional victimization.”⁶³

In the short run and not surprisingly, collectivization failed to remedy the chronic ills and fitful shortfalls of agricultural production. In fact, it aggravated them. To be sure, in 1930 there was a “record [cereal] harvest … followed by record grain collection” and exports. But this “spectacular victory, … [which] encouraged great complacency,” was largely due to good weather. A fortiori the disastrous harvests of the three following years confounded the Bolshevik leaders. But rather than reconsider or retreat, they opted for yet another fuite en avant. The massive slaughter of livestock is perhaps the best measure of the peasant’s recalcitrance. In 1930 alone, the destruction of “animal power” was greater than the “tractor power made available to the kolkhozy … and the losses of cows, pigs, and sheep were so great that … [the output of] meat and dairy products could not recover to its 1929 level for at least two years.”64 Thereafter, disillusioned by the shortage of tractors to lighten their toil, the collectivized peasants, rather than sweat and slave for their kolkhoz, attended to their household plots and animals. The authorities’ reaction was to step up the pressure by raising and fiercely enforcing delivery quotas. In addition, not unlike blue-collar workers, peasants were restricted to their workplace.

These strong-arm measures could not prevent serious food shortages from escalating into the great famine of 1932–33 which, like the famine of the early 1920s, was caused by both man and nature in proportions that remain in dispute. It took 4 million to 6 million lives and inflicted widespread suffering. Some regions were racked more severely than others, and among the worst hit, Ukraine stood out. Collectivization had proceeded perhaps most rapidly and violently in Ukraine, still one of Russia’s chief breadbaskets, producing between a quarter and one-third of the country’s grain harvest. By mid-1932 about 70 percent of Ukraine’s peasants were in kolkhozy and the government claimed about 40 percent of its grain production. In Ukraine the famine was at its worst during the early winter of 1932–33, but subsided starting in early spring, when grain requisitions were relaxed and then ended.

No doubt in Ukraine, as well as in other regions struck by famine, benighted and overzealous local officials of the party-state aggravated the Furies. Ultimately, however, Stalin and his partisans bear full responsibility by virtue of their resolve to forge ahead in the face of forbidding obstacles, regardless of cost, blinded by their commitment to force-paced industrialization and military preparedness as well as by their impatience with the muzhik. To the extent that their violence was in the nature of an enforcement terror, and notwithstanding their recourse to scapegoating and conspiracy mongering, it was essentially instrumental. It seems most doubtful that Stalin willfully mounted a genocidal war against, in particular, the peasantry of Ukraine with a view to abort the embryo of Ukrainian nationalism. Indeed, the Irish famine of the second half of the 1840s, in which over a million out of 8 million people perished, is a much closer parallel than the Judeocide of the 1940s.

The establishment and extension of the Gulag was closely correlated with the drive for industrialization and collectivization. It became at once an important instrument of political control and a vital agency for the furtherance of planned industrial growth. Indeed, the Gulag had a dual function: to serve as an instrument of enforcement terror; and to serve as an economic resource, notably as a source of unfree labor. These two roles were “inseparable and interdependent, with each role more important at different times.”65

As we noted above, almost from the outset of the Bolshevik regime, proven, suspected, and imagined enemies from among the old ruling and governing classes were either executed or confined to “concentration camps.”⁶⁶ In addition, black marketeers and common law criminals were sent to work camps for rehabilitation by forced labor. In the time of Lenin and until the late 1920s the concentration camps for political prisoners were administered by the OGPU, the Cheka’s successor, while the work camps, along with regular prisons, were under the NKVD, or People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Whereas during this decade the economic role of the double-track penal system was at best marginal, it became increasingly important during the following decade, under Stalin. In other words, even though “the camp system of the Gulag had firm roots in the years preceding Stalin’s assumption of power, [starting with the Second Revolution] it assumed its defining characteristics in the time of the centrally planned economy.”⁶⁷

The Gulag had two tasks. The one was “to imprison criminals, to isolate presumed and proven political enemies or rivals, and to put in fear the population.” In this capacity the Gulag was “not only a penal system but also an instrument of terror and sovietization.” The other function was “to methodically supply the planned state economy with the labor force of its convicts, thereby contributing to economic development and the settlement of virgin lands.” Whatever the relative importance of the penal, political, and economic reasons for the new departure, beginning in the late 1920s “the new economic demands contributed decisively to the expansion of the Gulag.”⁶⁸ The reserve army of forced labor was used in logging, in the construction of strategic roads, canals, and railways, as well as in the building of industrial plants and the operation of mines in remote regions. This compulsory labor contributed to lowering labor costs and saving foreign exchange. As we shall see, millions suffered and died in the wanton Gulag, which was half-hidden and half-public.

Forced labor played a role in the treatment of all categories of prisoners. Most likely the presumption in favor of this penal measure was rooted in the previously discussed katorga for criminals deported to far-off regions under the tsars.69 The Bolsheviks, for their part, distinguished between the “reform-intended labor of convicts of working-class origin and the forced labor for ‘counterrevolutionaries, socially dangerous elements,’ and class enemies.”⁷⁰ In economic terms, this incidental unfree labor was at best expected to cover the costs of the prison and camp systems of the NKVD and OGPU. In other words, the economic utility of forced labor was inconsequential until the decision of the late 1920s to exploit the “potential” of the growing prison and camp population for the advancement of the Five-Year Plan.⁷¹

This decision emerged, of course, from the same debate which starting in the mid-1920s looked to frame the general parameters for planned economic growth at the expense of NEP. From early on the interpenetration of the regime’s policies of internal security, economic development, and labor mobilization were embodied in Dzerzhinsky: besides being master of first the Cheka and then the OGPU, he headed a bureau of labor recruitment for economic reconstruction and the Commissariat for Transportation which directed the construction of new rail lines. Not least important, from early 1924 until his death in mid-1926 Dzerzhinsky was chairman of the Supreme Economic Council. All along, as a “resolute champion of rapid industrialization he concentrated on the transport system and on industry, especially heavy industry.” He took an early interest in plans for what became large-scale public works, such as the Stalingrad tractor plant and the Dnieper hydroelectric power complex, in whose construction forced labor eventually played a considerable role. Indeed, in Dzerzhinsky’s judgment, “an intimate collaboration between the economic apparatus and the security forces was indispensable” for the success of industrialization.⁷²

The Great Turn of 1928–30 was driven by four convergent impulses: the impetus of the First Five-Year Plan; the drive for the forced collectivization of agriculture; the conversion and activation of the OGPU for economic functions; and the centrifugal force of Stalin’s rising ascendancy. There is no question but that the momentum of this second foundation of the Bolshevik regime carried over to the expansion of the Gulag. On March 3, 1928, the Council of People’s Commissars urged that the penal regimen be hardened to inflict longer sentences and reduce early releases. It did so largely to facilitate the organization and allocation of prison labor. Three weeks later, on March 26, an official decree “ordered the ‘greater use of inmates’ in the fulfillment of economic projects.” Following the Communist Party’s adoption of Stalin’s conception of forced industrialization in April 1929, the swelling prison population was increasingly considered a “work force” and the OGPU “began to develop an extensive and economically grounded system of forced-labor camps.”73 Within a year the authorities introduced a clear distinction between, on the one hand, prisoners sentenced to terms of less than three years, who were to serve their time in the work colonies of the NKVD, and, on the other, prisoners sentenced to longer terms, to be served in the camps of the OGPU. Hereafter the OGPU’s camps mushroomed into the sprawling Gulag holding millions of inmates, hundreds of thousands of them deployed as forced laborers, typically in the construction of the infrastructures essential for the fulfillment of the Five-Year Plans—railway lines, canals, dams, and roads. With the stress on the economic utility of prisoners—also in mining and logging—the camps of the OGPU easily stole the march upon those of the Commissariat of Justice, which kept faith with the precepts of rehabilitation and reeducation. In any case, in great measure for reasons of functional rationality, both political and economic, the prisons and camps of both the OGPU and the Commissariat of Justice were placed under the All-Union Commissariat of Internal Affairs. As a subdivision of this restructured NKVD, the Gulag—the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements—assumed control of all places of confinement, including their labor reservoirs.

The flux and reflux of the prison population was closely related with coercive and terror-freighted political moves whose reasons and consequences were never purely or primarily economic. Between the Great Turn and the outbreak of the Second World War there were two major waves of mass arrests which swelled the number of prisoners in the Gulag: the first, between 1929 and 1933, consisted of “the opponents and victims of ‘dekulakization’ and forced collectivization, almost exclusively peasants, disproportionately many from Ukraine;” the second, from 1936 through mid-1938, consisted of the victims of the Ezhovshchina, including the “great purge,” who came from “all walks of life.”74 In the camps of the Gulag the authorities distinguished between nonpolitical and political inmates. The latter “were used unproductively and allowed to die at the height of the Terror with little or no thought for economic purposes.”⁷⁵ While under the ancien régime and NEP political prisoners had enjoyed a special status, they now tended to be relegated to the depths of the Gulag’s hell on earth, along with great criminals. Except for the politicals, one and all were impressed for forced labor “in the service of the second and third Five-Year Plan.”⁷⁶

There was, then, a vast increase in the camp population starting in the late 1920s, when it stood at about 30,000. It is estimated to have reached over 500,000 in the mid-1930s, and between 1.5 and 3.5 million by 1939.⁷⁷ The overall number of individuals who died is reckoned at between 1.5 and 3 million, unevenly divided between those executed in the camps and those who died there of “natural causes,” such as hunger, disease, and exhaustion. Conditions were particularly harsh in “the camps of Kolyma, the camps serving the construction of the Kotlas-Vorkuta railway, the logging camps, and the camps in the far north” of European Russia.⁷⁸ There is nothing to suggest that the Gulag was conceived and operated with an autogenocidal or ethnocidal intention, or unwittingly turned into a autogenocidal or ethnocidal fury.⁷⁹ The vast majority of inmates—probably over 90 percent—were adult males between the ages of twenty and sixty. There were relatively few children, women, and aged in the camps. Reflecting Russia’s social profile, peasants constituted the greatest number of inmates and victims, vastly overshadowing industrial workers and miners. As for the element of ethnocide, even if Ukrainians intermittently were victimized disproportionately, non-Russians were not preyed upon more than Russians.

Of course, all figures bearing on the Gulag are controversial, there being few reliable and exact statistics. Historians know all too well that it is impossible to be accurate and precise about the intemperance of man’s inhumanity to man. They can advance more or less well-grounded orders of magnitude, and even these can be treacherous. It is equally misleading to systematically inflate or deflate, usually for polemical reasons, the numbers pertaining to the pyramids of victims and their sufferings. Eventually, as the empirical data is sifted, passions cool, and contexts are framed, plausible figures carry the day, but not without remaining subject to debate and correction.

Meanwhile, the Gulag did not stand by itself: it was part of a large configuration of violence and terror. Whatever the total number of “excess” deaths from 1917 through 1939—between 10 million and 20 million—they cry out for chronologically informed disaggregration, key to critical analysis: the civil war and famine of 1921–22; dekulakization and the famine of 1932–33; the show trials and the Ezhovshchina, 1936–38. In the grand total of ravaged lives, the two famines account for by far the greatest number, and they were nearly all peasants, and “unknown.” By contrast, the victims of the show trials and Ezhovshchina accounted for a much smaller, if disproportionately large, share of the victims. Predominantly urban and educated, they were, above all, high and mid-level officials and functionaries of the party-state, including the military. By virtue of ever so many of their recorded life histories, their identity and fate are easier to reconstruct than those of the wretches of starvation. As we shall see, not everyone who was purged in 1937–38 was arrested, and not everyone who was arrested was executed.

The violence and terror of Stalin’s regime became uniquely fierce and extensive between 1934–35 and 1937–38, the years of the “great purge.” Both at the time and since, the word “purge” has assumed a variety of meanings. In the narrow sense, it denotes the periodic, albeit irregular, cleansing of the Communist Party; in a wider sense, the big show trials of 1936–39; and in the broadest sense, all the internal violence and terror that started with the civil war and culminated in the great trials and the Ezhovshchina of 1936–38.

Under the ancien régime the Bolshevik party had been a clandestine party with a small and select membership, the very opposite of a mass movement. For obvious reasons its membership increased from about 20,000 in 1917 to about 570,000 in 1921. The purges of the 1920s were designed to preserve the party’s “original revolutionary fervor” by screening and weeding out, above all, “careerists and flatterers,” the chief agents of bureaucratization and corruption.80 The largest purge of the decade was in 1921, in the wake of the civil war, when roughly one-fourth of the party members were excluded. Although “ideological ‘enemies’ or ‘aliens’ ” were also targeted, in the purges of the 1920s “political crimes or deviations pertained to a minority of those expelled.”⁸¹ With time, not a few ordinary citizens shared “a grim feeling of satisfaction at the sight of the downfall of frequently oppressive bureaucrats and party officials.”⁸²

Not unlike the large purge of 1921, that of 1933 followed a huge and rapid growth of party ranks. Starting in 1929, this influx answered the party’s need to meet the challenge of industrialization and collectivization. With membership rising by 1.4 million within a few years, there was growing concern about the party being flooded with timeservers and mediocrities. Some “18 percent of the party was expelled,” about 23 percent of them peasants, 14 percent of them employees, and 60 percent workers. Although the criteria for expulsion were “slightly more ideological” in 1933 than in the 1920s, the principal objective was, as before, to limit the perverse effects of wild party growth, not to persecute “members of the [political] opposition.”⁸³ There was, however, a noticeable change starting in 1935. In the purge of that year the proportion of “politicals” expelled from the party rose to about 25 percent, reflecting a growing disposition and resolve to “hunt for enemies” within the party, although not as yet in its higher circles.⁸⁴

The political trials of the late 1920s and early 1930s were in the same key as the party purge of 1933. They, too, unfolded in the heat and turbulence of the Great Turn. The Shakhty trial, in the spring of 1928, and the trial of the so-called “Industrial Party,” in the winter of 1930, were meant to cow non-party specialists and experts, many of them from the old technical intelligentsia, which was of growing importance to Russia’s industrialization. In the first trial fifty-three engineers, including three German nationals, were charged with sabotage and treason for allegedly engaging in deliberate “wrecking,” corruption, and mismanagement. Eleven of the defendants were sentenced to be shot, of whom five were executed. The others were judged less severely: four were acquitted, while four received suspended sentences and ten prison terms ranging from one to three years. In the second trial the court pronounced life sentences for most of the accused who confessed their guilt, but political authorities commuted them to prison terms. At a third trial, in March 1931, fourteen ex-Mensheviks working as experts in several economic and planning bureaus were accused of subversive “wrecking” for having pressed for a slow-paced tempo of industrial growth. After making confession they were given prison terms of between five and ten years.

Even if “not all the repression of those years was unjustified,” many of the arrests, indictments, and sentences were “completely unwarranted.”85 The charges were shadowy, not to say groundless, the imputation of willful sabotage linked to foreign powers or émigrés being particularly insidious. Clearly, the trials were exercises in political justice in which “legal forms [were] coopted for extra-legal purposes,” making for a “fusion of law and terror.”⁸⁶ This is not to say, however, that the trials of 1928 to 1931, any more than the purges of those same years, were a necessary and logical link or way station between Lenin’s reign of dictatorial violence and terror from 1917 to 1924 and Stalin’s reign of unbounded and unpredictable terror starting in the late 1920s. Such a linear vision blinks at the perplexities and resistances attending the Great Turn into the second foundation of the Revolution. Presumable Stalin, compared to Hitler, was neither hesitant nor remote, and he played an active and “personal role” in the terror.⁸⁷ There is, however, no need to portray him as “an omniscient and omnipotent demon” or as a “master planner” and consummate schemer in order to show his terrifying sides, including his iron will, arrant suspicion, and moral indigence. Indeed, he was “a cruel but ordinary mortal unable to see the future and with a limited ability to create and control it.”⁸⁸

Judging by Mikhail Riutin’s remonstrance and Sergei Kirov’s assassination, political dissension and opposition were very much astir during the first half of the 1930s.⁸⁹ A deposed high official of the Moscow party, Riutin was one of the moving spirits of a faction critical of furious collectivization and industrialization. In August 1932, two years after his expulsion from the party for spreading rightist propaganda, he circulated a lengthy memorandum advocating slowing the pace of collectivization and capital investment in order to give relief to peasants and workers. His urgent plea might have gone unnoticed for being on many tongues, except that it was combined with a plainspoken denunciation of Stalin’s rule as “the most naked, deceitful, [and perfectly] realized … personal dictatorship” which was “killing Leninism [and] the proletarian revolution.” Riutin looked to the “struggle for the destruction” of this dictatorship to “give birth to new leaders and heroes.” Following Riutin’s arrest in September 1932, at Stalin’s urging twenty of his associates were expelled from the party for “counterrevolutionary” activities, among them Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were suspected of sympathizing with them.90 Stalin having failed to convince the Politburo to prosecute Riutin, he was committed to forced residence until 1937, when he was swallowed up in the fires of the Great Terror.

Kirov was even closer to the center of power than Riutin. Member of the Politburo and chief of the Communist Party in Leningrad, he was assassinated on December 1, 1934. Until recently Stalin was widely presumed to have abetted, if not masterminded, this murder with an eye to remove a dangerous rival who, to boot, was said to have been of democratic disposition. It now appears that through the years Kirov “supported Stalin on every major policy issue,” which did not, however, preclude his having a considerable personal following in the party.⁹¹ Be that as it may, Stalin exploited the assassination, putting all the blame on the opposition. In January 1935 nineteen adherents of a so-called “Moscow Center” were arrested for complicity in the murder, including Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were sentenced, respectively, to ten and five years of close arrest. Still, as with Riutin, the fate of Zinoviev and Kamenev was not sealed until two years later, when both succumbed in the first of the big show trials in August 1936. Meanwhile Kirov’s assassination, which was to figure prominently in the Moscow trials, carried enormous weight for allegedly providing concrete proof of the ominous conspiracy subverting Soviet society.

The initially relatively mild treatment of Riutin and the alleged accomplices of Kirov’s assassin was consonant with a certain political thaw following the worst ravages of the dekulakization and famine. On May 8, 1933, Stalin and Molotov “ordered the release of half of all labor-camp inmates whose sentences were connected with collectivization.” The following year the regime began “to rein in the police and courts and to institute substantial reforms within them.” Paradoxically, Andrei Vyshinsky, the ferocious Inquisition-like prosecutor in the coming show trials, pressed for the establishment and observance of legal norms and procedures. This modulation of the terror continued after Kirov’s assassination, perhaps in part because the economy was doing well in the mid-1930s, early in the Second Five-Year Plan. In August 1935 “the government declared an amnesty for all collective farmers sentenced to less than five years if they worked ‘honorably and with good conscience’ on the kolkhozy.” Between 1934 and 1936 “arrests in general declined rapidly and steadily,” and so did prosecutions, convictions, and imprisonments for “counterrevolutionary activity.” These years also saw the debates surrounding the preparation of the new constitution of 1936, which was to reflect a certain normalization. None of this means that Stalin’s regime was emptying the Gulag and clearing the way for a transition to democracy in the party or political society at large. But it is to suggest that there was “no pattern … of increasing terror,” which makes its subsequent escalation that much more past comprehension.92

It is difficult to grasp, let alone rank the preconditions, causes, and precipitants for this escalation. What were Stalin’s reasons for the skyrocketing violence and terror in the late 1930s: to secure his and his associates’ rule by eliminating personal or factional rivals; to hold down a restless population by fear; to combat real and perceived enemies at home and abroad; to regain mastery of a political and civil society that was spinning out of control? In addition there is the greatest enigma of all: the regime’s insistence on public confession, and the compliance of so many of the victims with this dictate.

Amid the ambiguities and riddles, one certainly stands out. By the mid-1930s, the general situation of state and society became as complex and imperiled as it had been at the time of the Great Turn—except that international tensions were much greater than at the time of the war scare of 1927, and weighed much more heavily in the balance.

In domestic affairs the good years of 1934–36 gave way to a decided economic slowdown aggravated by the world depression and the bad harvest of 1936. The worst since the famine of 1932–33, this crop failure served as a stark reminder that the agrarian sector remained the regime’s Achilles’ heel. With time the purges exacerbated the situation by fostering considerable economic disorganization. As of September 1936, when Stalin appointed Nikolai Ezhov head of the NKVD, “the focus of the terror expanded to include growing numbers of industrial managers, administrators, and engineers, and the main accusations leveled against purge victims also changed from conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders to economic sabotage and ‘wrecking’,” first leveled in the political trials of 1928 and 1930. The many failings and blockages of the awkward and untried planned and command economy were “attributed to deliberate economic sabotage … and espionage.”93

By themselves “the economic problems … of the second half of the 1930s would not have … resulted in political terror.” They were politicized by “a suspicious and voluntarist leadership that expected ‘miracles’ and refused to accept economic constraints.” Soviet leaders acted in a “political culture and [faced] a populace accustomed to blame hardships on demonic forces and conspiracies.” But above all, ominous international developments, with foreign enemies at the gates, bolstered the credibility of wild conspiracy mongering at the same time that they dictated an ever faster military buildup which further strained and deformed the economy.⁹⁴

In the east Japan’s conquest of Manchuria in 1931 was a harbinger of worse things to come. Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany was particularly worrisome, both politically and militarily. Fascism, or what Moscow perceived as such, spread like wildfire, judging by the ascendance of new-model conservative and reactionary forces in Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece, and Portugal, as well as the Baltic countries, including Poland. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in October 1935, a move which was condoned by London and Paris and diverted attention from Hitler’s unilateral reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936. In November Berlin and Tokyo signed the Anti-Comintern and Anti-Soviet Pact, to which Rome adhered the following year, in keeping with Mussolini’s tried and true anti-Communism. In the meantime, in July 1936 General Franco’s uprising against Spain’s republican government rallied not only the political support of all Spanish right-wing parties and the Catholic Church but also the military cooperation of Germany, Italy, and Portugal. The Pope’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, which criticized the Third Reich’s treatment of the Church without condemning National Socialism, was nothing as virulent as his Divini redemptoris, condemning atheist Communism.

The Soviet Union was not totally blameless for this raging destabilization of the world system. Apart from having unintentionally helped Hitler’s rise to power with the Comintern’s campaign against German Social Democracy prior to 1933, with their terrorist repression at home the Soviets vindicated the anti-Communism of Fascists as well as conservatives and moderate democrats. Overall, however, Moscow was on the defensive and terrified by the prospect of being left to stand alone against, above all, Germany and Japan. Pushed by foreign Communists, notably French and Italian, Stalin and his associates in 1934 changed Comintern policy from fighting “social fascists” to pressing for hybrid popular and united fronts in the outside world, but with Soviet Russia’s security needs taking precedence over class warfare.

Stalin must have realized that it was not Comintern stratagems but Soviet diplomacy that would be decisive. Eager to break out of Russia’s isolation, he looked for a rapprochement with the Western democracies. France promised to be most receptive.95 As much as Moscow, Paris was looking for a continental counterweight to the bellicose Third Reich. In addition, the fascist danger had precipitated Europe’s pioneering Popular Front in France, first in the streets of the French capital in 1934–35 and then with the formation of the government of Léon Blum in 1936. To be sure, the Franco-Russian mutual security pact of 1935 was stillborn. Still, Stalin and Maxim Litvinov, his commissar of foreign affairs, were agreed that in the short run Paris, not London, was critical for putting Berlin under restraint. Although it backfired, the Soviet intervention in Spain was intended primarily to improve relations with France. Admittedly, London deterred Paris from intervening in support of the Loyalists. But Blum was no less held back by the moderate reformists in his own coalition as well as France’s traditional conservatives, the same forces which had scuttled the Franco-Soviet pact in 1935. In any case, Stalin’s intervention in the distant Iberian peninsula was not a self-confident and sly move to expand Soviet power and spread the Communist ideology. Rather, it was a frantic but risky bid for allies by the worried governors of a militarily endangered great power. Not unlike Napoleon, Stalin contracted a bleeding and debilitating “ulcer” in Spain, except that his ulcer gangrened to become fiercely ideological and moral, not military: the cold-blooded torment of Trotskyites, syndicalists, and anarchists on the ground as well as of blameless Soviet officers, advisors, and agents after their return home.

Domestic and foreign affairs were interlocked, and there was no debating them separately. In the mid-1930s the far “left” at home and abroad became fiercely critical of Stalin’s new international course. The Comintern’s call for a popular front recognizing no enemies on the left and Litvinov’s pursuit of collective security through the League of Nations were denounced for undermining revolutionary internationalism. The charge was that instead of adding fuel to the general crisis in the capitalist world and exploiting it for the proletarian cause, Moscow was helping to dampen it as part of the strategy to reassure the Western powers. For the “left” critics Stalin’s diplomacy, soon including his military intervention in Spain, was of a piece with his domestic policy, which they scorned for being ever more Thermidorean “in spirit if not in practice.”96 It is difficult to say whether considerations of world or domestic politics weighed heavier in Stalin’s decision to step up the terror as he perceived himself to be under growing partisan fire for both. His failure to prevail on the Western democracies to reverse their appeasement of Hitler at Russia’s expense is bound to have deepened his predicament, if not bewilderment.

The first of the great show trials, in August 1936, opens the most horrifying and inscrutable chapter in the life of the Bolshevik regime and Stalin’s reign. In comparing the “mutual slaughter” of the French revolutionaries and those of Russia, one difference stands out above all others.⁹⁷ In the time of the Great Revolution the terror of the guillotine started some few years after 1789; it was over within fourteen months; and the “centrist” rule of Robespierre, following the elimination of first the “left” and then the “right” Mountain, lasted less than four months. By contrast, “the Bolshevik regime was nearing the close of its second decade without showing signs of Jacobin-like insanity.” Of course “there was no lack of terror in the years of the [Russian] civil war,” as there had been during the French civil war. But the Bolsheviks, unlike the Jacobins, “did not execute their Girondins.” They either “allowed … the most eminent spokesmen of Menshevism … to leave or … exiled [them] from Russia after their party had been banned.” Although “a handful” of the Mensheviks who stayed behind were imprisoned, most of them, “reconciling themselves to defeat, loyally served in the Soviet administration and even on the staff of leading Bolsheviks.” The pattern of repression was essentially the same with the Socialist Revolutionaries.

Apparently the “Russian Mountain, having spared the lives of its Girondins,” was not about to “wallow in the blood of its own leaders.” Indeed, even in the early 1930s “the story was still current among Bolsheviks that at the outset … their leaders had … [sworn] never to set the guillotine into motion against one another.” It seems that having “pondered” the French example, Stalin repeatedly said that it “deterred him from resorting to the most drastic means of repression.” In the mid-1920s, when Zinoviev and Kamenev “demanded blood” against Trotsky, Stalin objected that “chopping off [heads] and blood-letting … were dangerous and infectious: you chop off one head today, another one tomorrow, still another on the day after—in the end what will be left of the party?”98 In 1929, when Trotsky was exiled from Russia, “it was still inconceivable that Trotsky should be imprisoned, let alone put before the firing squad.”

When the French Revolution devoured its own children it did so with an unremittingly “blind but still fresh passion.” The Russian Revolution, for its part, took this turn only after “its lava … seems to have cooled down.” Unlike the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks had elements of a pre-established program and organization, which meant that rather than “being part of the revolutionary flux” they were able to control it and resist “the irrational urges inherent in a despotism … issued from revolution.” When they finally “succumbed to … the gods that were athirst [after having withstood] them for nearly two decades, [the] prostration of the Bolsheviks was even more frightful than that of the Jacobins.” Ultimately, this controlled premeditation, “no less than the confessions … which contrasted so sharply with the proud and defiant behavior of most of the Jacobin leaders in the dock, made Stalin’s purge trials appear even more mystifying than Robespierre’s ‘amalgams.’ ”

Certainly Stalin must have approved the first great show trial, that of sixteen eminent Bolsheviks, including Kamenev and Zinoviev, in August 1936. Patently political, this trial resorted to “legal forms for extra-legal purposes” and fused “law and terror.”99 Although it was public and publicized, it crudely transgressed judicial rules and practices. There was no presumption of innocence and no hard evidence to support the indictment; the accused were denied legal counsel. They were arraigned for belonging to a Trotsky-Zinoviev United Center that ostensibly was planning to assassinate Soviet leaders. Kirov’s murder was said to have been their dress rehearsal. Straining for a semblance of plausibility, the prosecutor made Trotsky’s subversive intrigues the gravamen of his charge. Primarily through Lev Sedov, his son, Trotsky was alleged to have carried on a correspondence with oppositionists inside the Soviet Union as well as maintained personal contacts with them abroad.¹⁰⁰ Although Trotsky was not “blameless in life and pure of crime,” and doubtless looked to unseat Stalin, the polemical pamphlet, not the Trojan horse, was his preferred weapon. Still, though Vyshinsky’s charge was trumped up, it impressed those credulous souls who presume that there is no smoke without fire. In any case, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and most of the other defendants, the majority of whom were one-time followers of Trotsky, in open court confessed their complicity in Kirov’s assassination and their ties to a so-called “Terrorist Center.” For all one knows, at the outset the defendants could not imagine that they might, in fact, be put to the sword. Zinoviev and Kamenev had been tried once before, and until 1936 oppositionists of most persuasions and factions had been spared though marginalized. But this time Stalin crossed the Rubicon. All sixteen were executed on August 24, 1936, followed by the arrest and execution of two score suspected sympathizers.

The transition from the relative political moderation of the three good years to the unbounded repression of the infamous years was completed when Ezhov became chief of the NKVD. Since the late 1920s he had occupied several high posts in party and government. In 1935, in a position paper submitted to Stalin, Ezhov had argued that the Trotskyites at home and abroad were aware that Zinoviev’s “counterrevolutionary band” had chosen “terror as the weapon in [its] battle against the party and working class.” A member of the Central Committee, he followed up this text with a circular to local party organs asserting that the collaboration of Trotskyites and Zinovievites was premised on their agreement that “terror directed at party and state leaders [was] the only and decisive means to gain power.”101 In any event, Stalin acted with his eyes wide open when, on September 25, 1936, he notified the Politburo of the “absolute necessity and urgency to appoint Comrade Ezhov to the post of People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs,” to replace Genrykh Iagoda, whom he held responsible for “the OGPU being four years behind … in bringing to light the Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc.”¹⁰²

In their forced confessions Zinoviev and Kamenev had intimated that they had sympathizers among former right-oppositionists, thereby unintentionally contributing to spreading the net of suspicion. In September Karl Radek was arrested and Tomsky committed suicide. Three months later Ezhov told the Central Committee that leading rightists, including Bukharin and Rykov, “completely shared [the] aims” of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite center. Presently Bukharin was summoned to explain himself to the Central Committee. He firmly denied any wrongdoing or any familiarity, let alone complicity, with either Riutin or the subversive terrorist center at the same time that he commended the party for its vigilance. Bukharin expressed relief that these nefarious activities were being uncovered before the inevitable and approaching war, adding that “now we can win.” Even if unwittingly, and with the execution of the sixteen weighing on him, Bukharin vindicated the reasons and charges of the persecuting prosecution, only to become its star victim a year later, in March 1938.¹⁰³

The second major political trial was held during the last week of January 1937. Piatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov, and fourteen other high party officials were in the dock. In the late 1920s nearly all of them had been expelled from the party for supporting Trotsky, only to be readmitted in the early 1930s and appointed to important positions. Procedurally this trial was no different from the first, except that the authorities now resorted to physical and psychological torture to break the defendants, and have them confess publicly. The indictment, however, had a new tonality. In addition to being accused of conspiring to assassinate party leaders as part of an “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center,” the seventeen were charged not only with the sabotage and “wrecking” of planned industrialization and collectivization but also, or above all, with espionage in the service of Germany and Japan. The burden of the presentment was that the accused were sapping the Soviet Union’s economic and military strength in a time of intense foreign dangers. All seventeen were found guilty, and thirteen were executed.

This obsession with foreign dangers also weighed on the next plenum of the Central Committee in late February and early March 1937, to which Bukharin had been summoned. Its backdrop was Moscow’s lone intervention in Spain, the Anti-Comintern Pact, and the Western democracies’ continuing appeasement of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. Molotov took the floor first, with a report entitled “The Lessons of Wrecking, Diversion, and Espionage of the Japanese-German-Trotskyite Agents.”104 When grilling Bukharin before his peers, Molotov interjected that “if you don’t confess, that will prove you’re a fascist hireling.”¹⁰⁵ Ezhov struck the same note in his “Lessons Flowing from the Harmful Activity, Diversion, and Espionage of the Japanese-German-Trotskyite Agents.” He accused Bukharin of knowing of the treasonous Trotskyite conspiracy, whose “threads … extended farther than originally thought.”¹⁰⁶ Stressing the importance of taking account of the links between foreign treason and domestic subversion, Stalin criticized party leaders for not “paying attention to such things as the international position of the Soviet Union, capitalist encirclement, strengthening political work, struggle against wrecking, etc., supposing all these questions to be second-rate, and even third-rate matters.”¹⁰⁷

No matter how crude and contrived the charges, the perceived logic of the world situation gave them a ring of plausibility, all the more so since a time of troubles was inherently conducive to conspiratorial thinking among masses and classes alike. Indeed, when espousing the paralogism of the plot, Stalin and his votaries may have been as artless and unstudied as they were cunning and calculating.

If anything, the Tukhachevsky affair at once attested and reinforced the conspiratorial ambience and pretense. Hero of the civil war and Russo-Polish war, as well as modernizer of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky was probably the best known and most popular military leader in the armed forces and the party. He was chief of staff and deputy commissar of war when he was promoted to candidate member of the Central Committee in 1934 and Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935. On May 1, 1937, he “stood by Stalin’s side at the Lenin Mausoleum reviewing the May Day parade.”108 In the heavy atmosphere of the time it must have been shocking and disquieting to learn from the press, on May 11, that Tukhachevsky had been removed from office and, a month later, that he and seven high-ranking generals had been arrested, judged, and executed for treason and espionage for Germany. Tried by a summary court-martial, behind closed doors, Tukhachevsky was severely tortured before he confessed.

Since Tukhachevsky and other officers were mentioned during the proceedings of the recent show trials, it is tempting to argue that Stalin meant to eliminate them for the same ostensible crimes as the members of so-called Trotskyite centers. But the alleged conspiracy of the military leaders seems altogether more complex, and it is also more difficult to dismiss out of hand.

Four theses can be distinguished. The first holds that Tukhachevsky headed a generals’ plot, without foreign connections, to remove Stalin and substitute military for civilian rule. According to a second thesis, Nazi Germany’s secret services planted forged evidence of a Tukhachevsky-led generals’ conspiracy with a view to panic Stalin into eliminating the Red Army’s chief officers, including its most talented and daunting general. In a third construction, an émigré White general hatched the idea of a Tukhachevsky plot with links to the Wehrmacht, and inveigled German intelligence services into feeding it to Moscow, his objective being to avenge Tukhachevsky’s apostasy to the Red Army after 1917. The fourth suggests that once rumors of disloyalty in the military reached Stalin, he seized on them to spread his terror to the army and to prepare the ground for a rapprochement with Berlin by “placating the Germans … by destroying his best military officers.”¹⁰⁹

In any event, Stalin could not completely rule out a generals’ plot, all the more worrisome in light of yesteryear’s covert collaboration between senior Soviet and German officers. There is also the likelihood that by unduly crediting and stretching the evidence, Ezhov reinforced Stalin’s foreboding of “a vast [military] conspiracy against him” and bolstered his resolve “to root it out.”¹¹⁰ Even a less hardened tyrant than Stalin, harried by insuperable problems at home and abroad, would have been shaken by flying rumors of a possible fronde in the supreme command of his armed forces, which is not to say that he would have reacted as ferociously as he did. To make matters worse, the conspiracy was presumed to be headed by the premier general of the army, who alone among “all the military leaders of that time … showed a resemblance to the original Bonaparte and could have played the Russian First Consul.”111 Even though Soviet advisors, pilots, and arms were engaged in Spain at the time of the Tukhachevsky affair and the ensuing military purge, nothing suggests that Stalin wanted to be his own Napoleon. Incidentally, little is known about Tukhachevsky’s position on the intervention in support of the Spanish Republic.

Among the officers who perished in the furiously unfolding military purge, not a few, after fighting in the Russo-Polish war, had risen to top commands. All the marshals of the Red Army, except Budenny and Voroshilov, were executed. An estimated 20,000 to 35,000 army officers and 5,000 to 6,000 air force officers, or one-fourth to over half of the officers of these two branches, were expelled from the party and cashiered. In 1937–39 8,785 army officers and 892 air force officers who were “discharged for political reasons or arrested were returned to their posts, … leaving a total of 24,624 in both branches, whose fate is unknown.”¹¹² It is still unclear how many of the officers “whose fate is unknown … remained in the Gulag; how many were [acquitted and] freed but not reinstated in the army”; or how many were executed. Although not all were shot or imprisoned, the purge was at once massive and bloody.¹¹³ Officers in politically sensitive field commands or administrative posts were disproportionately at risk. As a matter of course, in May 1937 the civil war practice of assigning political commissars to military commands was reinstated.¹¹⁴

The radical purge in the military was part of the Ezhovshchina—in reality the Stalinshchina¹¹⁵—in polity and society at large. Indeed, “to the extent that the terror expanded to become ‘great,’ it did so now,” following Tukhachevsky’s execution, and not before. This was the time that, instructed by Stalin and the Politburo, Ezhov fixed on wholly arbitrary categories of perpetrators of past and present transgressions, to be subjected to arbitrary punishment. The NKVD had nearly complete license for the selection of victims. As for the objectives of this excessively excessive terror that was utterly disproportionate to any imaginable purpose, they remain mysterious: the completion of a system of “totalitarian” terror giving rise to a reign of fear pointed against largely imaginary enemies; or the intensification of a functional terror against largely real enemies at the expense of innocents. But then again, perhaps there was no fixed purpose, and the Ezhovshchina, including the open political trials and the closed military trial of Tukhachevsky, was in the nature of an “explosion of madness or [panic] fear” in the highest reaches of an unhinged and intractable party and state, embodied in Stalin.116

Ezhov’s instructions divided suspects “into two categories, the one marked for execution and the other for [internal] exile,” a quota being set for each. He stipulated that in 1937 in the two largest oblasts of Moscow and Leningrad, respectively, 5,000 and 4,000 “were to be shot,” and 30,000 and 10,000 “exiled.” Ezhov also fixed at 10,000 the number of inmates to “be executed in the labor camps.” The NKVD set a total of “72,950 executions and 177,500 exiles” for the country as a whole. In January 1938 Stalin personally “approved an additional 48,000 executions and 9,200 exiles in 22 jurisdictions.” With local NKVD branches free “to raise or lower the numbers,” arrests ran considerably higher than originally fixed by the center. It appears that in 1937–38 all told the maximum number of people “arrested on all charges” was 2.5 million, while “[t]he number shot ‘was more likely a question of hundreds of thousands rather than of millions.’ ”¹¹⁷ The ravages were most devastating in the higher and highest reaches of the political class. Seventy percent of the members of the Central Committee elected in 1934 were sent to the Gulag or executed, and so were 50 percent of the delegates of the 1934 Party Congress, as well as 80 percent of the sitting Central Committee and 30 percent of People’s Commissars. Between 1934 and 1939 party membership was reduced by 36 percent. In the government, the purge struck savagely at the upper echelons of Gosplan and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, in which “a minimum of 62 percent … of the top officials … who served in the 1920s … fell in the Terror.” To the extent that the Great Terror’s primary aim was to put in fear the inner circles of power rather than the population at large, it is emblematic that “except for Stalin, every member of the Politburo who had served under Lenin was destroyed, including Trotsky, who was murdered by an NKVD agent in Mexico in 1940.”¹¹⁸

The third and last great political trial marked at once the crest and reflux of the Ezhovshchina. From March 2 to 13, 1938, Bukharin, Rykov, Iagoda, and eighteen others were tried as affiliates of a “Right-Trotskyite Bloc.” They stood accused of a composite of the charges preferred at the 1936 and 1937 trials, except that those relating to the economic, military, and diplomatic subversion and weakening of the Soviet Union in favor of foreign powers weighed even more heavily than heretofore. All of the defendants had occupied leading positions in party and state, and most of them had been actively involved in the internecine political struggles of the past decade.

Probably this third trial had greater resonance than the first two because Bukharin was among the accused. Of all the old Bolsheviks his standing was the most irreproachable. Intermittently member of the Central Committee of the Politburo and of the executive committee of the Comintern, as well as editor of Pravda and Izvestia, Bukharin was also, in Lenin’s judgment, the party’s “most brilliant and valuable theoretician.”119 As noted, Bukharin fully sided with Stalin against the Left opposition and Trotsky before opposing him during the Great Turn to planned industrialization and collectivization, which led to his being attacked as the leader of a Right Opposition. At the same time the Great Depression, by invalidating his analysis of the staying power of capitalist stabilization, somewhat attenuated his theoretical renown. Although excluded from the Politburo and the executive of the Comintern, from 1929 to 1932 he still occupied important if not commanding positions in two economic commissariats and continued to edit Pravda until he was forced to leave it for Izvestia in 1934. However, following his implication in the alleged crimes before the first two show trials, Bukharin was completely frozen out of politics. Also, under pressure and disoriented, he gave contradictory testimony. It took another year for him to be brought to trial. In the meantime, on December 10, 1937, he wrote to Stalin, his nemesis, from prison to ask that he be allowed “either to work at some cultural task in Siberia or to emigrate to America, where he would be a faithful Soviet citizen and would ‘beat Trotsky and company in the snout.’ ” But should he have to die, he pleaded that “it be from an overdose of morphine, not by shooting.”¹²⁰

At the trial Bukharin and Nikolai Krestinsky sparred with the prosecution, but to no avail. Under relentless compulsion, including threats to their loved ones, they and their codefendants confessed, and most of them, including Bukharin, were executed instantly, while those sentenced to prison terms paid with their lives at a later date.

The three pseudo-trials and Tukhachevsky’s court-martial were the controlled part of the Great Terror, which had otherwise veered out of control and developed “a momentum of its own,” perhaps to the point of “endanger[ing] the system itself.”121 By the time of the third trial there were rising criticisms within the party of the excesses and mistakes of the Ezhovshchina. These were first formally voiced at the plenum of the purged Central Committee in January 1938. They also made their way into the press, and there were individual remonstrances. In the course of the year the generalized and arbitrary Great Purge was curbed in favor of a return to the limited and essentially nonviolent intra-party purges of the 1920s and early 1930s. Arrests, tortures, and executions decreased radically: conditions improved in the prisons and camps; the NKVD’s security police was put under restraint; and the autonomy of the judiciary began to make its mark. In November 1938 the Central Committee cashiered Ezhov, as both a gesture of appeasement and an act of self-exoneration; and before long he was arrested and executed.

At the Eighteenth Party Congress, meeting in Moscow from March 10 to 21, 1939, Stalin declared that the fight against internal enemies had run its course and that the “edge” of the security services was “no longer turned to the inside of the country, but to the outside, against external enemies.”¹²² It may well be that he and his closest associates concluded that the disruptions and rancors stemming from the Ezhovshchina needed to be reduced if they were not to impede the call to arms against the foreign enemy. The castigation and proscription of internal enemies was about to be replaced by the exaltation of army and fatherland as Russia was forced to prepare to fight a defensive war, the polar opposite of a military crusade to spread Communism abroad. Hereafter the difficult refoundation of Russia would be fraught primarily with the Furies of foreign war rather than domestic terror.

The Great Terror of the 1930s defies explanation, let alone comprehension, and divergent interpretations, old and new, will generate critical debate till the end of time. In one reading, Stalin knowingly “sent thousands to their death and tens and hundreds of thousands into prisons and concentration camps,” determined to “destroy the men capable of forming an alternative government.” No matter how exaggerated his estimate and fear of political rivals and their potential support, Stalin struck all precincts of the party-state to prevent any opposition from coalescing, in the process building a new political class loyal to him.123 Another thesis, which also slights foreign dangers, denies the existence of any “active organized opposition.” Insisting that the collapse of significant resistance is the essential precondition for total(itarian) terror, it holds that in resorting to it Stalin was at best marginally “concerned with known or suspected opponents.” Ultimately the Great Terror “ ‘punished’ [for] ‘objective’ reasons …, independently of any subjective guilt,” with both the accuser and victim knowing not only “that the victim was innocent” but that he could never have committed any of the “crimes” imputed to him.¹²⁴

In reality, starting with the Great Turn, and judging by the Riutin affair, Stalin and his inner circle considered the internal opposition to be both “real and dangerous,” in part because they presumed it to be bound up with escalating international perils. No doubt Stalin conflated the threat to his personal leadership with the threat to the Soviet regime and Russian state. But no matter how intense his disquiet and smoldering his mistrust, in the second half of the 1930s Stalin acted “with great self-control” and was guided by “clear-cut political … considerations and calculations.”¹²⁵

In another construction, the Furies of 1936–38 were neither an expression of “the uncontested power of an omnipotent dictatorship” nor the “triumphant and carefully planned extermination campaign of a master strategist thirsting for vengeance and absolute power and executed by monolithic and obedient [security] operatives.”¹²⁶ Indeed, it can be argued that the Great Terror was at once cause and effect of a polity and society with multiple and severe strains between rival governing factions, between Thermidoreans and true believers, and between an overstrained center and refractory periphery. The resulting distempers were magnified by the deficiencies of the party-state’s administrative structures and cadres: far and wide the ouster or withdrawal of the old elites had left a vacuum inviting bureaucratic conceit and arbitrariness by unfitted officials of untried local security agencies and judicial organs. To the extent that the Great Terror was the ultima ratio of an unbending but insecure regime, its “implementation was chaotic, uncontrolled, and manipulated by nearly all the [party-state’s] dignitaries.” In sum, the Stalinshchina was anything but a logical system with a coherent purpose: it unfolded and raged in an “atmosphere of panic … reminiscent of the European witch hunts, lynchings in the American South, or McCarthyism.”127

It is, of course, difficult to gauge the extent and intensity of the fear generated by the Great Terror. It is not unreasonable to suggest, however, that “to say that all, or probably even the majority, were terrorized is as incorrect for the USSR [even] in the second half of the 1930s as it is for Germany at the same time.” Just as in the Third Reich “voluntary support was considerably more important … than coercion,” in Soviet Russia factors other than fear “were more important in securing popular compliance.”¹²⁸

At the height of the Great Terror Stalin was, in the first place, concerned with maintaining and reinforcing the regime’s whip hand over the elite.¹²⁹ As noted, the great trials struck at the top, not the bottom, of the pyramid. Besides, the unmasking of the misdeeds and deceits of public officials, near and far, corresponded with the ordinary people’s predisposition “to lend credence to the regime’s propaganda about the subversive activities of [domestic] plotters and foreign agents.” In an as yet heavily traditional society buffeted by a whirlwind of change it was not uncommon for people to “attribute [their] everyday misfortunes to the activities of evil spirits” and to “suspect office holders of plotting against them.”¹³⁰

Incongruously, Stalin was neither a Thermidorean nor a Man on Horseback. He was, if not a revolutionary, a radical modernizer, as much by necessity as by choice. Russia’s “revolution from above” was unlike Germany’s in 1918–19, when Social Democrats and left liberals had effectuated a radical reform of political institutions, leaving economy, society, and judiciary essentially unaltered. Stalin, to the contrary, steeled the new political regime for a central role in an all-out economic, social, and military transformation. During the 1930s Russia became a major industrial power, with gigantic metallurgical complexes, hydroelectric power stations, and tractor plants. In sheer volume, but not quality, heavy-industry production caught up with Germany, Great Britain, and France. The number of industrial workers jumped from less than 3 million to over 8 million, and the urban population rose by almost 30 million. At the same time, in economic weight the industrial sector outstripped the agricultural sector, in which Russia’s 25 million individual production units were regrouped in 240,000 collective farms.

The social costs of this hurried modernization were, of course, egregious: housing was woefully insufficient and unsanitary; workers, including the women who rushed into the labor force, labored long hours; wages and living standards were all but stagnant; and consumer goods remained scarce. Clearly, the party-state’s socialization of property and throttling of the free market did not short-circuit the “primitive capital accumulation” on the back of the working class at a time that the peasantry was also being squeezed to help finance industrialization. Indeed, with collectivization having met with less economic success—and more resistance—than industrialization, peasants would have been as indigent as workers, had it not been for the food they wrested from their family plots.

But there was the other side. In the city and, to a lesser extent, in the countryside, the educational system developed rapidly at all levels, fostering upward social mobility alongside advancement by geographic relocation and on-the-job training. As a matter of course, the hothouse growth of industry and city, of party and state bureaucracy, demanded and furthered the expansion of technical and professional cadres drawn from more modest social origins than under the old regime. It is an index of this trend that between 1934 and 1939 the party admitted or recruited at least as many members as it purged.

Clearly the situation was simultaneously closed and open, terrifying and full of promise. At the same time that “party and state leaders were being arrested as ‘enemies of the people’ new schools, factories, and palaces of culture were rising everywhere; while military leaders were being arrested as spies … the Party was building a strong modern army; while scientists were being arrested as wreckers … Soviet science … developed rapidly with the Party’s support; while writers were being arrested as Trotskyites and counterrevolutionaries … some literary works appeared that were real masterpieces; and while leaders in the minor republics were being arrested as nationalists … the formerly oppressed nationalities were improving their lot.” This “obvious progress” could not help but “engender confidence in the Party that was organizing it and the man who stood at its head.”131 Besides, if the inevitable social, political, and cultural discontents did not explode, it was on account not only of fear of the NKVD but of the continuing hold of the Communist promise, the absence of a credible programmatic alternative, and the cementing force of foreign dangers.

The heightened danger of war, shamelessly used to fuel the campaign against domestic enemies, was only too real. Especially as of 1936, the Allied appeasement of the Axis powers, without the least regard for Soviet Russia, quickened Stalin’s sense of diplomatic and military encirclement. For all one knows, in his predicament he recalled the foreboding, in 1907, of Alexander Bogdanov, then still a Bolshevik, that by reason of the hostility of the outside world the first socialist state “would be profoundly and lastingly distorted by the many years of its besieged condition, of unavoidable terror, and of a military regime.”132

Almost from the outset the Bolsheviks could do no more than play on the conflicts of interest among the great powers, beginning with the treaties of Brest-Litovsk (1918) and Rapallo (1922), followed by the Franco-Soviet Pact (1935). Moscow’s intervention in Spain was yet another futile and self-defeating attempt to make a breach in the cordon sanitaire. The Kremlin seemed helpless in the face of an international situation that went from bad to worse. In March 1938 Nazi Germany “annexed” Austria. On Russia’s European doorsteps, the governments of Poland and Rumania, not unlike those of the Baltic republics, turned further to the right and reinforced their pro-Western, or anti-Soviet, orientation. Along its “far eastern” borders, Japan continued its rampage in Manchuria with complete impunity. The appeasement of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan reached its climax with the Munich conference of September 29, 1938, at which Britain and France agreed to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Prague being forced to cede the Sudetenland to Berlin. Six months later, in March 1939, the Third Reich liquidated the rest of Czechoslovakia: Bohemia-Moravia became a German protectorate; Slovakia a sham independent state. Overnight, England and France pledged military support for Poland, Rumania, and Greece in case of attack.

All this time the Allies disdainfully ignored Moscow, and there was no denying that Stalin had suffered a stinging and humiliating diplomatic defeat: neither the policy of collective security nor the intervention in Spain had brought about an opening to the Western powers.

Seven weeks after the Wehrmacht marched into Prague, Molotov replaced Litvinov, the agent and symbol of Moscow’s spurned courtship of Paris and London.133 The appointment of Stalin’s closest associate as foreign commissar was a signal that Soviet foreign policy was being reappraised. Not that the Kremlin, embarrassed and indecisive, considered the appeasement of Britain and France beyond recall. But the mutual distrust between Soviets and Allies, dating from 1918–20, was undiminished, with each side suspecting the other of seeking to provoke or incite Hitler to turn, first, against the other. Besides, whereas the Allies had little confidence in the Red Army, especially after its purge, Moscow doubted the political will and military capability of London and Paris to make good their eleventh-hour pledge to stand by Poland, the gateway to Russia. At any rate, Molotov now pressed the Allies to change their unilateral guarantee to Warsaw and Bucharest into a multilateral military alliance. London in particular hesitated to brace a new-model Triple Entente with a binding military commitment. The governors of Poland and Rumania would not agree to Russian troops crossing their borders to engage the Wehrmacht further west, and the Allies were loath to high-pressure them as they had high-pressured Czechoslovakia, albeit in a different logic.

It was while these cross-grained and erratic negotiations were deadlocked between July 24 and August 12, 1939, that the Kremlin made its first overtures to Berlin, which all this time continued its contacts with London and Paris. Disquieted by the prevarication of the Allies, the Soviets became increasingly anxious about the security of their western frontier. Poland was of infinitely greater strategic importance than Czechoslovakia: bordering on Russia, it was the hinge of the buffer zone running from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In the international arena Stalin and Molotov were dealing from weakness and fear, not strength and self-assurance. If they found a receptive ear in the German capital, it was largely because, not entirely unbeknown to them, Hitler was determined to break Poland before the onset of winter. Not about to risk another Munich-like debacle, the Kremlin meant to keep the Axis and the Allies from coming to an agreement much as the Allies were looking to block a rapprochement between Moscow and Berlin. Stalin and Molotov were still creatures and masters of the unfinished refoundation of Russia. But at this perilous juncture they were, above all, practitioners of real- and machtpolitik.

There is, of course, a radically different interpretation of Moscow’s diplomacy, which gives absolute primacy to Stalin’s ideological intention and thirst for personal power. In this alternate reading, framed with the concept of totalitarianism, the Soviet and Nazi regimes are cut of the same cloth: with Stalin and Hitler as all-powerful leaders, the political, social, and cultural structures and dynamics of both systems are all but identical. Both are considered as inherently bent on unlimited expansion, essential to bolster and maintain total domination.134 The Vozhd and the Führer are seen as enemy brothers, the one determined on a Drang nach Westen, the other on a Drang nach Osten, seeking the military subjection of neighboring states as stepping stones to the mastery first of Europe, then the world. Moscow and Berlin are presumed alike in their resolve to tear apart bourgeois democracy and western civilization, each with the intent of establishing, by force of arms, a new transnational order based on the guiding principle, respectively, of class and race.

In this interpretation, from before the Great Turn, Stalin was sworn to execute Lenin’s warrant to revolutionize the Continent, as prefigured by the military offensive toward Warsaw in 1920. Admittedly, the road to the Soviet-Nazi Pact was twisted. But it kept moving forward, with Stalin relentlessly seeking to embroil the capitalist nations in a mutually devastating war certain to seed the ground for the spread of Communist regimes across Europe and overseas. Supposedly the Kremlin worked within this logic when blinking at Hitler’s rise to power and, thereafter, when cynically contriving and exploiting the appeals of antifascism to serve the interests of the Soviet state and elite by infiltrating and subverting nations far and wide. In keeping with this reason, Stalin is said to have rushed arms production not to bolster Russia’s security but to strengthen his expansionist hand. At last, in August 1939, he took advantage of the looked-for, if unexpected, opportunity to divide and conquer the crisis-torn capitalist world. In sum, Molotov’s last-minute negotiations with the Western powers were a calculated deception, all the more so since allegedly not Berlin but Moscow pressed for a deal which entailed Stalin’s premeditated seizure of Eastern Europe, way station to the rest of the Continent.135

The unreality of this retrovision from a frozen and narrowly western cold-war perspective shuts out the grim reality of the Phony Peace of 1938–39: the Axis powers were the aggressors, and Hitler had a relatively rigid timetable for spreading Berlin’s dominion over Europe. Presently Stalin, like Chamberlain and Daladier before him, sought to avoid or postpone war with Germany, eager for a breathing spell to further military preparedness.

In any case, the Third Reich was primed to liquidate Poland in the manner of Czechoslovakia, only more nakedly so. Even in the unlikely event the French army launched an attack on Germany’s fortified western frontier, it would lack the striking power and the time to keep the Wehrmacht from overrunning Poland up to Russia’s border. Deeply apprehensive about continuing isolation in the face of Germany’s impending move to the east, Stalin and Molotov decided to entertain Joachim von Ribbentrop’s insistent offer to pay for the Kremlin’s momentary neutrality with strategically valuable territories.

With the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact of August 23 Moscow and Berlin agreed not to attack each other for ten years, nor to aid a third party that might attack either of them. This unexceptional if startling compact was coupled with an unseasonable secret protocol dividing the ill-starred eastern European rimland—prized by all geopoliticians of pre-atomic times—into two spheres of influence: Soviet Russia secured hegemony over eastern Poland, Bessarabia, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia; Nazi Germany over western Poland and Lithuania. With a stroke of the pen, Stalin and Hitler nullified the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Riga, as well as Versailles. Above all, the imprudently overexpanded Third Poland was about to pay the price of a fourth partition for having willingly, nay zealously, served as the linchpin of both the Paris Peace Settlement and the cordon sanitaire.

Unlike the Allies, Hitler was in a position to offer both time and space: he yielded lands which he himself coveted for the Thousand-Year Reich, confident that he could reclaim them, at will, from a militarily weak, politically unsteady, and racially blighted Soviet regime. Having robbed the Allies of the strategic advantage which had emboldened them in 1914, Hitler expected them to back down and leave Poland at his mercy. When they stood firm, he invaded Poland on September 1, confident that, in the short run, he need not worry about an Allied attack in the west.

As for Stalin, by averting and deflecting war, even if only for a short while, he got a reprieve to improve Moscow’s military preparedness in anticipation of a later reckoning. By virtue of the secret protocol, he held the “deployment positions of the German armies as far to the west as possible,”136 as several of his senior generals demanded. Predictably, although they declared war on Germany and stepped up rearmament, the Allies took no military action. Bound by a dated defensive mentality and war plan, the French high command marshaled its forces behind the Maginot Line, while across the Channel conscription was barely getting under way. By September 17, 1939, with German troops racing eastward, but ten days before Warsaw’s surrender, Stalin sent the Red Army into eastern Poland to at once test and turn to use the letter and spirit of the Russo-German compact. He made a point of occupying “only areas taken from Russia by the Poles in the Treaty of Riga and largely inhabited by Ukrainians and Belorussians.”¹³⁷ Before long the Kremlin also forced the three Baltic republics—Berlin having ceded Lithuania to Moscow in exchange for Polish lands between the Vistula and Bug rivers—to agree to Russian bases and garrisons on their soil. The Soviets made the same demand on Finland, looking to facilitate the defense of Leningrad and the northeastern salient. When Helsinki balked, on November 30 at least twenty-five divisions moved into Finland to become mired in an embarrassing and costly three-month winter war, sustaining the outside world’s understandable doubts about the soundness of the Red Army. The Finnish government eventually ceded the Karelian Isthmus and the shores of Lake Ladoga, but remained master in the rest of the country.

Meanwhile the pact between the two sworn ideological enemies struck Europe’s chancelleries and political precincts like a bombshell. It confounded, in particular, millions of Communists as well as millions of sympathizers of Communism and the Soviet Union. In Europe’s united-front left, Stalin’s cold-blooded sectarian policy in Spain had precipitated a certain disquiet and some prominent defections. No doubt this incipient schism would have snowballed had the secret protocol—reminiscent of the cursed secret treaties of before 1917—been known at the time, along with the ravages of Stalin’s terror. But ultimately the disastrous consequences of the democracies’ appeasement of the fascist regimes understandably became the grand justification for turning half a blind eye and embracing the lesser of two evils. This was all the more the case since this Allied diplomacy was widely perceived to be deeply marked by the right-wing politics underlying not only most of the outside world’s unrelenting animosity to the Russian Revolution, but also its heartless management of the Great Depression.

At home Stalin benefited from seemingly having correctly anticipated the international crisis and the urgency to prepare for it by means of an all-out drive to overcome Russia’s dangerous backwardness. Indeed, the cunning of history continued to help Stalin invest the warrant for Socialism in One Country with the fervor of traditional nationalism: by reason of an improbable turn of events, he reestablished Russian control over nearly all the lands ceded after 1917, thereby recovering the strategically critical glacis from Estonia to Bessarabia, along with some 22 million souls, most of them non-Russian. To be sure, his Faustian bargain with Hitler was totally unprincipled. But bearing in mind that Stalin faced a virtual Hobson’s choice in a time of extreme peril, perhaps the Nazi-Soviet Pact “should not be added to [the long] list of [his] errors and crimes.”138 Indeed, though “cold-blooded, it was also … realistic in a high degree, … and it marked the culminating failure of British and French foreign policy and diplomacy over several years.”¹³⁹

Between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Kremlin strained every nerve to put off a German attack as long as possible in order to push the training of troops, the production of weapons, and the fortification of frontier zones. A few weeks after the lightning fall of France in June 1940, Hitler ordered his commanders-in-chief to redeploy the bulk of Germany’s armed forces from west to east, for an all-out assault on Russia in the fall. When his senior generals insisted that there was not enough time to make preparations and defeat the Red Army before the onset of winter, Hitler reluctantly postponed the assault for one season. Eventually the invasion was set for June 22, 1941. Hitler repeatedly boasted that the scale, speed, and ferocity of the onslaught would be such that the world would “hold its breath.” The objective of Operation Barbarossa would be to smash the Red Army, conquer eastern Lebensraum, and extirpate “Judeobolshevism.”140

While Hitler underestimated the Soviet regime and army, as well as the difficulty of the terrain, Stalin kept misjudging Hitler and the dynamics of the Nazi system. In particular, in the spring of 1941 he refused to believe that, notwithstanding the risk of a two-front war, Hitler would strike in June 1941, convinced that the Wehrmacht would not have sufficient time to complete its campaign ahead of Russia’s forbidding weather. Overall, however, his incredulity, in the face of credible and convergent indisputable warnings of an imminent invasion, was of the same order as that of France’s political and military leaders during the Phony War of the year before. By late spring Stalin was “in a state of confusion, anxiety, demoralization, even paralysis.”¹⁴¹ Only at the eleventh hour did he agree to position additional forces further west.

Lately this frontward deployment has been taken as evidence that in reality Stalin, rather than act indecisively and defensively, was preparing to attack Germany some time in 1941–42, upon completion of his military buildup. Accordingly, mid-1941 “was just about the last possible moment for [the Third Reich] to launch and fight a ‘preventive’ war” and it is “left to the imagination to contemplate what would have been the fate of Germany and other European countries if instead of giving the order to attack on June 22 Hitler had waited for Stalin to wage the war of extermination he had planned.”¹⁴² Actually, in the spring of 1941 Stalin probably was at least as bewildered as on the eve of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; and there is nothing to suggest that he and his generals ever envisaged, let alone planned, either to carry Communism to the heart of Europe or to conduct a Barbarossa-like campaign of premeditated conquest, enslavement, and ethnic cleansing.

Meanwhile, between September 1939 and June 1941 the Soviets tightened their grip on their newly annexed territories, particularly on Poland.¹⁴³ Ethnically the Third Poland was severely burdened by the Treaty of Riga: the eastern half had a population of 13 million, of whom over 7 million were Ukrainians, over 3 million Belorussians, and over 1 million Jews. Not surprisingly, unlike the Wehrmacht in German-occupied western Poland, the Red Army was, to a degree, welcomed by these three minorities which, historically, had suffered at the hands of the ruling Polish minority. With some success the Soviets claimed to come as liberators, not conquerors, and here and there they even were met by peasants and workers—led by local Communists and their sympathizers—calling for social and economic reform. But the Kremlin’s primary objective was to establish an efficient civil and military administration, which typically involved repressing resistances and enlisting local “collaborators.”

Military considerations were paramount. The Red Army created fortified positions inland as well as along the new western border, along the Bug river, and it did so with little regard for local norms, interests, and mores. It also looked to foster security behind military lines.

The drive for political control and security was, of course, by far more systematic and violent. The governments of all the Soviet-annexed countries and territories had been at once politically right-wing and diplomatically anti-Soviet, in several instances overtly pro-German. Immediately following the occupation, the Soviet authorities arrested, above all, high and middle-level government officials as well as army and police officers, and many of them, along with landed magnates, were deported to Russia. Apparently on Stalin’s direct order, between 5,000 and 6,000 captured Polish officers were executed, no doubt to cut the ground from under future resistance.

While, for obvious reasons, there were few Jews among these political and military hostages to Fortune, they were disproportionately pounded by the unfolding social-economic sovietization, notably in commerce, banking, and industry. On the other hand, Jews were overrepresented among the collaborators, in that Jews accepted party and government positions, many of them embracing the new regime as the lesser of two evils, all the more so with deadly anti-Semitism ravaging the German half of Poland as part of the Third Reich’s conquering racist fury. Incidentally, with the annexed territories, the Jewish population of the Soviet Union rose from 3 million to over 5 million, or fully one-third of all Jews worldwide. Although popular anti-Judaism persisted, probably exacerbated by Jewish collaboration with the Soviets, there seems not to have been any willful or official anti-Semitic discrimination. Indeed, Stalin’s agents, unlike Hitler’s, were not driven by a cosmic sense of racial and cultural superiority. In the Soviet-occupied territories there was no equivalent of either Reinhard Heydrich or Heinrich Himmler. At the time “the Soviets were … somewhat awed, insecure, and intimidated … [and] their intentions were [neither] vicious [nor] evil.” They applied policies that “were no different from those of the administration at home,” which means that they shared and imposed the everyday “hardships … [and] arbitrariness of power” that were the earmark of their world.144 But above all, Hitler considered his part of Poland a corridor for the conquest of Lebensraum in the east; Stalin considered his part a defensive bulwark.

There was a second and greater wave of arrests and deportations in 1941, not long before the German invasion. With inordinate concern for military security, many thousands of suspects were exiled to the remote Russian interior. All told, during the twenty-two months of the Phony Peace in the east probably close to one million civilians were deported from the Soviet-annexed lands, some to be confined to work camps, others to be resettled. There were nearly 100,000 Jews among them, mostly refugees from western Poland. Because of the terrible conditions of transport and climatic rigors, the suffering and loss of life is bound to have been considerable. Ironically, in the topsy-turvy world of Europe’s most hapless borderland, many of the Jews who were forcibly deported were spared the fires of the Judeocide.

By this time the German half of Poland had become the essential staging ground and logistical base for the ultramodern and superbly equipped army of 3.2 million men which burst into Russia on June 22, 1941. Holding its breath, the world was divided between those who were heartened and those who were terrified by Hitler’s prediction that the Wehrmacht needed do no more than “kick in the door” of Soviet Russia for “the entire rotten structure to come crashing down.” By all odds the old-new Russia should have crumbled, and it nearly did. Stalin had not made optimal use of his play for time to make the armed forces battle-ready, and he had ignored all storm signals. Clearly, he was momentarily unnerved, not to say panic-struck, by the sheer might of the onslaught which tested the logic of his policy and governance since the Great Turn. Compared to the German assault in the west, which had brought down France in less than six weeks, the blitzkrieg in the east, though infinitely more power-packed and furious, soon began to lose momentum and falter, largely because of the handicap of space. In any case, in terms of space-time the Red Army was able to keep falling back to regroup for defense, compelling the Wehrmacht to keep overextending its supply lines as it raced against the meteorological clock. This forced and improvised defense in depth succeeded despite the loss, during the first six months, of half of Russia’s military aircraft, one-third of its capital stock, and one-third of its resource base for grain. Casualties were equally enormous, and the Wehrmacht captured over 2.5 million prisoners. Because of its large demographic reservoir, especially of peasants, the Red Army eventually was able to sacrifice three Russian soldiers for every German soldier.

Of course, there were also less “natural” forces than vast space, ample cannon fodder, and inclement weather to account for the Soviet Union’s staying power in the fall of 1941, and its eventual, if difficult and ruinous, victory. Above all, the defense-oriented forced industrialization of the 1930s provided the sinews of modern warfare, and the technique and experience of planning was invaluable. In addition, Russia’s immemorial culture of discipline and deprivation turned into an inexhaustible fount of civil and moral energy. On July 3, after recovering his iron will, Stalin proclaimed a levée en masse and dictature de détresse—in the spirit of the declaration of total war of August 23, 1793145—in defense of the Fatherland of Socialism: he called for a Great Patriotic War against Fascism, not a revolutionary war or crusade for Communism. In this “war of the entire Soviet people against the German-fascist armies” there could be “no mercy for the enemy,” the rear of the lines would have to be strengthened, “panic-mongers and deserters” would be ruthlessly dealt with, and in case of “forced retreat” the earth would have to be “scorched.”¹⁴⁶ From the start the preplanned and wanton savagery of the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen incited and justified Stalin’s martial terror in what became a quasi-religious life-or-death struggle between the two largest land armies in recorded history.

In bloodletting, brutality, and destruction there was no common measure between the war in the west and that in the east. The latter felt the full brunt of Nazi Germany’s military and genocidal rage: for three years “Barbarossa” was fought on Soviet soil, and it was on the eastern front that the German armies counted four-fifths of their dead, wounded, missing, and prisoners. The USSR suffered between 26 million and 30 million casualties out of a population of 200 million (including the inhabitants of the annexed territories of 1939): over 6 million were killed; some 15 million became invalids or were wounded; and over 4 million were captured or missing, of whom over one-half were slaughtered or died. The 900-day siege of Leningrad, which was wrenched by cannibalism, cost about one million civilian dead and half of Russia’s total war dead were civilians. These miseries and disasters of war were compounded by colossal material damage. In this unthinkable total war Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Black Sea region were all but laid waste. With both sides scorching the earth, 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages were leveled, and so were close to 32,000 industrial enterprises. Countless bridges, roads, and railway tracks were destroyed, and the loss of livestock and draft animals was no less massive.

Evidently the Soviet Union paid a monstrous and crippling price for its narrow brush with catastrophe but eventual triumph. Even so, not altogether unexceptionally, the uphill war rallied the people around Stalin and the Soviet leaders, who unfurled the flag of time-honored patriotism and Orthodoxy. It also fostered the legitimacy of the regime, the latest blood sacrifice vindicating the foundation of 1917. The awesome victory seemed to validate the reason of Stalin’s Great Turn and the preeminence of the party. Paradoxically, the war which brought wrack and ruin functioned as a forcing house for continuing modernization: it reinforced the system and culture of the command economy along with the party-state, including its radically renovated political, technical, and professional cadres. On the brink of the precipice in late 1941, four years later, in 1944–45, Soviet Russia stood out as the Continent’s strongest military power, the Red Army having advanced to the Oder-Neisse line. At first sight Stalin had every reason to gloat or, at any rate, be self-confident. This reading prompted Solzhenitsyn’s penetrating but chilling syllogism that in war “governments need victories and the people need defeats”: whereas defeat in the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the First World War brought Russia “freedom and revolution, … the victory over Napoleon [and Hitler]” hardened the existent regimes, “with victory [giving] rise to the desire for more victories.”147

In reality Stalin was apprehensive and wary. With much of Russia reduced to rubble, Stalin worried that the Allies, in particular the United States, would soon realize that the awe-inspiring Red Army was a Potemkin village dissembling the country’s general prostration. Indeed, not unlike after the civil war and through the 1930s, the Kremlin faced, once again, the impossible problem of integrating Soviet Russia into the world system, including its economy, necessary for reconstruction. The Soviet leaders feared that the Allies would exploit the weakness of the USSR now that its military utility was at an end.

Of course, Allied aid, particularly American Lend-Lease, had been of considerable military importance, notably in 1941–42. But, clearly, the wartime alliance, forged in a time of common peril, was contre-nature. On June 22, 1941, when extending unconditional assistance to the Soviet Union, Churchill had been disarmingly plainspoken: conceding that since 1918 he had been the most “consistent opponent of Communism” and insisting that he would “unsay no word [he had] spoken,” the British prime minister swore that “all this fades away” now that “the Russian danger is … our danger and the danger of the United States.”148 This opposition, which was mutual, was bound to resurface with the turn of the military tide. As the war moved to a close, and the Red Army got the advantage, Stalin and Churchill looked for ways to extend their false-hearted alliance into the immediate afterwar. In October 1944, at Churchill’s initiative, they seemed to find common ground in a secret (percentage) agreement defining their respective spheres of influence in eastern and southeastern Europe: Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary largely in the Soviet orbit; Greece in the British or Western orbit; Yugoslavia under fifty-fifty tutelage of the two camps. This diplomatic barter was implicitly ratified and broadened at Yalta and Potsdam, where the United Kingdom and the United States assigned to the Soviet Union eastern Poland up to the heretofore contested Curzon Line, compensating Poland with German lands in the west. In any case, this diplomatic logrolling was contingent on the continuing reign of realpolitik, with the reason of state prevailing over ideology.

Just as the First World War left a deep imprint on the politics and diplomacy of the period leading into the Second World War, so the First Cold War weighed on the start and development of the Second Cold War. Both cold wars were driven by unstable mixtures of power politics and ideological pretense. At the inception of both, military and diplomatic factors were out front before ideology pulled even or ahead. Whereas ideology was relatively muted during the quarantine years of the 1920s, it again became manifest and strident during the diplomatic death dance of the 1930s.

In 1941, while in the Axis camp the Cold War exploded into hot war, in the Allied camp it went into remission. Since misbegotten wartime alliances are destined to come apart, it is not surprising that the Cold War resurfaced in 1944–45 when Russia and the Western powers recalled their mutual suspicions and conflicts of interest. The Soviets revived bitter memories of the Allied intervention in the civil war, the establishment of hostile regimes along Russia’s western borders, the ostracism of Russia from the concert of powers, and the Allied appeasement of Fascism. In turn, the Western powers recalled the cunning of the Comintern and the treachery of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. On both sides, after three years of “normal” relations, there was a surfeit of negative and raw remembrances to feed mistrust and antagonism. In the meantime, incompatible with the spirit of both the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Grand Alliance, the contrapuntal terms of revolution and counterrevolution vanished from all the belligerents’ propaganda, which is not to say that the reality attached to these terms vanished as well. Stalin and Churchill embodied the close kinship between the First and Second Cold War: they were “present at the creation” of both, and they were critical agents of major twists and turns during the transition from the one to the other.

There were, of course, major discontinuities as well. Though bled white, in 1945 the Soviet Union stood forth as the Continent’s only militarily credible great power. Simultaneously Berlin, Paris, and London handed over the baton of anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism to Washington, whose instruments of containment would be not only military but also, or markedly, financial, economic, and cultural. Marshal Foch and General Weygand were emblematic of the daybreak of the First Cold War; General George C. Marshall, as secretary of state, was symbolic of the dawn of the Second Cold War.

Neither Soviet Russia nor the United States was practiced and world-wise in international politics. Both were unprepared to assume the responsibilities of their unexpected and unexampled great-power status and to become each other’s sworn adversary, not to say enemy. Indeed, they would have to learn how to engage: the Soviet Union was a Eurasian land power with concrete but vulnerable territorial frontiers to be protected primarily by conventional armed forces; the United States a continental island without exposed strategic borders but with vital if contested spheres of influence to be shielded chiefly by naval, air, and economic power. In terms of security, there was no American equivalent for Soviet Russia’s cathectic focus on Eastern Europe. Neither power had a blueprint for ideological or military expansion. Even when making what appeared to be offensive moves, Moscow and Washington believed and claimed to be acting defensively, putatively to preempt an imminent threat from the other. The objective was to improve security or attenuate insecurity, in keeping with the legendary wisdom that in a time of troubles the security of one power or alliance is perceived to be the insecurity of another power or alliance.

In 1944–45, as victorious great powers, the Soviet Union and the United States had radically different profiles. The USSR was, above all, utterly drained and exhausted. The civilian economy was wrecked. Probably Stalin was desperate to conceal the desolation of the Russian economy, especially since it stood in such stark contrast to the American economy, which came out of the war immensely enriched and strengthened. By early 1946, however, military security analysts in Washington concluded that in the short term economic weakness would force Soviet Russia to limit itself to “consolidating its power in Eastern Europe primarily to strengthen its own security” rather than take actions “which might develop into hostilities with the Anglo-Americans.”149 At this same time George F. Kennan, the astute American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, advised the State Department that “gauged against the Western world as a whole the Soviets were still by far the weaker force,” which meant that the United States and its Allies could “enter with reasonable confidence” upon a firm course.¹⁵⁰ Frank K. Roberts, Kennan’s British counterpart, informed London that partly because of the atom bomb, Russia’s rulers realized the “inadequacy” of their navy and air force and that, although confident of the Soviet Union’s “ultimate strength,” they knew that it was “nothing like so strong at present as the Western democratic world.”¹⁵¹ A year later John Foster Dulles, a hard-line Republican counselor to the State Department, insisted that with Russia still “weak in consequence of war devastation,” its leaders were not about to “consciously risk war,” also because its “military establishment is completely outmatched by the mechanized weapons—particularly the atomic weapons—available to the United States.”152After 1945, with the country bled white, the Kremlin radically reduced the manpower of the Red Army. It did so although worried about sedition in the western periphery, scores of Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Balts having collaborated with the German Wehrmacht and security forces during the war. In any case, preoccupied with security in Eastern Europe and economic reconstruction, and more than ever obsessed with catching up with the West, Stalin was not about to launch his armies on a march to the Atlantic. Like Lenin in the dawn of the First Cold War, he gave absolute priority to making safe the Soviet state and regime.

Meanwhile Stalin and his associates were at once awed and disconcerted by America’s daunting capability to project its power to the four corners of the world, partly by claiming the legacy of Europe’s overseas empires for itself. By force of habit, and bearing in mind the Great Depression, the Soviet leaders were still convinced that ultimately capitalism carried the seeds of its own destruction. At this juncture, however, they had to come to terms with the unexpected renaissance of capitalism, especially now that America occupied its commanding heights, accounting for a major part of the world’s finance capital and industry. In the immediate after-war the Kremlin was less concerned with capitalism’s economic inconstancy than its political force: unlike the Soviet economy, the American economy was a formidable source and instrument of instant international power and influence. By 1946, especially in the wake of diplomatic skirmishes between the Soviets and Anglo-Americans along the southern Eurasian rim, Nikolai Novikov, the Russian ambassador in the United States, advised Moscow that “expenditures on the army and navy [were] rising colossally”: driven by an “unofficial bloc of reactionary southern Democrats and the old guard of the Republicans,” Washington was “establishing a very extensive system of naval and air bases in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans … with many points of support located outside the boundaries of the United States.” In Europe and Japan “American occupation authorities … were [supporting] reactionary classes and groups” with an eye to “the struggle against the Soviet Union.” To this same end, American policy was “directed at limiting or dislodging the influence of the Soviet Union from neighboring countries.”153

The first engagements of the Second Cold War came not, as one might have expected, in Eastern Europe, but in Iran, Turkey, and Greece. Britain’s imperial decomposition, not to say collapse, left a power vacuum along Eurasia’s southern salient, which Moscow could not ignore. Testing wartime agreements with the Allies, the Kremlin looked to refuse the removal of troops from northern Iran with a view to negotiate keeping a foothold there; it also concentrated troops along the Turkish border in an effort to negotiate a revision of the Montreux Convention to give Russia a substantial voice in the control of the Dardanelles. In one reading, in this area, as in Eastern Europe, the Kremlin was moved by a “traditional and instinctive [not to say] neurotic … sense of insecurity … [and] fear of the outside world.”¹⁵⁴ In another, fashioned in London and gradually embraced by Washington, the USSR was heir to tsarist Russia’s endemic propensity to expand into a region historically on Britain’s imperial watch. As yet no one seriously suggested that this was an early expression of Soviet Communism’s inherent expansionism. In any case, once the United States dispatched several warships into the Indian Ocean and eastern Mediterranean to shore up England’s failing strength, the Kremlin drew back, partly to husband its limited energy and diplomatic capital for more essential and less risky confrontations, notably in Eastern Europe.

Increasingly with one voice, the United Kingdom and United States considered Soviet Russia’s interest in Greece part of the same geostrategic design as its probe in Iran and Turkey. In 1944–45, in line with his agreement with Churchill, Stalin countenanced Britain quelling the resistance-rooted and Communist-led rebellion in Greece and installing a would-be parliamentary monarchy. But starting in mid-1946, during the discord over the Dardanelles, the left-wing partisans rose up again in northern Greece, with help from the Communist regimes of neighboring Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. In keeping with the logic of the division of spheres, Stalin reined in the Communists of these embryonic People’s Democracies, leaving the rebels at the mercy of the rightist Greek government, backed by British troops and warships. His active non-interference in Greece was intended as a signal to the Allies that he expected them to continue to condone his muscled intervention in Poland, where the Red Army gave Russia the sway that British and American naval and air power exercised in the Arabian and Aegean seas.

Indeed, his eyes fixed on Eastern Europe, Stalin had jumped at Churchill’s proposal for mutual accommodation. Bearing in mind the Nazi-Soviet Pact—as well as the treaties of Brest-Litovsk, Versailles, and Riga—Stalin was at once sober and cynical about yet another division of spheres in Eastern and Balkan Europe. To be sure, at Yalta the Big Three had issued the American-made Declaration on Liberated Europe calling for Eastern Europe’s provisional governments to be “broadly representative of all democratic elements,” to be established “through free elections.”155 But Stalin and Churchill attached little if any importance to this Wilsonian will-o’-the-wisp. Stalin meant to keep control of the western borderlands which in less than thirty years had twice been the staging area and invasion route for enemy armies. In military terms, he considered the rimland running from the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea to the western shore of the Black Sea, particularly its Polish hinge, a question of “life and death.” At the time the future status of Germany was altogether uncertain, and Stalin, who “hated” the Germans, expected them to be back on their feet in “twelve to fifteen years.”¹⁵⁶ No less important, since he and his inner circle basically thought in conventional military terms, unmindful of long-range aircraft, let alone guided missiles, strategically the forward western space seemed all the more crucial.

This was the mind-set which Stalin brought to the recasting of the polities and societies of the countries liberated by the Red Army. It is important to remember that only yesterday Eastern and Balkan Europe had been a bastion of unmitigated conservatism and reaction. Of course, the countries of this region differed greatly from each other. Even so, by and large, with the partial exception of Czechoslovakia, in major respects they were old regimes.¹⁵⁷ They had been, in addition, the warp and woof of the cordon sanitaire. In different degrees their governors had yielded to the Fascist temptation, some to the point of having their countries participate in Operation Barbarossa and the Judeocide. As one might expect, the Kremlin was intent upon aborting the rebirth of governments disposed to resume an anti-Soviet foreign policy and to restore regimes likely to favor such a course.

Meanwhile, throughout Russia’s close vicinity as everywhere in Europe, the miseries and disasters of war had considerably strengthened the not inconsiderable opposition to the old ruling and governing classes. To be sure, the presence of the Red Army would weigh very heavily in the transformation of the borderlands. But there was also a powerful indigenous groundswell for a sweeping renewal. A broadly based popular and united front, inclusive of agrarians, pressed for radical de-fascistization as well as drastic land and social reform, along with an entente cordiale with Soviet Russia. The provisional governments which were put in place under Moscow’s control were left-leaning but not Communist-dominated coalitions. Depending on the country, they were validated by more or less free elections, and they allowed for considerable civil and cultural freedom. The fledgling regimes—People’s Democracies—faced an enormously difficult task. Until the second half of 1947 Stalin had no set mold for the new regimes, nor a blueprint for their satellization.

And yet, almost overnight, in the Western world critics cried out against Moscow’s allegedly wily and concerted drive to turn Eastern Europe into a captive and closed sphere of influence impermeable to outside democratic and liberal influences. In turn, this vociferous censure prompted the Kremlin to be on its guard and fight shy of risking continuing openness. Presently not a few sober Allied voices cautioned against prejudging and denouncing the Soviets instead of trying to understand and reassure them. In the United States, where there was a feverish resurgence of anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism fomented by right-wing Republicans and newspapers, Henry L. Stimson, the secretary of war, was troubled that some Americans had “exaggerated views of the Monroe Doctrine” at the same time that they “butt[ed] into every question that comes up in Central Europe … and the Balkans.”158 Sharing this concern, Henry A. Wallace, the secretary of commerce, thought it important to “recognize that we have no more business … [interfering] in the political affairs of Eastern Europe … than Russia has interfering in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States, … [and] in stirring up … native Communists.” Wallace considered unexceptional “that the Russians will try to socialize their sphere of influence just as we will try to democratize our sphere of influence” in Japan and Germany. Insisting that Russia would have to meet the Western powers “halfway,” he nevertheless cautioned that “the tougher we get the tougher the Russians will get.”159 Subscribing to Stimson’s scruples about unilateral nuclear diplomacy, Wallace asked how it would “look to us if Russia had the atomic bomb and we did not, if Russia had 10,000-mile bombers and air bases within a thousand miles of our coastlines and we did not.”¹⁶⁰

In 1939, when he repossessed the Eastern European security zone in his Faustian pact with Hitler, Stalin had negotiated from a position of extreme weakness and vulnerability. Eventually the Wehrmacht swept through this zone with lightning speed and ease, and the Red Army did not recapture it until three years later. Henceforth Stalin faced the Western Allies from a position of strength by virtue of Soviet troops occupying the buffer zone and having fought their way to Central Europe.

In any case, Stalin did not flinch when Harry Truman began to harden America’s Russian policy and to step up support for Britain: the American president abruptly ended Lend-Lease aid and refused reconstruction loans for Moscow at the same time that he extended financial assistance to London, soon followed by efforts to simultaneously prolong and usurp Britain’s role of keeping Russia landlocked. Characteristically, it was Churchill, driven from power by Labour in 1945, who begged off the letter and spirit of his agreement with Stalin to become the first prominent herald of the reversion from realpolitik to ideologically saturated foreign policy and diplomacy. Churchill had declared his impassioned anti-Communism in 1918–19, and between the wars it had informed his sympathy for Mussolini and Franco. But finally the bankruptcy of the tendentious diplomacy of appeasement jolted him into recognizing the sharp pinch of power politics and the reason of state: in 1939 he expressed his understanding for Stalin’s pact with Hitler;¹⁶¹ in 1941 he extended unconditional aid to Moscow; in 1944 he rushed to Moscow to win Stalin for a division of spheres.

On March 6, 1946, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill, introduced by Truman, predicated that the ancient states and people of Central and Eastern Europe “lie in the Soviet sphere, … behind an iron curtain, … subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow.” Although he conceded that the Soviets did not want war, he asserted that they wanted “the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrine.” Especially since there were no limits to the Kremlin’s “expansive and proselytizing tendencies,” the Western powers, in particular their English-speaking peoples, needed to stand fast and strong so as to give all other peoples a chance at freedom.162

Truman applauded Churchill when he sounded the alarm about the Soviets lowering an Iron Curtain from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic—a cordon sanitaire in reverse—and about their ideologically fired intention to spread “police government” near and far beyond it. Within a year, on March 12, 1947, before a special joint session of Congress, Truman took an additional step from realpolitik to ideopolitik. To be sure, the Kremlin recently had backed down in Iran, the Straits between European and Asian Turkey, and Greece. But at this juncture, in February 1947, London advised Washington that for budgetary reasons Britain needed to reduce its military and foreign-aid expenditures, necessitating the recall of 40,000 troops from Greece and the termination of financial assistance to Athens and Ankara. This notice was the trigger for Truman and his foreign-policy team to dramatize and justify the need and urgency for a Pax Americana to replace the Pax Britannica, whose collapse had left a vacuum of international power dangerous for military and economic security across the oceans and continents.

Of course, in keeping with the ongoing projection of U. S. power into the eastern Mediterranean, in his congressional address Truman announced that Washington would guarantee not only the military security of Greece and Turkey but also their economic and political stability, to the amount of 250 and 150 million dollars, respectively. But this conspicuous intervention, which was consistent with wartime agreements, was supported by a sweeping ideological warrant. Truman attributed the crisis in Greece to the “terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists,” who were “exploiting human want and misery … to create political chaos” subversive of economic recovery and government stability. He vowed that henceforth the United States would “support free peoples [everywhere?] who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” seeking to impose “totalitarian regimes” on the model of those in Eastern Europe, which violate the Yalta agreement. Indeed, the world had to choose between two “alternative ways of life”: that in the Communist orbit feeding on the “evil soil of poverty and strife … and based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed … [by] terror and oppression” and the suppression of all civil and political rights; or that in the democratic orbit, based upon the Four Freedoms.163

Clearly Truman turned the renewed discord in the eastern Mediterranean into a great virtue and cause, as well as a welcome occasion to put the full weight of the nascent imperial presidency behind the Churchillian vision and tocsin. He raised the ideological wager less to win over a reluctant Congress to vote the credits to salvage Greece and Turkey than to go with the stream. In November 1946 the Republicans, many of them playing on the fear and hatred of Communism, had won control of both Houses. In essence these elections were like those of November 1918:¹⁶⁴ both at once expressed and fired a conservative backlash against social reform and liberal internationalism in the form of aggressive anti-Communism, racism, and diplomatic unilateralism. Swayed by the Red Scare, Woodrow Wilson had sanctioned the Palmer raids in 1919–20. In that same spirit, immediately following his address to Congress, on March 23, 1947, Truman issued an executive order establishing a loyalty program for all federal civil servants, thereby intensifying and legitimating the Red Scare of his day.¹⁶⁵ Of course, the president spoke as much to the Kremlin as to Capitol Hill and Main Street. To make sure that Stalin should get his drift, on March 17 he reiterated some of this declaration’s major themes in a message to Congress, with special emphasis on Soviet Russia’s violation of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements as well as its “designs to subjugate the free community of Europe.” Two days later, equating the Soviets and National Socialists, Secretary of State Marshall declared that “never before in history has the world situation been more threatening to our ideals and interests than at the present time.”¹⁶⁶

All this time throughout the emergent Western orbit, but especially in the United States, distrust and hatred of the Soviet Union intensified. Incongruously, the Kremlin was expected to support the democratization of Eastern Europe, and its failure to do so was construed as the first move of a careful plan to export the Soviet system the world over by means foul and fair. The perception took hold that the regimes in Moscow’s sphere were, uniformly and above all, vassal states. Gainsaying the strength and authenticity of local Communist and left-democratic (including agrarian) parties, the censors perceived the drive for socioeconomic reform and diplomatic concord with Russia as an insidious Soviet stratagem. Even Czechoslovakia, which had the most open and vigorous united front, and undertook to serve as a bridge between East and West, was seen and treated as a Soviet satellite. In this tendentious vision the old elites, including the clergy, rather than the embattled popular-front leaders, were the paragons of political virtue. In turn, the Soviets seized upon this hypercriticism to reconsider and curtail their calculated, if awkward, support of non-Communists in the provisional governments of the People’s Democracies. The lopsided impasse over the vital nuclear and German questions not only furthered their suspicion of the Western powers but also prompted them to tighten their control on Eastern Europe.

In the West, meanwhile, economic recovery had made major strides until the wretched harvest and winter of 1946–47 exposed the Continent’s continuing infirmity. Nature dislocated the national economies, threatening a return of yesterday’s distress, hunger, and impoverishment, favoring the treacherous soil on which “domestic and foreign policies meet.”167 Washington feared, above all, the political consequences of this economic relapse: the radicalization of the laboring classes, especially in France and Italy, in favor of Communist parties and their affiliated trade unions, whose leaders risked being outflanked on the left. Although Stalin pressed these leaders to continue collaborating with the governments of national reconstruction, after Truman’s address Washington urged Paris and Rome to break with what remained of the popular front. In early May the Communist ministers were dismissed from the French and Italian coalition cabinets, another milestone on the way to the Second Cold War.

Such was the situation and atmosphere when Secretary of State Marshall delivered his carefully vetted and crafted commencement address at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, three months after Truman’s address to Congress.168 He declared Washington’s primary purpose to be the conquest of “hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos,” which throughout Europe were causing a grave “economic, social, and political deterioration” with serious consequences for the American economy. Marshall stressed that the United States proposed a policy designed to revive “a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” Having extended assistance “on a piecemeal basis” in response to “various crises” since the end of the war, the American government now proffered an aid program intended as “a cure rather than a mere palliative.” But Marshall insisted that in what would have to be a “joint” undertaking, it would be up to the European countries to spell out their needs and “the part they themselves will take.”

Certainly Marshall’s address had a different tonality from Truman’s. The invitation to the European countries to join in a vast program of reconstruction and stabilization was open to the Soviet Union and People’s Democracies. Indeed, Marshall emphasized that American policy was “directed not against any country or doctrine.” But he also served notice that “governments, political parties, or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.” Indeed, it is most doubtful that Marshall expected or wanted the Soviets to cooperate.

Seen from Moscow, Marshall’s address was as much a defiance as an invitation. Especially in the wake of the dismissal of the Communist ministers in France and Italy, Stalin is likely to have read it as aiming to forge an economic instrument with which to implement the anti-Russian and anti-Communist intention of the Churchill-Truman policy, not to say doctrine, now fixed on the heart rather than periphery of Europe. With distrust running as high among Soviet as Western leaders, Stalin and Molotov were predisposed against exploring the American overture. They were vexed at Moscow having been excluded from the preliminary negotiations between Washington, London, and Paris. They were no less irked that Germany should qualify for aid on the same terms as the countries it had ravaged, and this before German reparations were agreed upon. But above all, Stalin demurred at the likely, nay inevitable interference in the internal affairs of both Soviet Russia and the People’s Democracies. America would demand access to vital statistics at a time when Stalin still sought to hide the full extent of Russia’s weakness and handicap. Equally disturbing, by virtue of its demand for an open-ended right of oversight, Washington would seek to sway the allocation of resources for Russia’s planned economy and Eastern Europe’s mixed economies. All in all, Molotov’s counterproposal for economic aid without intrusions and strings was as unreal as Marshall’s invitation. With hard-liners in the ascendant in both camps, there was little if any room or will for negotiation.

But obviously Washington had the upper hand. Even if unintentionally, it had maneuvered Moscow into turning down a seemingly generous and innocent proposal, reinforcing the perception and charge that the Soviets, incorrigibly intractable, were responsible for the polarization of the world, the more so now that they tightened their grip on the People’s Democracies. Desperate for financial aid, but for other weighty reasons as well, most of them were tempted by the American proposal, and Poland and Czechoslovakia actually notified their acceptance, only to be pressured to rescind it.

In February 1948 the local Communists seized power, without bloodshed, in Prague: the most democratic and popular of the provisional governments was the first to fall, along with the last bridge between East and West. This takeover symbolized the willful, not to say vengeful turn in the second half of 1947, from the inconstant support of improvised and formless popular-front governments to the peremptory establishment of essentially undifferentiated satellite regimes. Under rigid Soviet control these regimes were also forged into a single diplomatic, military, and economic bloc—Warsaw Pact and Comecon—reinforced by a formidable cultural and ideological carapace. Reenacting Stalin’s Great Turn, all the regimes of the Soviet security sphere rushed into forced-draft industrialization and collectivization within the framework of planned economies, for which there was some measure of popular support. Controlled by hard-line Communists loyal to Moscow, the local Communist parties were purged of yesterday’s coalitionists; democratic leaders and parties were driven out; and churchmen were prosecuted. Presently, with the secret police firmly in place, there were mass arrests of real and imagined resistants or subversives, and what remained of personal and intellectual freedom was snuffed out.

In Eastern and Balkan Europe—except in Yugoslavia, where Tito stood his ground—Stalin hardened the Communist parties to serve as undisguised instruments of Soviet power, sworn to uphold, above all, Russian hegemony. In the rest of Europe, the role of the Communist parties shifted from supporting to impeding reconstruction and restabilization. Indeed, as Kennan, Truman, and Marshall had forewarned, “as malignant parasites” Communists henceforth would feed on Europe’s “diseased tissue,” “evil soil of poverty and strife,” and “human misery.” In keeping with the logic of the situation the Comintern, dissolved during the Grand Alliance, was revived and renamed Cominform in September 1947, signaling this shift in policy as well as the battening down of the Iron Curtain, in keeping with the point of no return on both sides of the unbridgeable divide. Andrei Zhdanov, speaking for the Cominform, proclaimed the world to be divided in two: “the imperialist and anti-democratic camp,” chiefly driven by America, whose cardinal purpose is “to strengthen imperialism, hatch a new imperialist war, combat socialism and democracy, and support reactionary and antidemocratic profascist regimes and movements everywhere; … the anti-imperialist and democratic camp … based in the USSR and the new democracies [whose] purpose is to resist the threat of new wars and imperialist expansion, strengthen democracy, and extirpate the vestiges of fascism.” In reverse image of the charge out of Washington, the Kremlin denounced the Marshall Plan as a “carefully veiled attempt to carry through … the ‘Truman Doctrine’s’ expansionist policy,” beginning with American credits designed to rob the European countries of their “economic and then political independence.”169

Obviously, the coming of the Second Cold War was an intensely interactive process, to be reconstructed by careful attention to dates. Perhaps the fact that the Western side, starting with Churchill’s first move at Fulton, was on the offensive was less important than that it was, in addition, infinitely stronger, except, perhaps, in ideological terms.

The relentless hostility of the major non-Communist powers had contributed significantly to the steeling of the Soviet regime since its creation in 1917: in 1918–20; during the 1930s; and in 1945–48. Certainly by and large the outside world made few concerted efforts to relax and normalize relations. After 1945 Washington dismissed or ignored Stalin’s security concerns on his western borders. Likewise the West, especially the United States, recognized neither the legitimacy nor the complexity of Moscow’s resolve to foster the establishment of non-hostile regimes along Russia’s vulnerable European frontiers. This same insensitivity, if not hostility, informed President Truman’s refusal to extend financial and moral aid to Soviet Russia and the People’s Democracies until mid-1947, when it was caught up in the escalating tensions of the Second Cold War. To boot, Washington rattled the nuclear saber, until the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in July 1949. All in all, early in the Second Cold War the West, led by the United States, unwarily and confidently played on Russia’s weakness and fed the Kremlin’s chronic but not entirely groundless siege mentality.

Of course, when making their early probes in Iran and the Dardanelles, the Soviets, just as unwisely, fired Western suspicions and fears, rather than allay them. Especially in America, anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism crystallized too rapidly for Washington to take into account that the “Soviet Union was the successor to the Russian Empire and that Stalin was not only the heir of Marx and Lenin but of Peter the Great and the Tsars of all the Russias.”170 Nor were Washington and London disposed to seriously consider that unlike Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia had no “fixed plans” and took no “unnecessary risks,”¹⁷¹ making its leaders “infinitely more flexible, … capable of readjusting, … and confident that time was on their side.”¹⁷² With Churchill and Truman sounding the alarm, respectively, about the danger of appeasement and the perils of falling dominoes, the Soviet back-down in Iran and Turkey was hailed as a victory over an ideologically driven expansionist regime at once bent and dependent on achieving world ascendancy by a combination of ideological deceit, political subversion, and military brawn. Washington misread or ignored the political and psychological impact on Moscow of turning limited confrontations into “prestige-engaging showdowns.” The Kremlin, for its part, was unversed and ingenuous about the “sources” of the “conduct” of American foreign policy and diplomacy, conducive to the projection of its own wishes, phantasms, and fears.

In fact, until 1947–48 Stalin and his advisors practiced, in the main, realpolitik. In addition to being diplomatically cautious but vigilant, they made every effort to bridle and moderate the Communist parties near—throughout Eastern and Balkan Europe—and far—Greece, France, Italy, and China. They did so as part of a self-interested Soviet Russian drive to transform the Second World War’s grand but uneasy military, diplomatic, and political alliance into a concert of powers looking to build a new international order respecting the legitimacy and composing the conflicting interests of the major players.

It may be helpful to compare France in 1815 and Russia in 1945. Though defeated, France emerged from a quarter century of war essentially unscathed. The fighting had taken place far across the borders, so that the country suffered no material damage. Furthermore, French casualties were not inordinate, the economy was intact, and the victors recognized the loser’s prewar borders. France remained the Continent’s most advanced, powerful, and influential nation, though England now stood forth as the sole world or global power. As a matter of course, the defeat of Napoleon brought an Allied-sponsored restoration of the monarchy. But this restoration was neither dictated nor absolute, and it validated some of the major achievements of the French Revolution. Reassured by a far-flung retour à l’ordre, the great powers recognized the legitimacy of the old-new regime and welcomed France back into the Concert of Powers. All in all, the French Revolution was spared the agonies of protracted quarantine by the outside world, even after its armies convulsed the international system and wrought havoc on not a few provinces of Europe’s old order, with more benefits than costs to France.

By contrast, in 1945, even though victorious, Russia was ravaged and spent. At home, twenty-eight years after 1917, the Revolution and regime were strengthened for having weathered a monstrous but also glorious ordeal by fire. Even so, except for China, Soviet Russia was still the most backward of the great powers, determined to resume its prewar drive to catch up to the West. Abroad, throughout liberated Europe, the military defeat of the Axis entailed the political defeat of Fascism along with its conservative and reactionary collaborators and sympathizers. This conservative reflux disproportionately redounded to the benefit of the popular or united fronts which, renewed and galvanized in the resistance, (re)surfaced at the end of the war. As champions of a far-reaching socioeconomic new deal, these coalitions, in which Communists played a major but not paramount role, and which were as discordant as during the 1930s, hearkened to the social promise of the Russian Revolution whose party-state had courted disaster. Upon liberation, Europe witnessed a groundswell for radical reform and renewal, the very opposite of a retour à l’ordre, and the attendant revival of the specter of revolution deeply impacted on the diplomacy of the Western governments in the early dawn of the Second Cold War.

Stalin sought to bank rather than fan these flames of social upheaval in the interest of the Kremlin’s realpolitik. Like most tsars since Peter the Great, he conceived Russia to be part of Europe, and his projected division of the world into spheres of influence was bound to be Europe-centered. In any case, Stalin looked for the (re)establishment of a concert of great powers which, besides preventing the rebirth of an aggressive and expansionist Germany, would recognize and maintain the postwar territorial settlement and distribution of power. Premised on the mutual recognition of its members, such a concert could resort to the usual balance-of-power mechanisms, such as buffer zones, to attenuate the conflicts of interest inherent to the division of spheres between Soviet Russia and the three Western powers.

Needless to say, immediately after World War Two the situation was much more fluid and contentious than at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1814–15 the victors had been sufficiently united to agree not only on a peace settlement with the defeated enemy (the Treaty of Paris of 1815) but also on a concert of powers to enforce it, along with all European borders. In 1945 the victors were too divided to come to an agreement on the paramount and urgent German question. By virtue of the conflictual political conditions in large parts of Europe, the states also had to confront the difficulty of reconciling the drawing of new territorial lines and spheres with the unresolved constitutional conflicts behind the lines and within the spheres.

Even in 1815, despite the return of normalcy throughout the Continent, the great powers had set up the Holy Alliance to look after, in particular, the maintenance of the European states’ internal status quo. As “members of one and the same Christian nation,” Europe’s sovereigns claimed to share a moral consensus in defense of monarchic legitimacy and social order. Having endorsed the principle of intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states, in 1820, with the approval of the Holy Alliance, Austria sent troops to help suppress revolts in Naples and Piedmont, and in 1823 France intervened militarily to squash a newly installed constitutional regime in Spain.

At war’s end Stalin made every effort to bring about a concert of great powers that would not be coupled with a holy alliance, for which the necessary consensus was in any case wanting: he meant the right of intervention to be reserved to the power exercising hegemony within its sphere. Comforted by his agreement with Churchill, which licensed Moscow’s intervention in Eastern Europe in exchange for London’s in the eastern Mediterranean, he probably realized that Europe, nay the world, was on the threshold of an era of unprecedented external intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. The instruments of intervention being less military than economic, financial, and cultural, the Kremlin was bound to be at a disadvantage beyond the western lands liberated by the Red Army. As noted before, the United States, without counting the potential of its advanced Western European allies, had many times Soviet Russia’s power resources. The Soviet leaders must have been perplexed by the ease and speed with which Washington made huge politically freighted foreign loans and grants-in-aid. Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican senator from Massachusetts, confirmed their worst suspicions, not to say fears, when he declared, in words that could have been their own, that the Marshall Plan would be “the biggest damned interference in internal affairs that there has ever been in history,” with the United States assuming responsibility “for the people who stay in power as a result of our efforts.”173 Stalin realized that the United States vastly outstripped Russia in its capacity to project its influence far and wide by not only naval and air power but financial and economic power as well.

Ultimately the Soviets were outclassed on every major score, except ideology. Especially in historical epochs, ideology is a formidable instrument of power at home and abroad. In international politics it serves to justify objectives and actions while at the same time representing them as just and disinterested. Coming out of the war the Soviet leaders were unshaken, if not fortified, in their belief in progress, socialist construction, economic planning, forced-pace industrialization, and the universal destiny of socialism, with their project serving as universal model and inspiration. But above all, and despite all historical handicaps and war ravages, as well as international obstacles, they continued to be confident that history was on their side. At all events, ideology was the Kremlin’s only hope and its only edge for intervention beyond the rimland, in Central and Western Europe.

Ironically, Stalin was neither suited nor disposed to wield the ideological weapon. He never considered ideology separate from the party, which was the spinal cord of the Soviet regime and government and functioned as a military-religious order not only at home but to a large degree abroad as well. With Soviet Russia’s national interest his absolute and urgent priority, and obsessed by its multiple deficits, Stalin was as careful not to challenge or provoke the Allies, especially the United States, in Western Europe as he was determined to shield his own sphere of influence from their intrusion. Accordingly, instead of urging the military-religious orders in France and Italy to feed, by word and deed, on the hardships and dislocations of their societies, Stalin directed them to cool their revolutionary ardor and collaborate, in the spirit of the popular front, in postwar governments embarked on reconstruction and reform. Until early spring of 1947 Moscow hoped against hope that its help in moderating the radical political and syndical left during the critical post-liberation moment would pave the way for a mutual desistance of hostile intervention in each other’s sphere.

Such was not to be the case. Even assuming the Western governments were aware of Stalin’s reason, they were not about to meet him on his ground. They suspected that ultimately Moscow was the command center of all movements for radical or revolutionary change, and assumed that its self-restraint was a short-term expedient, dictated by temporary weakness. In any case, starting with Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in early March 1946, the Western powers, led or pressed by the United States, unceasingly questioned the legitimacy of the invasive primacy of Soviet Russia in Eastern Europe at the same time that they stepped up their charge that everywhere Moscow was infiltrating and subverting free or established governments as part of a design to forcibly expand its totalitarian system to the four corners of the earth. The Kremlin perceived the Truman-Marshall doctrine and plan of action as designed to lock in the Soviet Union and deny it economic aid on acceptable terms while at the same time questioning its probity and ascendance in Eastern Europe.

This renewed isolation, proscription, and boycott unwittingly played into the hands of the hardliners and, above all, of Stalin. If after 1945 there were any historical possibilities for the relaxation of the regime, they were now foreclosed. Once again vindicated and fired by the self-fulfilling prophecy of encirclement by a hostile capitalist world, the Soviet leaders braced the party-state, military-religious order, and planned economy to tackle reconstruction and resume industrialization without foreign aid, in the mode of the 1930s, with outsized attention and allocation of scarce resources to military requirements. The renewed international beleaguerment, at once real and imagined, prepared the ground for the intensification of the politics and culture of fear and suspicion, fueled by the manipulation of the specter of foreign conspiracy. All in all, Soviet Russia turned into a politically run garrison state geared to defense and security rather than foreign aggression and expansion. Of course, Stalin conceived the western periphery to be shielded by this garrison state to include Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

The Kremlin adopted this posture in the face of and in interaction with the adoption of the containment policy by the American-led Western powers. This policy was at once anti-Russian and anti-Communist. In the “Mr. X” article in Foreign Affairs, which the Soviet leaders must have read, Kennan merely articulated and structured the ideas that had made their way in American policy-making circles. To be sure, the policy of containment would “confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force” wherever they showed signs of pushing beyond their far-flung perimeter. But the unspoken premise underlying this policy was that the “men in the Kremlin,” who were directing Russia’s destiny, had never “completed … the process of consolidation” started with their seizure of power in November 1917. In more ways than one Russia was “by far the weaker party.” Indeed, the United States had the “power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate … and in this way promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”174 And so it turned out, for the better or for the worse, and at enormous expense on both sides, as well as in the world at large.

NOTES

1. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Knopf, 1962), ch. 2.

2. Ibid., p. 68.

3. Cited in Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926 (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 278.

4. Ronald Suny, “Stalin and His Stalinism: Power and Authority in the Soviet Union, 1930–53,” in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 26–52, esp. p. 32.

5. Suny, “Stalin and His Stalinism,” p. 31.

6. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1932 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982/1994), pp. 100–1.

7. Ibid., p. 104.

8. Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968); James R. Millar and Alec Nove, “A Debate on Collectivization: Was Stalin Really Necessary?” in Problems of Communism 25 (July–August 1976): pp. 49–62.

9. Millar in Millar and Nove, “A Debate,” p. 56 and p. 60.

10. Suny, “Stalin and His Stalinism,” p. 44. Cf. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: Norton, 1990), ch. 3, esp. pp. 44–45.

11. Suny, “Stalin and His Stalinism,” p. 38.

12. Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution, p. 110. See also Tucker, Stalin, p. 93 and p. 178.

13. In this paragraph and the next I follow Tucker, Stalin, passim, esp. pp. 50–65 and 114–18; Maureen Perrie, “The Tsar, the Emperor, the Leader: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Anatoli Rybakov’s Stalin,” in Nick Lampert and Gábor T. Rittersporn, eds., Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath—Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 77–100; Alec Nove, “Stalin and Stalinism,” in Nove, ed., The Stalin Phenomenon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), esp. pp. 6–7. See also chapter 8 above.

14. Cited by Perrie, “The Tsar,” p. 81.

15. Tucker, Stalin, pp. 328–29.

16. See Nove in Nove, ed., Stalin Phenomenon, p. 26.

17. Nove in ibid., pp. 200–201 and p. 20.

18. Tsipko, writing in Nauka I Zhizn (no. 12, 1988), cited by Nove in ibid., p. 15.

19. See Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York: Vintage, 1970).

20. Nove, in Nove, ed., Stalin Phenomenon, p. 28 and p. 201.

21. R. W. Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 458.

22. Ibid., p. 460.

23. Cited in ibid., p. 458.

24. Churchill cited in Thomas C. Fiddick, Russia’s Retreat from Poland, 1920: From Permanent Revolution to Peaceful Coexistence (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 4.

25. See chapter 8 and chapter 10 above.

26. Fiddick, Russia’s Retreat, pp. 255–56.

27. Ibid., p. 272.

28. Cited in ibid., p. 273.

29. See John P. Sontag, “The Soviet War Scare of 1926–27,” in The Russian Review 34:1 (January 1975): pp. 66–77.

30. Cited in Davies, Turmoil, p. 442.

31. Ibid., p. 443.

32. Jacques Sapir, “The Economics of War in the Soviet Union during World War II,” in Kershaw and Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism, pp. 208–36, esp. pp. 211–12, 227.

33. Cited in Davies, Turmoil, p. 444 and p. 449. See also John Erickson, The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918–1941 (London: Macmillan, 1962), pt. 4.

34. Davies, Turmoil, pp. 453–54.

35. Ibid., pp. 454–55.

36. Cited in ibid., p. 446.

37. Ibid., pp. 446–47.

38. J. V. Stalin, Works, vols. 12 and 13 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1955), vol. 12, pp. 242–44.

39. Eugen Varga, Die Krise des Kapitalismus und ihre politischen Folgen (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969).

40. Stalin, Works, vol. 12, pp. 261–62.

41. Stalin, Works, vol. 13, pp. 40–41.

42. Davies, Turmoil, p. 467.

43. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Anne D. Rassweiler, The Generation of Power: A History of Dneprostroi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

44. Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution, p. 119.

45. Roberta T. Manning, “The Soviet Economic Crisis of 1936–1940 and the Great Purges,” in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 116–41, esp. pp. 132–35.

46. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 6.

47. Ibid., p. 399.

48. Ibid., p. 399. See also Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Knopf, 1973), ch. 9.

49. Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution, p. 117.

50. J. Arch Getty, “The Politics of Stalinism,” in Nove, ed., Stalin Phenomenon, pp. 132–33.

51. Lewin, Russian Peasants, pp. 516–19.

52. Stalin, Works, vol. 12, esp. p. 183.

53. Nove, in Nove, ed., Stalin Phenomenon, p. 36.

54. See Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

55. Davies, Socialist Offensive, p. 411.

56. Ibid., p. 414.

57. Ibid., p. 412.

58. Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution, p. 127. See also Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

59. Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution, p. 127.

60. Ibid., pp. 128–29.

61. Viola, “The Second Coming: Class Enemies in the Soviet Countryside, 1927–1935,” in Getty and Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror, pp. 65–98, esp. p. 96.

62. Manfred Hildermeier, Geschichte der Sowjetunion, 1917–1991: Entstehung und Niedergang des ersten sozialistischen Staates (Munich: Beck, 1998), pp. 392–98; and Ronald Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 226.

63. Viola, “The Second Coming,” pp. 70–75 and 95–96.

64. Davies, Socialist Offensive, p. 413.

65. Ralf Stettner, “Archipel GULag”: Stalins Zwangslager—Terrorinstrument und Wirtschaftsgigant: Entstehung, Organisation und Funktion des sowjetischen Lagersystems, 1928–1956 (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996), p. 13 and p. 323.

66. See chapter 8 above.

67. Stettner, “Archipel GULag,” p. 42 and p. 364.

68. Ibid., p. 365.

69. See chapter 8 above.

70. Stettner, “Archipel GULag,” p. 45.

71. Ibid., p. 49.

72. Ibid., pp. 112–13.

73. Ibid., pp. 117–22.

74. Ibid., pp. 168–69.

75. Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 106.

76. Stettner, “Archipel GULag,” pp. 173–74.

77. See Appendix 2 in ibid., pp. 376–98.

78. Ibid., pp. 188–89.

79. See Jean-Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes: Génocide, identité, reconnaissance (Paris: Découverte, 1997).

80. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 189.

81. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 38.

82. Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship, p. 89.

83. Getty, Great Purges, pp. 48–56.

84. Thurston, Life and Terror, pp. 29–33.

85. Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Knopf, 1972), p. 137.

86. Robert Sharlet, “Soviet Legal Culture,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 155–79, esp. p. 164.

87. Getty, “The Politics of Repression Revisited,” in Getty and Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror, pp. 40–62, esp. pp. 41–42. See also Moshe Lewin, “Stalin in the Mirror of the Other,” in Kershaw and Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism, pp. 107–34.

88. Getty, “Politics of Repression,” p. 62.

89. See Tucker, Stalin, pp. 120–21, 211–15; and Vadim Z. Rogovin, 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror (Oak Park, Mich.: Mehring Books, 1998).

90. Cited in Thurston, Life and Terror, pp. 16–17.

91. Ibid., pp. 21–22. See also Getty, “Politics of Repression,” pp. 44–47.

92. Thurston, Life and Terror, pp. 9–15. See also Getty, “Politics of Repression,” pp. 50–51.

93. Manning, “The Soviet Economic Crisis,” pp. 117–18, 138.

94. Ibid., pp. 140–41, 137–38.

95. William Evans Scott, Alliance against Hitler: The Origins of the Franco-Soviet Pact (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1962); Jiri Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934–1938 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), ch. 2; Piotr S. Wandycz, The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 1926–1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), chs. 11–13.

96. Jonathan Haslam, “Political Opposition to Stalin and the Origins of the Terror in Russia, 1932–1936,” in The Historical Journal 29:3 (1986): pp. 395–418, esp. p. 413.

97. This and the following two paragraphs give the essence of Isaac Deutscher’s insightful if telescoped comparison of the defining circumstances of the Great Terror in the French and Russian revolutions. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 345–48.

98. Stalin cited in Deutscher, Stalin, p. 347.

99. See Sharlet, “Soviet Legal Culture,” p. 164.

100. Fred E. Schrader, Der Moskauer Prozess, 1936: Zur Sozialgeschichte eines politischen Feindbildes (Frankfurt: Campus, 1995); and Rogovin, 1937, passim.

101. Ezhov cited by Boris A. Starkov, “Narkom Ezhov,” in Getty and Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror, pp. 21–39, esp. pp. 25–26.

102. Cited by Starkov, “Narkom Ezhov, ” p. 27.

103. Thurston, Life and Terror, pp. 36–42, esp. p. 39 and p. 41.

104. Cited in ibid., p. 43.

105. Cited in Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 174. At this very time, Bukharin was writing a two-volume treatise on “The Crisis of Capitalist Culture and Socialism” whose central concern is the total antithesis or opposition of Soviet Socialism and Fascism. Only the second volume, written in jail in March–April 1937, has been recovered. Bukharin, Gefängnisschriften 1: Der Sozialismus und seine Kultur (Berlin: BasisDruck, 1996).

106. Cited in Getty, Great Purges, p. 138.

107. Cited in ibid., p. 139.

108. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 379.

109. Thurston, Life and Terror, p. 54. See also Fiddick, Russia’s Retreat, p. 276. Cf. Rogovin, 1937, chs. 46–54.

110. Thurston, Life and Terror, p. 56.

111. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 379.

112. Thurston, Life and Terror, pp. 121–23.

113. Roger R. Reese, “The Red Army and the Great Purges,” in Getty and Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror, pp. 198–214, esp. p. 199; and Erickson, Soviet High Command, pt. 5.

114. Getty, Great Purges, p. 167.

115. Hildermeier, Geschichte, p. 451.

116. Thurston, Life and Terror, pp. 61–62.

117. Ibid., pp. 59–61, 63; and J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” in American Historical Review 98:4 (October 1993): p. 1023.

118. Thurston, Life and Terror, pp. 59–61, 63, 68.

119. See Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, passim.

120. Thurston, Life and Terror, p. 42.

121. Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship, p. 189.

122. Stalin, Works, vol. 14 (London: Red Star Press, 1978), p. 421.

123. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 380. See also Rogovin, 1937.

124. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd enlarged ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958), pp. 321–22; and Arendt in Carl J. Friedrich, ed., Totalitarianism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), p. 79.

125. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 306 and p. 308.

126. Gábor T. Rittersporn, Simplifications staliniennes et complications soviétiques: Tensions sociales et conflits politiques en URSS, 1933–1953 (Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 1988), p. 32 and p. 140.

127. Thurston, Life and Terror, p. 90.

128. Ibid., p. 159 and p. xx. See Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

129. Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution, p. 157.

130. Rittersporn, “The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s,” in Getty and Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror, pp. 99–115.

131. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 372.

132. Cited in ibid., p. 374.

133. Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 (New York: Pantheon, 1989); and Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933–1941 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).

134. Arendt, Origins, p. 392 and pp. 414–15.

135. Joachim Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg, 1941–1945 (Munich: Verlag für Wehrwissenschaften, 1995), chs. 1–2; and François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion: Essai sur l’idée communiste au XX siècle (Paris: Laffont/Calmann, 1995), ch. 9.

136. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 393.

137. Suny, The Soviet Experiment, p. 303. See also Hugh Seton-Watson, Neither War nor Peace: The Struggle for Power in the Postwar World (New York: Praeger, 1960), p. 24.

138. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 441.

139. Churchill, Gathering Storm, pp. 393–94.

140. Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988), ch. VII.

141. Nikita Khrushchev, cited in Richard Overy, Russia’s War: Blood upon the Snow (New York: TV Books/Penguin Putnam, 1997), pp. 93–97, esp. p. 97.

142. Hoffmann, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg, p. 61 and p. 298.

143. Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern Jewry under Soviet Rule, 1939–41 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995).

144. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, p. 230.

145. “From this moment until that in which our enemies shall have been driven from the territory of the Republic, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for service in the armies.

“The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge weapons and transport supplies; the women will make tents and clothes and will serve in the hospitals; the children will make up old linen into lint; the old men will have themselves carried into the public squares to rouse the courage of fighting men, to preach the unity of the Republic and hatred of Kings.

“The public buildings shall be turned into barracks, the public squares into munitions factories, the earthen floors shall be treated with lye to extract saltpetre [for the manufacture of gunpowder].

“All firearms of suitable calibre shall be turned over to the troops; the interior shall be policed with shotguns and with cold steel.

“All saddle horses shall be seized for the cavalry; all draft horses not employed in cultivation will draw the artillery and supply-wagons.” Cited in T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 100–1.

146. For the text of this radio broadcast, see Marshal Stalin, On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), pp. 5–9.

147. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, vol. 1 (London: Collins/Fontana, 1974), p. 272.

148. Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, vols. VI and VII (New York: Chelsea House, 1974), vol. VI, pp. 6427–31.

149. Naval Intelligence memorandum, January 12, 1946, cited in Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper, 1972), p. 33.

150. George F. Kennan, “ ‘Long Telegram’ ” (February 22, 1946) in Kenneth M. Jensen, ed. Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts ‘Long Telegrams’ of 1946 (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1991), p. 29.

151. Roberts telegram (March 17, 1946), in Jensen, ed., Cold War, p. 54.

152. Cited in Kolko, Limits of Power, p. 33.

153. Nikolai Novikov telegram on “U.S. Foreign Policy in the Postwar Period” (September 27, 1946), in Jensen, ed., Cold War, pp. 3–16.

154. Kennan, “Long Telegram,” pp. 20–21.

155. Cited in John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), p. 164.

156. Cited in Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 150–51.

157. For the sense in which I use the term old regime, see my The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

158. Cited in Paterson, On Every Front, p. 40.

159. Cited in Richard J. Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War (New York: Viking, 1976), pp. 103–5.

160. Cited in ibid., p. 90.

161. See Churchill’s broadcast of October 1, 1939, cited in James, ed., Winston Churchill, pp. 6160–64. This is the radio talk in which Churchill spoke of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” to which Russia’s “national interest” might provide “a key.”

162. Cited in James, ed., Churchill, vol. VII, pp. 7285–93.

163. For the text of President Truman’s address, see Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks: February 21 to June 5, 1947 (New York: Viking, 1955), pp. 269–74.

164. For the congressional elections of November 1918, see Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967), ch. 4.

165. Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origin of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946–1948 (New York: Knopf, 1972), ch. III; and David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Harper, 1979), pt. 1.

166. Cited in John C. Campbell, ed., The United States in World Affairs, 1947–1948 (New York: Harper, 1948), p. 507.

167. Kennan, “Long Telegram,” p. 31.

168. For the text of Marshall’s speech, see Jones, Fifteen Weeks, pp. 281–84.

169. Andrei Zhdanov in For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy, No. 1 (September 1947), cited in Gales Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 40–41.

170. Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U. S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1947), p. 30.

171. Kennan, “Long Telegram,” p. 29.

172. Roberts, telegram, in Jensen, ed., Cold War, p. 53.

173. Cited in Paterson, On Every Front, p. 61.

174. Cited in George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 111 and pp. 126–27.