Stalin

The party congress had continued through February 10. Stalin belatedly acknowledged the livestock losses (his report carried a table), which he attributed to kulak sabotage, yet he urged that “1934 must and can be a breakthrough year to growth of the whole livestock economy.” The dearth of meat was widely felt.²⁰⁵ Orjonikidze proposed that industrial production plans be cut, rather than increased, and the congress approved a resolution for the rest of the second plan, stipulating 18.5 percent growth in consumer goods, versus 14.5 for producer goods. Many speakers underscored the imperative to ramp up retail trade and living standards.²⁰⁶ But Kaganovich affirmed that Stalin’s “revolution from above was the greatest revolution human history has known, a revolution that smashed the old economic structure and created a new collective farm system.”

²⁰⁷ Even Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, the erstwhile ardent Trotsky supporter, marveled from the rostrum, “Collectivization—that is the heart of the matter! Did I predict collectivization? I did not.”²⁰⁸

Kirov, afforded the honor of closing out discussion of Stalin’s report, celebrated all that had been achieved, assuring delegates that “the chief difficulties are behind us,” while reminding them to keep shoulders to the wheel. His oratory elicited repeated clapping, especially when he proposed that every word of Stalin’s political report be approved as marching orders. “Comrades, ten years ago, we buried the man who founded our party, who founded our proletarian state,” Kirov concluded. “We, comrades, can say with pride before Lenin’s memory: we fulfilled that vow; we in future, too, shall fulfill that vow, because that vow was made by the grand strategist of the liberation of the toilers of our country and the whole world, comrade Stalin. (Stormy, prolonged applause, a warm ovation by the entire hall, all stand.)”²⁰⁹

Stalin declined to give the heretofore customary reply to the discussion, citing “no disagreements at all.”²¹⁰ He dictated the composition of the new Central Committee: seventy-one members and sixty-eight candidates. The number of candidates he permitted to stand equaled the number of slots, although, by party tradition, delegates could cross out anyone they opposed. In the voting on February 9, 1934, only 1,059 of 1,225 ballots ended up in the record. (At the previous congress, 134 voting delegates had not returned ballots.)²¹¹ Only Kalinin and Ivan Kodatsky (Leningrad province soviet chairman) were elected unanimously in the official accounting. Three votes went against Stalin, though apparatchiks might have tossed out a few negatives. Kirov received four against. (Back at the 16th Congress, Stalin, like Kirov, had officially received nine votes against.)

²¹²

Rumors circulated in Moscow and then abroad about some provincial party bosses having sought to have the aw-shucks Kirov replace Stalin.²¹³ Lev Shaumyan (b. 1904), a newspaper editor (and the unofficially adopted son of Mikoyan), would later assert that “the thought ripened in the minds of certain congress delegates, primarily those who remembered Lenin’s Testament well, that it was time to transfer Stalin from the post of general secretary to other work.”²¹⁴

But the idea that Kirov was widely viewed as worthy of replacing Stalin, or that he led a “moderate faction” opposed to Stalin, is contradicted by the evidence.²¹⁵ Kirov seemed a provincial by comparison with his predecessor in the second capital, Zinoviev, who had worked closely with Lenin and headed the Comintern. At the same time, Kirov had turned out a lot like Zinoviev: a talker, a bon vivant. Still, there was a difference. “At meetings, he never once said anything about any question,” Mikoyan told Khrushchev of Kirov. “He sat silent, and that was it.”²¹⁶ Selecting the general secretary, moreover, fell not to the congress but to the one-day plenum of the newly elected Central Committee afterward. Another gloss on the whispering was provided by the Leningrad delegate Mikhail Rosliakov. “Generally,” he would recall, “the talk was that the party had matured, grown stronger, that there were even people capable of replacing Stalin if the necessity arose.”²¹⁷