Stalin

Ten years to the day after Stalin had been sworn that oath, January 26, the 17th Party Congress opened in the Grand Kremlin Palace, bringing together 1,225 voting and 739 nonvoting delegates, representing 2.8 million members and candidates. Party statutes had specified an annual congress, but three and a half years had elapsed, the longest interval yet.¹⁸³ Pravda headlined it as the “Congress of Victors.” Magnanimously, the dictator had allowed high-profile opposition figures back into the party after they had again publicly admitted their errors. From the rostrum they issued self-flagellating calls for “unity,” with Kamenev defending Stalin’s personal dictatorship (in contrast to his bold denunciation of it back at the 14th Party Congress).¹⁸⁴ Bukharin, whom Stalin would appoint editor of Izvestiya, told the congress regarding the right deviation: “Our grouping was unavoidably becoming the focus for all the forces fighting against the socialist offensive, and primarily for the strata most threatened by the socialist offensive—the kulaks and their urban intellectual ideologists,” which had heightened the danger of “an untimely foreign intervention.” He praised the plan and quipped, “Hitler wants to drive us into Siberia, and the Japanese imperialists want to drive us from Siberia, so the entire 160 million population of our country would have to be located on one of the blast furnaces of Magnitogorsk.”

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Stalin delivered a five-hour keynote on opening night. “He spoke unhurriedly, as if conversing,” one witness wrote in his diary. “He was witty. The more he spoke, the closer he became to the audience. Ovations. Explosions of laughter. Full-blooded. But a practical, working speech.”¹⁸⁶ The dictator issued a call to accountability, speaking of “difficulties of our organizational work, difficulties of our organizational leadership. They are concentrated in us ourselves, in our leading functionaries, in our organizations. . . . The responsibility for our failures and shortcomings rests, in nine out of ten cases, not on ‘objective conditions’ but on ourselves and only on ourselves.” He denounced chancellery methods of management (“resolutions and decrees”) and called for criticism from below, worker competitions, getting bosses into the factories and farms, getting skilled workers out of offices and into production, and refusing to tolerate people who failed to implement directives. “We must not hesitate to remove them from their leading posts, regardless of their services in the past.”¹⁸⁷

After the applause died down, Stalin offered an example of empty-words leadership:

STALIN: How goes the sowing?

FUNCTIONARY: The sowing, comrade Stalin? We have mobilized. (Laughter.)

STALIN: And?

FUNCTIONARY: We posed the question squarely. (Laughter.)

STALIN: And then?

FUNCTIONARY: We have a breakthrough, comrade Stalin, soon there’ll be a breakthrough.

(Laughter.)

STALIN: And in fact?

FUNCTIONARY: There is movement. (Laughter.)

STALIN: But in fact, how goes the sowing?

FUNCTIONARY: So far, the sowing is not happening, comrade Stalin. (General guffaws.)¹⁸⁸

Stalin pointedly added that provincial officials, “like feudal princes, think the laws were written not for them but for fools.”

Against capitalism’s “raging waves of economic shocks and military-political catastrophes,” Stalin contrasted how “the USSR stands apart, like an anchor, continuing its socialist construction and struggle for keeping the peace.” He accused the capitalists, without irony, of “deepening their exploitation via strengthening the intensity of their labor, and at the expense of farmers, by further reduction in the prices of products of their labor.” Fascism, and especially National Socialism, he averred, “contained not an atom of socialism,” and “should be seen as a sign of the bourgeoisie’s weakness, of its lack of power to rule by the old parliamentary methods, forcing it to turn internally to terrorist methods of rule” and externally to a “policy of war.” Without naming the likely aggressor, he foresaw a “new imperialist war” that “will certainly unleash revolution and place the very existence of capitalism in question in a number of countries, as happened during the first imperialist war.”¹⁸⁹

Stalin observed that fascism in Italy had not prohibited good bilateral relations with the USSR, and dismissed as “imaginary” German complaints that the Soviet Union’s many nonaggression pacts signified a “reorientation” toward Western Europe. “We never had any orientation toward Germany, nor have we [now] any orientation toward Poland and France,” he insisted. “We were oriented in the past and are oriented in the present only on the USSR. (Stormy applause.)” He also warned Japan: “Those who desire good peace and relations would always meet a positive response, but those who try to attack our country will receive a crushing rebuff to teach them in future not to poke their pig snouts into our Soviet garden. (Thunderous applause.)”¹⁹⁰