Stalin

What Stalin forced through all across Eurasia was flabbergasting, using newspaper articles, secret circulars, plenipotentiaries, party discipline, a few plenums, a party congress, the secret police and internal troops, major foreign technology companies and foreign customers for Soviet primary goods, tens of thousands of urban worker volunteers and a tiny handful of top politburo officials, and the dream of a new world. Trotsky perceived him as an opportunist and cynic, a representative of the class interests of the bureaucracy, a person bereft of convictions. With Rykov’s expulsion from the politburo, Trotsky even predicted, in his Bulletin of the Opposition, that “just as the rout of the left opposition at the 15th Party Congress [in 1927] . . . preceded the turn to the left . . . the rout of the right opposition presages an inevitable turn to the right.”³⁵⁹ Others in the emigration knew better. “Stalin is acting logically in the new peasant policy,” Boris Bakhmeteff, the former Provisional Government ambassador to Washington and a civil engineering professor at Columbia University, had observed of collectivization to a fellow émigré as early as February 12, 1929. “If I were a consistent Communist, I would be doing the same.” No less shrewdly, he added, “Stalin is capable of adapting, and, in contrast to other Bolshevik politicians, possesses tactical gifts. But it seems to me wrong to think that he is an opportunist and that for him Communism is a mere name.”

³⁶⁰

The Soviet state, no less than its tsarist predecessor, sought control over grain supplies to finance imports of machinery to survive in the international system, but Stalin ideologically excluded the “capitalist path.” His vision was one of anticapitalist modernity. The perpetual emergency rule required to build socialism afforded free rein to his inner demons as well. Stalin’s persecution of his friend Bukharin in 1929–30 revealed new depths of malice, as well as self-pity.³⁶¹ At the same time, his deft political neutering of Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov had demanded considerable exertion.³⁶²

The rightists possessed an alternative program that—whether or not it could possibly work to achieve socialism—commanded support. Indeed, it is striking how much potential power the right wing of the party had possessed within the politburo, and how Stalin crushed them anyway.³⁶³ They were hard pressed to match his cunning, and immobilized by their own aversion to schism: amid the mass peasant revolts that Rykov himself had predicted, the rightists shrank from too public a challenge to the party line.

³⁶⁴ Tactics aside, the rightists were handcuffed by party structures and practices: they had no way to capitalize on the deep disillusionment in the army and the secret police, except via a conspiracy, even when they were still members of the politburo. Rykov was respected but had made no friends throttling army budgets, and, unlike Stalin, had not earned plaudits at the front in the civil war.³⁶⁵

Stalin had adroitly positioned himself as the incarnation of the popular will and historical necessity, but his resounding political triumph of 1929–30 had demonstrated a certain dependency, beyond even the luck of the harvest. His power rested on Mężyński and Yagoda, who were in operational command of the secret police and not personally close to him, though keen to demonstrate their loyalty—but could Stalin be sure? Not for nothing had he promoted Yevdokimov. More fundamentally, Stalin’s power rested upon just four fellow politburo members: Molotov, Kaganovich, Orjonikidze, and Voroshilov. The first two seemed unlikely ever to waver. But Orjonikidze and Voroshilov? Had they acted on their knowledge of the dangerous muddle Stalin had created with his “Great Break” and embraced the well-founded critiques put forward by the Stalin protégé Syrtsov and the Orjonikidze protégé Lominadze, the two authoritative figures in the politburo could have taken Stalin down. Of course, the question would have been, Who could replace him? No one in Stalin’s faction appeared to consider himself the dictator’s equal. Still, what if, going forward, they changed their minds? What if further difficulties arose, and this time foreign capitalists selling their state-of-the-art technology, and the peasants and the weather delivering a bounteous harvest, did not come to Stalin’s rescue?

CHAPTER 2APOCALYPSE