STALIN’;S ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF WHAT TO DO WITH POWER WAS simple and surprising: make a revolution. That wasn’t what most people had expected of him. Perhaps he had not even expected it of himself before victory over the factions emboldened him. It was a revolution from above rather than from below, of course, though not without substantial popular mobilization. The point of the revolution was to “build socialism” in the shortest possible time, which in practice meant a crash modernization program. The whole urban economy, including trade, was to be taken into state hands and to become subject to centralized planning. The First Five-Year Plan was to launch rapid industrialization. Peasant farming was to be collectivized, and the allegedly voluntary aspect of the process was not to be taken too seriously. The “class enemies” of socialism, at home and abroad, would be fearlessly confronted: let them understand once and for all that the Soviet regime was not to be trifled with. Stalin called the whole package “the great break.”
If much of this sounded like Trotsky and the Left’s program, Stalin didn’t really care. It was the maximal version of the options that had emerged from the policy debates of the 1920s, and now that he had power, he was going to be a maximalist. At some point during these years, the idea must have taken root in Stalin’s mind that by launching Russia’s second revolution, the economic one, he could put himself up with Lenin, the leader of the political revolution in 1917, in the history books. He had no doubt that this would require the same uncompromising toughness and willingness to use force as the first revolution; indeed, he probably welcomed this. Even before he had decided to take the plunge, he was very clear that socialist modernization would mean breaking heads. The core question about proceeding to Russia’s second (economic) revolution, he suggested in 1926, was whether the Soviet Union had the strength, and presumably the will, to take on and defeat its internal class enemies. By 1928, he had decided that the will was there.
In introducing the New Economic Policy (NEP) back in 1921, Lenin had stressed that the retreat from the maximalism of the Civil War period was “serious and for a long time.” By this, he meant to convince doubting Communists, who wanted to keep on making revolution, that the change had to be for real if the new state was going to survive. Nevertheless, it was a tactical retreat, not a change of objective, and at some point, if the party stayed revolutionary, the retreat would have to end. “Not tomorrow, but in a few years” was Lenin’s last utterance on the question of when “NEP Russia would become socialist Russia.” Six years had passed since then, and the economy had strengthened. As Stalin would tell the Central Committee in July 1928, “the position of permanent retreats is not our policy.”1
Outsiders looking at NEP hoped that, after going through its revolutionary turmoil, Russia was slowly returning to normality; it was assumed that as time passed, common sense would increasingly prevail and utopian revolutionary ideals be forgotten. This would indeed happen in time, but not yet. The general population—“philistines,” as the Bolsheviks liked to call them—were in favor of a return to normality, but the party activists were still raring for a fight. The activists in the party and its youth branch, the Komsomol, had not been happy with the socially conciliatory policies of NEP, which required them to refrain from pushing peasants around, let the backward masses go to church, and respect the greater knowledge of “bourgeois specialists,” that is, the intelligentsia. They wanted more “class struggle,” as they had known it during the Civil War, so that they could show priests, traders, kulaks (prosperous peasants), and the bourgeoisie who was in charge now. The outsiders’ hope of a return to normality was the Bolsheviks’ fear: they called it Thermidor, after the month of Robespierre’s defeat in the French Revolution, and worried immensely in the second half of the 1920s about whether signs of revolutionary “degeneration” were already visible. Trotsky taunted Stalin with aspiring to be a Thermidorian, but he was wrong. The role to which Stalin evidently aspired was the same one as Trotsky: the Robespierre of the Russian Revolution.
The Bolshevik Party called itself a workers’ party, but in the 1920s it was also a party of Civil War veterans. For the large proportion of party members who had fought or served as political commissars in the Red Army, the Civil War was the great formative and bonding experience. This was the source of the macho culture in the party, a fellowship of hardened male veterans who liked to drink and smoke together, and who still usually wore a version of military uniform, with belted tunic and high boots, in civilian life. The Stalin team shared this culture and dressed in this way in the 1920s. Most of them had been at the fronts during the Civil War, often bonding with each other when they served together.
A new willingness, even gusto, for using force against enemies was noticeable in the Stalin team’s demeanor in the wake of the Left Opposition’s defeat. Two categories of class enemies came immediately under fire in the first months of 1928. The first were kulaks, who were supposed to be hoarding the grain necessary to feed the towns and the army. Despite a good harvest in the autumn of 1927, peasant grain sales fell far below expectations. One response on the part of the leadership might have been to raise prices as an incentive for peasants to bring their grain to market, but at a time when the state was planning to make major investments in industry, this was an unattractive option. Stalin came up with a different solution. In a rare trip outside the capital, Stalin visited Siberia in the spring of 1928 and decided that sales were down not because producers were holding out for a better price but because bad peasants (“kulaks”) were withholding the grain, their motive being to sabotage Soviet power. Since this was in essence counterrevolutionary behavior, the answer was to use force to get the grain out of the villages and hit the hoarders with prison terms.
This was the beginning of an escalation of hostilities between the state and the peasantry that ended up in general forced collectivization, which gave the state more leverage in ensuring that the peasants accepted low prices and kept up grain deliveries. To make collectivization stick, the Stalinists introduced a ruthless intimidatory measure (their own innovation, not part of the playbook of the Left), namely, the arrest and deportation of kulak households. Kulaks were hard to define exactly, since exploitation of other peasants and anti-Soviet attitudes, as well as comparative prosperity, were criteria, and the term became a catchall for peasant troublemakers. It is estimated that close to five million peasants were uprooted, though many of these fled from their villages on their own rather than being deported by the state. The intimidatory and traumatic impact was also felt by the peasants remaining in the village, most of whom signed up, however unwillingly, in collective farms within a few years. The campaign against kulaks was combined with a savage campaign against churches and mass arrests of priests. While Stalin’s wager that massive force from the OGPU and, where necessary, the army would prevent major peasant revolt proved correct, peasant disturbances were registered all over the Soviet Union. The collectivization campaign launched in the winter of 1927–28 was the beginning of a five-year battle with the peasantry that Stalin told Churchill was the greatest challenge the revolution ever faced and Molotov later described as a “more significant victory” than the Second World War.
It was Stalin who took the initiative in these great struggles, showing a firmness and boldness that inspired the rest of the team and convinced them of his outstanding qualities as a leader. The rashness of Stalin’s new policies sometimes took their breath away, not to mention his penchant for coercion, but they admired him for it (and so, after a while, did some of the former Left Oppositionists). Of the team members, Molotov was Stalin’s closest ally in launching the Great Break, his unfailing supporter on the need for toughness, and the one most privy to his sometimes remarkably devious machinations against opponents and allies. In later life, it was a matter of pride to Molotov that the harsh measures he used to get out the grain on a trip to Ukraine early in 1928 had inspired Stalin to go off to Siberia a few months later and come up with something even harsher: prosecution of “hoarders” under the criminal code.2
The OGPU was an indispensable player in the struggle with the peasantry, but this was not the only field in which its activities were expanding. From the late 1920s, it had been drawn into the party’s factional fights on the Stalin side, exiling Oppositionists and keeping their underground organizations under surveillance. Private traders and middlemen had been arrested and their property confiscated. The foundation of the future Gulag empire was laid, as camps were established for a new influx of peasants and urban traders; soon, the OGPU would be supplying new industrial construction projects with convict labor. The OGPU and Stalin worked well together, though the assumption that the OGPU leaders were Stalin’s men seems—with regard to the period before 1937—premature. After the departure of Dzerzhinsky, a major political figure in his own right who was usually a Stalin ally, the OGPU was headed by people who were neither of Politburo status nor known for any particular ties to Stalin. Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, who headed the agency after Dzerzhinsky, was a cultured aristocrat and intellectual of Polish origins, a former émigré Old Bolshevik and speaker of many languages with whom Stalin had little in common, though this did not prevent them from setting up an effective “good cop/bad cop” routine on the issue of punishing the Opposition. As Menzhinsky’s health declined, his deputy Genrikh Yagoda increasingly took over, efficiently organizing the kulak deportations. But he was so little Stalin’s man that he was rumored to have Rightist sympathies.3
Rapid industrialization on the basis of a state economic plan was the cornerstone of the new program, the sine qua non in Bolshevik eyes for moving toward socialism. Economic planning may not sound exciting now, but it was trailblazing stuff in the 1920s, when Man masters the economy carried the emotional punch of Man conquers space forty years later. What such an economic plan would look like had been debated since the early 1920s, but the discussion was on hold for a few years in the mid-1920s as the party’s theoreticians and economic specialists argued about how it could be paid for. Massive investment would be required, and it didn’t look as if loans and credits would be available from the West. The alternative of raising the money domestically seemed unpromising: there were no real capitalists left, and “squeezing” the peasantry via taxation or terms of trade was considered politically risky. Various versions of a First Five-Year Plan were drafted and hotly discussed in 1926–27, the minimalist coming from the State Planning Commission (where non-Communist economists were influential), the maximalist from the Supreme Economic Council, headed by team member Kuibyshev. Stalin himself barely participated in the debates on industrialization planning, but from 1924 the top economic authority (Vesenkha) was always headed by a major figure who was a Stalin ally or team member—Dzerzhinsky in the mid-1920s, then Kuibyshev after Dzerzhinsky’s death, and later Ordzhonikidze—so we can assume Stalin shared the general opinion that it was a key post. By the autumn of 1927, Kuibyshev was claiming that the Soviet economy was entering “a new phase of development which has no precedent in our history or in the history of other countries.” They were about to embark on centralized state economic planning.
When the First Five-Year Plan was brought for approval of the XV Party Congress in December 1927 (the same congress that marked the defeat of the Left Opposition), the industrial ministry’s maximalist line was in the ascendant, with Kuibyshev speaking in terms of much more ambitious industrialization targets than had been hitherto contemplated. Among his most enthusiastic supporters was Voroshilov, in charge of the military, who wanted a strong defense industry to support the Red Army. The threat of war seemed sufficiently real for the planners to be told to prepare a contingency First Five-Year Plan for the eventuality of armed attack, given “the probability of foreign intervention.” For Stalin, rapid industrialization was nothing less than a matter of survival in the inevitable battle with the capitalist West. For all of Russian history, in Stalin’s reading, Russia had been “beaten” and humiliated by foreign powers, and the capitalists were waiting to try it again as soon as opportunity presented. They would fail, but only if the Soviet Union brought off its ambitious industrialization plan. “To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we shall go under.”4
The Stalin team did not find a conventional economic solution for the problem of how to raise the money for the industrialization drive. Instead, they almost ignored it, apart from pushing grain exports regardless of domestic consumption needs. If investment capital was in short supply, cheap labor was plentiful, thanks to the stream of peasants fleeing collectivization to work in the towns and industrial construction sites and the availability of convict labor to work in inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union where free labor wouldn’t go. Planning was still rudimentary, consisting largely of identifying priority projects, setting production targets, and punishing those who failed to meet them. It was a “crash through or crash” approach, powered by large doses of coercion and smaller ones of enthusiasm on the part of activists and the young. For the young enthusiasts, the experience was exhilarating, leaving lasting memories of comradeship, adventure, and struggle against the odds. The team felt something of the same exhilaration, along with a burden of responsibility and occasional stabs of panic. Stalin rose to the occasion, projecting unflinching purpose and the concentration of a general in battle.
Cultural Revolution was the order of the day, a precursor of China’s better-known movement of the 1960s, which similarly involved mobilization of radical youth against class enemies, Rightists, and bureaucrats. In the countryside, kulaks and priests were the major victims; in the cities, non-Communist intellectuals and professionals. Alarm was whipped up about the untrustworthiness and potential for treason of “bourgeois specialists,” as white-collar professionals were called. The message was dramatized by the Shakhty trial, held in the spring of 1928 in Moscow and given extensive press coverage. The anti-Soviet conspiracy of mining engineers in the Shakhty region of the Donbass was the discovery (or invention) of the Ukrainian OGPU, but the elaboration of a narrative involving treasonous contacts with foreign intelligence and lax oversight by “Rightist” bureaucrats was done in Moscow under Stalin’s close supervision. On a national scale, this was the first in a new genre of political theater in which anti-Soviet “wreckers” were accused of sabotage and other subversive activities on behalf of foreign intelligence. Some of Stalin’s team were a bit bemused about the whole thing: Molotov suggested to Stalin after a few months of saturation press coverage that people were probably getting sick of it. But Stalin loved these trials, which clearly allowed the creative aspect of his personality (after all, he was a former poet) full rein. Whether he believed the literal truth of the accusations or simply understood them as symbolically true and politically useful is unclear, but he certainly took a keen interest in shaping the scenario.5
It might seem odd to go after engineers at the same time as launching an industrialization drive. Whereas it could be argued that the drive against kulaks, another class enemy, was a misplaced response to a real threat in the form of falling grain deliveries, it’s hard to see how arresting engineers could be thought to increase industrial production. But anti-intellectualism always had popular appeal in Russia, and hostility to “bourgeois” engineers was widespread among factory workers, who saw them as representing old-style management. These attitudes were reflected in the Bolshevik Party, whose rank-and-file membership included many workers, especially the class-conscious kind. When the implications of the Shakhty Affair were discussed in the Central Committee in April 1928, the general mood was enthusiastically against “bourgeois” specialists; sixty speakers signed up to take part in the discussion. Stalin explained the political stakes: it was just like the Civil War, when “whole groups of military specialists, generals and officers, sons of the bourgeoisie and landowners” were ready to help military interventionists bring down Soviet power. Then the capitalists had launched a military and political intervention, whereas now it was an economic one. “They [the Western capitalists] want us to give up our revolutionary policy, and then they will be ‘friends’ … What do you think, comrades, can we go along with that?” There was a resounding cry of “No!”
The Stalin team, however, had varying reactions. Apart from the message of antibourgeois vigilance going out to the public, the specific policy implications were quite complex. Not fully articulated, but unmistakably present as a subtext, was the proposition that if things went wrong in industry, as they were bound to do given the ambitious targets of the Five-Year Plan, the proper response was to arrest people, more or less regardless of culpability, and charge them with “wrecking.” Since industrial administrators (some of whom went on trial along with the engineers) had failed to detect the conspiracy, and were generally being accused of letting bourgeois specialists pull the wool over their eyes, they were in defensive mode, especially those from Ukraine, where Shakhty was located. Kuibyshev, head of the industrial ministry, was worried by the shadow cast on engineers, a key component of his industrialization efforts. Kaganovich had no problems with arresting engineers or stepping up OGPU activities but, as party boss in Ukraine, he was uneasy about the implication that Ukrainian party officials had been lax. Andreev eagerly endorsed the need for more vigilance against enemies, and a future team member, Andrei Zhdanov, still out in Nizhny Novgorod but already buttering up Stalin in hope of promotion, took such a holier-than-thou posture about the need for vigilance that one of the Ukrainian delegates interjected sourly, “Is it wrecking when the people on duty are asleep?” Rykov, although the official rapporteur on the Shakhty Affair, clearly had reservations about blowing up its significance. Alone of the team, Tomsky, the trade unionist, struck an openly skeptical note, being inclined to see bad management and wasted money rather than intentional sabotage and conspiracy.6
The team response was complicated by the fact that a heated bureaucratic fight was under way between the industrial and education ministries about which of them should control higher technical education. This seemingly trivial issue was invested with all sorts of political overtones, because the education ministry was run by party intellectuals suspected of bourgeois liberal tendencies. Although Stalin unambiguously took the side of the industrial ministry at the April 1928 plenum of the Central Committee, a long and passionate discussion ensued, in which Molotov, Kaganovich, and, of course, Kuibyshev (as minister for industry) followed Stalin’s lead, but Ordzhonikidze and Andreev were opposed; Tomsky and Rykov equivocated. Nadezhda Krupskaya, deputy head of the Russian education ministry, was one member of the education group who argued strongly against the Stalin/Molotov position, citing Lenin as her authority. The issue was sufficiently unresolved to require more discussion at the next Central Committee meeting in July. At this meeting, with Molotov as rapporteur strongly supporting transfer of higher technical schools from education to industry, no team member publicly opposed him, and the final vote recorded only seven dissents. But the leaders of the Russian and Ukrainian education ministries put up such spirited resistance that the ultimate adjudication was left to the Politburo, which duly voted for the transfer. It was the last occasion when team members publicly took different sides on a policy issue. Members of the team would disagree with one another and with Stalin in the future, but only within the confines of the Politburo.7
The team kept up an inhuman pace of work in the years of the Five-Year Plan. Core members of the Stalin team were constantly on the road, fighting (and sometimes laying fires) all over the nation, sending daily reports on local collectivization and industrial construction back to Moscow. It was a level of peripatetic activity unprecedented since the Civil War, and undoubtedly recalled those glorious days for the participants. Molotov, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan crisscrossed the country, particularly the main grain-growing regions, several times a year, pushing local officials to push the peasants. In the spring they were monitoring the sowing, in the autumn the harvest and grain deliveries. In 1928 alone, Molotov traveled to Ukraine, Russia’s Central Black Earth region, and the Volga; Kaganovich went to the Central Black Earth region and the Lower Volga; and Mikoyan was in the North Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Central Black Earth region. Ordzhonikidze was also frequently on the road. Kalinin, the party’s recognized peasant expert, was sent out less often, presumably because he was considered soft on peasants: these jobs were for the really tough members of the team. The pattern was repeated for years. Of course, as Molotov noted, they didn’t know much about the village, but that was not the point: their task was to force local authorities to get maximum deliveries from the peasants, jolt them into a revolutionary and “vigilant” frame of mind, and back them up in tough measures, including mass arrests and deportations. Molotov was to claim in later life—contrary to most contemporary grassroots descriptions—that the party’s efforts aroused a great positive response: “the country rose at once to collectivization. A stormy process began, which we hadn’t expected. It turned out much better, much more successful.”
Agriculture was one of the few major sectors of government without a specific team member in charge, probably because in the first stormy years of collectivization, Stalin and Molotov were so deeply engaged. They were assisted by Yakov Yakovlev, a bright young Jewish protégé of Stalin’s, minister for agriculture from 1929 to 1934, who seems to have functioned almost as a team member for some years but was never appointed to the Politburo. Other team members were also closely involved. Mikoyan’s baptism by fire as a team spokesman to the Central Committee was his report on grain procurements in April 1928. Andreev, sent down to the North Caucasus as regional party secretary early in 1928, had a similarly testing experience in November. Although he knew nothing about agriculture (he had “not yet completely liquidated my agronomic illiteracy,” he admitted to the Central Committee), his task was to demonstrate the potential for rapid growth in agricultural output, despite the resistance of the class enemy, on the basis of the experience of his major grain-growing region. Stalin himself stayed in Moscow, after his memorable Siberian excursion, but was at his warmest encouraging the troops. “I could kiss you for how you acted there,” Stalin told Molotov after he got back from cracking the whip in Ukraine in his January 1928 trip. When Mikoyan showed signs of flagging under the strain of the grain procurements battle, Stalin wrote supportively, “In a word, hold on and don’t get depressed—our team must win.”8
Industry became more and more central to the team’s concerns after the adoption of the First Five-Year Plan in spring 1929, which inaugurated a crash program of industrial expansion throughout the Soviet Union. It wasn’t just Kuibyshev, as industrial minister, who was intimately involved on a day-to-day basis. Ordzhonikidze was as well, since the state arm of his Control Commission had started an intensive investigation of the state of factories and industrial authorities, which produced a series of highly critical reports. As head of the government, which included both the state planning authority and the industrial ministry, Rykov had a lot to do with decision making on industry. For Kirov in Leningrad, Stanislav Kosior in Ukraine, and other republican and regional party secretaries, industrial development was a major preoccupation. Indeed, Kuibyshev, Stalin, and the Politburo as a whole were encountering an unexpected by-product of the economic plan: intensive lobbying for industrial investment from the heads of different industries and regions, Ukraine being particularly forceful. Kuibyshev started noticing the lobbying phenomenon after the XV Party Congress, when he found himself visited by a stream of party secretaries from the big industrial regions—Ukraine, the Urals, Western Siberia, Baku—hoping to persuade him to back big new projects. Correspondence between Stalin and Molotov during Stalin’s yearly vacations started to be peppered with the names of particular industrial plants and construction sites. From 1929 onward, the Politburo regularly discussed the situation in particular sectors of heavy industry, on several occasions with Stalin as rapporteur, and every such discussion and subsequent resolution was preceded by heavy lobbying.9
At the same time, a new split in the leadership was in the making, this time with the Right. It was scarcely a surprise that those most closely associated with moderate policies in the 1920s—notably, Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky—should have reservations when Stalin switched to radical ones. They had weight in the leadership and visibility in the country, with Rykov heading the government, Tomsky the trade unions, and Bukharin the Comintern (as well as editing Pravda); in addition, all three were ethnic Russians, which was useful in terms of public opinion. (Kalinin, titular head of the Soviet government, was similarly inclined to moderation, though he ended up on the Stalin team, not with the Right.) Given that a comparative openness to debate still prevailed in the Politburo, they no doubt hoped to stay in as a moderating influence, awaiting the inevitable time when things settled down again, but in the meantime prepared to accept and publicly endorse decisions that went against them. Certainly, they had no thought of organizing an Opposition faction, having seen what happened to the last one, and never made the slightest move to do so. But it didn’t suit Stalin to have internal dissenters on the team, however loyal. Mikoyan reports a curious conversation early in 1928, while riding back from the dacha one evening with Kirov and Ordzhonikidze, in which Stalin remarked casually that there were a few moderates who would doubtless drop out of top positions in the next few years, to be replaced by up-and-coming, hard-driving men like them. They were all shocked, Mikoyan says, being still in unity mode. But there were other warning signs, notably a very sharp attack on Rykov by Molotov in a discussion of the First Five-Year Plan in March 1928, which Tomsky later remembered as the beginning of the campaign against the Right.
While Rykov had always been an ally of Stalin’s, rather than a member of Stalin’s team, Bukharin and Tomsky had both been personally and politically close to Stalin in the mid-1920s. Indeed, during his vacations in 1925–26, Stalin addressed many of his communications jointly to Molotov and Bukharin, as acting team captains in his absence. Rykov and Tomsky were near contemporaries of Stalin’s, Bukharin a decade younger. Rykov and Bukharin were among the party’s intellectuals, educated men with connections to Lenin going back to the 1910s; Tomsky was a worker, a former printer who had worked with Lenin’s wife Krupskaya in Saint Petersburg back in the 1890s and remained friendly with her after Lenin’s death. Lenin had called Bukharin “the favorite of the party” in his “Testament,” and this is broadly attested: just about everyone on the team used the intimate form of address with him. People often referred to him by diminutives of his surname—Bukharchik, Bukhashka—which were both affectionate and a shade condescending: his volatility and tendency to weep in public made his colleagues not take him entirely seriously, though he was recognized as a powerful orator, theorist, and polemicist. At the XV Party Congress, his standing, as measured by strength of applause recorded in the published minutes, was high: he came in third (along with Voroshilov) after Stalin and Kalinin, the popular “old man” of the party.
Bukharin became a close friend of Stalin’s in the mid-1920s; he called him “Koba,” Stalin’s conspiratorial pseudonym from the prerevolutionary underground in the Caucasus, a name reserved for his intimates. Bukharin and his then wife, Esfir Gurvich, had a daughter, Svetlana, not much older than Stalin’s own daughter, Svetlana, and the family was invited for lengthy stays at Stalin’s dacha in Zubalovo; in 1927, at Stalin’s suggestion, Bukharin (though not Esfir, who was an emancipated career woman) moved into an apartment at the Kremlin, and they thus became neighbors. Their wives, both enrolled as students in Moscow higher educational institutions, were friendly, too. Tomsky and his wife were Kremlin neighbors whom Stalin often visited at home. Both Tomskys called Stalin Koba, as their son remembered, and Tomsky had a photo affectionately inscribed to “To my pal Mishka Tomsky.”10
The increasingly militant tone of the party at the April and July plenums in 1928 alarmed the Right. They were worried about the escalating confrontation with the peasantry and what they saw as unrealistic targets in the First Five-Year Plan industrialization drive. Tomsky, as trade-union leader, was alarmed at the talk of working-class sacrifices in the cause of rapid industrialization and the strengthening of management powers vis-à-vis labor. At some point in the late 1920s, Tomsky and Stalin had a serious quarrel that brought their friendship to an end: as Tomsky family legend has it, Stalin’s last friendly visit, bottle in hand, ended with Tomsky throwing him out with the words, “You’re a bastard, a real bastard! Get out and take your bottle to the devil!”
Bukharin also reportedly had a shouting match with Stalin around this time, after which they did not speak for several weeks. Bukharin’s unhappiness came to a head at the Central Committee plenum of July 1928. At the end of the meeting, he left the Kremlin with Grigory Sokolnikov, an Old Bolshevik intellectual of the Zinoviev faction with whom he had been friendly since childhood. Exactly what happened next is a matter of dispute. Bukharin (who tended to tell fibs when he was in trouble) told Anna Larina, his future third wife, that he and Sokolnikov had run into the disgraced Oppositionist Lev Kamenev by chance on the street and fell into a conversation that became emotional on Bukharin’s part, but was in no way conspiratorial. Kamenev said that Bukharin and Sokolnikov showed up at his place unexpectedly after the plenum, but that he had had a meeting with Sokolnikov earlier in the day, where Bukharin’s unhappiness with Stalin and the possibility of the Right’s rapprochement with the Zinovievites had been discussed. This suggests that on Sokolnikov’s part, at least, the affair had a conspiratorial aspect. From Stalin’s point of view, it was clearly a conspiracy—a secret meeting whose purpose was the formation of a block between the old Zinovievite Opposition and the Right. Whatever the exact circumstances, it was an act of incredible political folly on Bukharin’s part, as he later admitted (“What a boy I was, what a fool!”).
The Stalin interpretation certainly looks plausible in light of Kamenev’s notes on the meeting, whose basic accuracy Bukharin later did not deny. In a state of high emotion during his conversation with Kamenev, he spoke of Stalin in a “tone of absolute hatred” and seemed to have no doubt that a split was inevitable. Identifying Rykov, Tomsky, and himself as a bloc, he said that “we consider Stalin’s line ruinous for the revolution,” and moreover described Stalin as “an unprincipled intriguer, who subordinates everything to keeping power” and was likely to put a knife in your back at any time. Stalin had instilled a “Genghis Khan culture” in the Central Committee. He was spying on them: the GPU was following them and tapping their telephones. Bukharin and his allies had come to see Zinoviev and Kamenev as infinitely preferable to Stalin. Kamenev pressed him on just who those allies were, and Bukharin implied that it was most of the Politburo, although not all were willing to come out and say so. The “blockhead Molotov, who gives me lessons in Marxism and whom we call ‘stone-bottom,’” was a hopeless case, of course. But Rykov and Tomsky were absolutely committed, along with Bukharin, in opposition to Stalin; Andreev was with them, and police chief Yagoda was on board. The Leningrad people (that is, Kirov) “are in general with us, but took fright at the idea of the possible removal of Stalin.” Voroshilov and Kalinin were sympathizers, but “betrayed us at the last minute,” evidently because Stalin had some kind of hold over them. Ordzhonikidze was another sympathizer who had let them down, despite having “come round to my place and cursed out Stalin.”
All this was duly noted by Kamenev and typed up by his secretaries for transmission to Zinoviev. As Bukharin should surely have anticipated, given his remarks about surveillance, Stalin soon had the report in his hands—he immediately gave it to Rykov to read, who was appalled at Bukharin’s folly—and within a few months it had ended up in the hands of the outlawed Trotskyist Opposition, which put it into underground circulation. This was brought up for discussion and condemnation at a joint meeting of the Central Committee and the party Control Commission in April 1929.11
Stalin was furious when news of this betrayal reached him. In a handwritten note he passed to Bukharin at the Central Committee plenum in April 1929, he wrote angrily (still using the familiar form of address), “You won’t force me to be silent or hide my opinion … Will there ever be an end to the attacks on me?” Bukharin could have made the same complaint: from the standpoint of anybody but Stalin, he was the person being hounded at the meeting. Bukharin is said to have been shocked when Stalin publicly repudiated their friendship, saying that “the personal element is a triviality, and it’s not worth taking time with trivialities. Yesterday we [he and Bukharin] were still personal friends, but now we have parted company with him on politics.” The repudiation shouldn’t have been a surprise. Not only had Bukharin, in fact, betrayed Stalin both personally and politically, but Stalin’s statement about the “triviality” of personal ties was an axiom for the Bolsheviks, and indeed all Russia’s revolutionaries going back to the nineteenth century. When Stalin said, “This is not a family circle, not a company of personal friends, but a political party of the working class,” he was saying something completely obvious and unexceptionable in party terms—which is not to say that he was telling the whole truth about his feelings about the matter. The team was indeed “a company of personal friends,” among other things, and Stalin had just heard that one of those friends had claimed to hate him and think his leadership disastrous, while others, including Kirov, to whom Stalin was particularly attached, and his old friends Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov, were said to hold similar opinions.
Bukharin was remarkably slow to recognize the irreversible train wreck he had brought about, but he certainly noticed the semipublic campaign against him, orchestrated by Molotov, that was undermining him in the Comintern, attacking his writings on economics, and punishing his young disciples. One of the charges brought against him was that he was a hypocrite who publicly supported the party’s collectivization policies but actually privately opposed them. This was of course true, but it was also a function of the rules of the game: once a decision was made within the Politburo, all members were supposed to support it outside. The alternative was to go public with disagreement and thus issue a factional challenge, as the Left had done. But Bukharin and his allies were desperate to avoid anything that could be construed as factional activity: they believed that Stalin was trying to paint them as splitters, as he had earlier done with the Left. “You’re not going to get a new opposition!” Bukharin shouted at Stalin at the April 1929 plenum. “You’re not going to get it. And not one of us is going to head [it]!” In an article in Pravda, “Notes of an Economist,” Bukharin had published an Aesopian critique of industrialization policies, thus breaking the rules in what he hoped was a minor and deniable way, but he had also been maneuvered into public endorsement of policy that he privately opposed and, more embarrassing still, into public denunciation of the unnamed villains who sought to undermine it. It was an untenable position, and Stalin and Molotov gleefully made the most of Bukharin’s discomfiture.12
True to Stalin’s principle of dosage, the three Rightists were ousted from their positions gradually, and according to separate timetables, but it was clear to the team long before the final departures that they were on their way out. “Rykov and his gang must be driven out,” Stalin wrote to Molotov in the autumn of 1929. “But for the time being this is just between ourselves” (italics in the original). Bukharin was formally removed from the editorship of Pravda in June 1929 and the leadership of the Comintern a month later, but, in fact, feeling himself undermined, he hadn’t been going to work at either place since his return from summer vacation the year before, thus leaving himself open to accusations of slacking because of injured vanity. Tomsky, similarly, stopped going to work at the trade union office after Kaganovich was sent in as a watchdog, and was officially removed in June 1929. Rykov, a more prudent and slippery customer than the other two, soldiered on as head of the government, but the Stalinists made it increasingly difficult for him to get anything done. On New Year’s Eve, December 1929, the three of them made a last-minute attempt at peacemaking, arriving unexpectedly at Stalin’s apartment in the early hours, bearing a conciliatory bottle of Georgian wine. But it was too late. While they were not cast into outer darkness like the Left, having not in fact organized anything approaching a faction, they were dropped one by one from the Politburo—Tomsky in July 1929, Bukharin four months later, and Rykov in December 1930. After his removal as head of the government at the end of 1930, Rykov got a second-tier position—minister of communications—while Bukharin and Tomsky were given third-tier positions in economic administration.13
In the early stages of the parting of ways with the Right, the team—or at least some of its members—was inclined to hope for a reconciliation. “We honestly did not want to cut off Rykov, Tomsky and Bukharin,” Mikoyan recalled, without clarifying exactly who “we” were. Molotov, as usual, was staunchly backing Stalin and, in his absence, monitoring the reliability of the rest of the team. Quite a few “friends [are] inclined to panic,” he warned Stalin in August 1928, and he seemed to expect that some of these “political weathervanes”—perhaps a larger group than the three who ended up in disgrace—would have to be dropped from the team. Stalin was afraid that Mikoyan and Kuibyshev might be susceptible to Tomsky’s arguments, so dropped a word to Kuibyshev that Tomsky was “a malicious person and not always honest,” who, despite the appearance of friendship, was “planning to hurt you.” Molotov was doing a bit of undermining of his own, as Kaganovich later remembered: “he would say [of Bukharin] he is a cunning fox; he is the Shuisky of our time.” (Vasily Shuisky was a noble who played both sides in the seventeenth-century Time of Troubles and had a brief stint as tsar before being deposed in his turn.)
Ordzhonikidze, never an enthusiast for cutting off his friends, was at first strongly opposed to any further splits in the leadership. “We need to leave this behind us,” he told Rykov in the autumn of 1928, using the intimate form of address. He was sure that there were no fundamental disagreements between the Rykov group and the rest of the team; it was just that last year’s grain procurements problem had rattled everyone. He begged Rykov to do what he could to bring about a reconciliation between Bukharin and Stalin (though he knew enough about their estrangement to know that this would be difficult) and avoid at all costs getting into a fight on any policy issue. Dropping Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky from the team would be “ridiculous,” “just madness.” A month or so later, he was glad to be able to tell Voroshilov that “Misha [Tomsky] … had conducted himself quite diplomatically,” but expressed unhappiness about the covert critique of Politburo policy that Bukharin had published in “Notes of an Economist”: “It’s not good with Bukharin’s article.Poor Bukharin is getting quite a hard time at the meetings. He shouldn’t have written such an article. Have you read it? It’s quite confused: Bukharchik didn’t dare to come out and say openly what he wanted to say in that article, and therefore had a go both at the left and the right; as a result everyone is dissatisfied.”
But once the content of his conversation with Kamenev became known to the team, sympathy with poor Bukharchik sharply declined. He had tarnished or insulted virtually everyone on the team, and for those who were his friends, the whole affair was peculiarly embarrassing. Indeed, Bukharin could scarcely have delivered a crueler blow to the team waverers (if such they were), or one more likely to have sent them scurrying back into the fold. Probably they had in fact been somewhat disloyal on occasion in private conversation, as who has not? Most likely none of them really wanted to see the Right cast out. Their wavering may have come as no surprise to Stalin, if OGPU surveillance of the leaders was as good as is claimed. But by sanctioning the release of Kamenev’s notes, albeit only for the limited public of the Central Committee, Stalin had not only blown Bukharin out of the water but also sent a warning shot across the bows of Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Andreev, Kirov, and Kalinin, and they reacted accordingly. “To hell with him [Bukharin],” Ordzhonikidze wrote to Voroshilov, who had complained to him after Bukharin’s perfidy. “To our complete surprise, he turned out not to be a particularly decent person. He will do everything he can to create the impression that people are insulting and suppressing him, and at the same time he himself will pour shit on us.”14
Deteriorating personal relations were evident at the Central Committee’s April 1929 meeting, where the Bukharin-Kamenev conversation was discussed. Bored by Bukharin’s long theoretical disquisition on the economy, and picking up on his use of the metaphor of winding a screw, Rudzutak interrupted with a scornful “Wind on, wind on,” to which Bukharin responded, “I suppose you think that’s very funny.” Ordzhonikidze laughed, which further angered Bukharin. “So now laughing is forbidden?” Ordzhonikidze riposted, which led Bukharin to shoot back with a reference to Ordzhonikidze’s notoriously volatile temper: “I know nobody forbade you to bash chauffeurs in the mug.” When Bukharin baited him at a Politburo meeting, Voroshilov completely lost his temper, calling Bukharin a liar and a bastard and threatening physical violence. Voroshilov was embarrassed by his own behavior, as he told his friend Ordzhonikidze, but Bukharin was too much to bear: he was “just trash, a man capable of telling the most awful fibs in your face, putting on a particularly innocent and holy-bastardly expression on that Jesuitical face of his.”
Voroshilov made a speech attacking the Right, along with their international capitalist sponsors, which he thought was a total flop (“I tortured the Leningraders with my speech and they won’t ask me again”), but Stalin was ready with reassurance: “It was a good, principled speech. All the [Herbert] Hoovers, [Austen] Chamberlains and Bukharins got hit where it hurts.” But not everyone was getting encouragement from Stalin. When Kalinin was named in one of the (fake) confessions of experts accused of wrecking and sabotage—extracted by the secret police in 1930—Molotov, upon receiving the transcript, assumed it should be edited out, but Stalin quickly set him right: “All confessions without exception should be sent out to members of the Central Committee … That Kalinin has sinned cannot be doubted. Everything that they say about Kalinin in the confessions is the unvarnished truth.” The Central Committee needed to be informed “so that in future Kalinin won’t get mixed up with scoundrels.” In other words, let Kalinin understand that, however high the respect in which he was held in the party, his position was not unassailable.15
Nevertheless, Kalinin stayed on the team, perhaps because the majority never came round to excluding him. The same was true of other “waverers” like Voroshilov and Ordzhonikidze, although it was the unwavering Molotov and Kaganovich who became Stalin’s closest political confidants. Out in the provinces, future team members were being tested in battle, ready to be brought into Moscow as Mikoyan, Ordzhonikidze, and Kirov had been a few years earlier. Andrei Zhdanov was working in Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga, the site of a major new auto plant. A young man with intellectual pretensions (“I was always the best student in my school and graduated with top honors,” he wrote in a 1922 résumé), Zhdanov was more notable for his obedience to changes in the party line than any particular efficiency in meeting First Five-Year Plan targets, but Stalin liked him. Lavrenty Beria was in the Caucasus, rising from head of the Georgian GPU to the head of the Transcaucasus party committee and, through his patron Ordzhonikidze, angling for promotion to Moscow, preferably in a party position, not a security one. He kept Ordzhonikidze and Stalin up-to-date on the intricacies of Caucasian politics, in which both retained a keen interest, and took advantage of Stalin’s regular vacation trips to the South to curry favor. Beria’s local leadership performance, both in the agricultural and industrial realm, seems to have been superior to Zhdanov’s; he was efficient as well as tough, and, if his son is to be believed, managed to secure a First Five-Year Plan for Georgia that encouraged citrus and tea growing—implying a milder form of collectivization than elsewhere—as well as quell anticollectivization uprisings in Azerbaijan “with maximum cunning and minimal firepower.”16
Stalin and others had initially expected future leaders to come out of the Institute of Red Professors and Sverdlov Communist University, which were set up in the early 1920s as Communist elite training institutions in the social sciences. But these students proved a disappointment. Highly politicized, they were prone to spend their time in ideological debate and factional politics—and, worse, the wrong kind of factional politics, as the students’ favorite was the popular and approachable young theorist Bukharin. With the Cultural Revolution, Stalin and the team switched to a strong “class” policy in elite recruitment, favoring proletarians and party members and violently hostile to students from the old upper classes: “Throw them out of Moscow on their necks,” Stalin wrote to Molotov, “and put in their place young lads, our people, Communists.”17
Along with this policy of proletarian affirmative action went an abrupt shift in higher educational priorities toward engineering (now under the jurisdiction of the Stalinist industrial ministry, not the Rightist intellectuals from education), which in the 1930s became the most desirable credential for political as well as professional careers. Looking toward the future, almost all the Brezhnev-Kosygin team in power from the mid-1960s to the 1980s were engineering graduates, but they had precursors in two who joined Stalin’s team in the mid-1930s: Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev. Malenkov, from a noble Russian family and related by marriage to an Old Bolshevik contemporary and friend of Lenin’s (Gleb Krzhizhanovsky), was a student in the early 1920s (after fighting in the Civil War) at the most prestigious of all Russian engineering schools, the Bauman Higher Technical School. According to his son, he was doing well enough for his professor of electrical engineering to encourage him to go on to graduate school, but he chose instead to go to work in the Central Committee office and rose under Stalin’s patronage. Khrushchev, ethnically Russian, though spending his youth in Ukraine, was the son of a peasant who worked seasonally in industry, and Khrushchev himself was a factory worker from the age of fifteen. He joined the party in 1918, was mobilized into the Red Army during the Civil War, went into local party work in Ukraine in the 1920s, and became a protégé of Kaganovich’s. He moved to Moscow in 1930, as a mature-age student—a beneficiary of proletarian affirmative action—with significant political experience behind him. His place of study was the Industrial Academy, academically less distinguished than the Bauman but with the special profile of providing higher education to working-class Communists like Khrushchev, who had missed out on it earlier. Fellow students included Dora Khazan (Andreev’s wife) and Nadya Alliluyeva, whose friendship with Khrushchev may have first drawn him to Stalin’s attention. At thirty-five, Khrushchev was probably too old and too busy with politics to learn much engineering, but he made his mark as the academy’s party secretary, leading the battle against the Right. He was quickly rewarded by an appointment as second secretary to Kaganovich in the Moscow Party Committee.
In addition to the new men in the wings, there were some old ones renouncing past errors and making a comeback, albeit at a level below the Politburo. For some of the former Left Oppositionists, Stalin’s industrialization drive had great appeal, not just because the policies had their origin in the Left but also because their implementation during the First Five-Year Plan period was such an exciting challenge. As of 1930, the Stalin team was riding high, with opposition defeated, strong support in the party rank and file, and launched on the kind of bold, aggressive program of social transformation that, seen from within, seemed natural for a revolutionary party. Foremost among the former Leftists who successfully applied for readmission to the party was Yury Pyatakov, once a close associate of Trotsky, who was soon serving as a key deputy to Ordzhonikidze at the ministry of heavy industry.
“Tne heroic period of our socialist construction has arrived,” Pyatakov exulted. It was a sentiment shared by the team and enthusiastically embraced by the young Communists who served as the “shock troops” of collectivization, the industrialization drive, and the Cultural Revolution. Kaganovich, one of the team’s most effective orators, told a Komsomol congress in 1931 that the future was theirs. The First Five-Year Plan had started “a gigantic thrust forward which will show the whole world that the hour is not far off when we shall catch up and surpass the most advanced country—the United States of North America [sic] … Socialism will be victorious … You will be masters of the whole world.”18