Stalin

Suddenly, the regime backed down from socialization of all livestock, with a decree (March 26, 1932) initiated by land commissar Yakovlev and accepted by Stalin. Functionaries in the commissariat interpreted it as a retreat from collectivization—some asked whether it contained a typo—but the aim was tactical: to end flight from the collectives. Local officials did not hurry to return collectivized animals.¹⁹⁹

Not coincidentally, speculation about the dictator’s health, typical in any dictatorship, intensified. “This is not the first time that false rumors that I am ill have circulated in the bourgeois press,” Stalin wrote in a letter published in Pravda (April 3). “Sad though it may be, the fact is that I am in perfect health.”²⁰⁰

Ukraine party boss Kosior reported to Stalin that one quarter of the republic’s horses had died, and that the surviving ones were “skin and bones.”²⁰¹ The OGPU reported that in Borisov, in the Belorussian republic, a crowd had seized grain warehouses, and several hundred women and children had marched on the local Red Army barracks (“signs of commiseration could be seen among the soldiers and officers”).²⁰² In the textile mills of the Ivanovo region, ration cuts of up to one half, on top of labor intensification measures, provoked strikes and spontaneous assemblies.²⁰³ A sign placed in a shopwindow read “Even as the starving workers of Vichuga and Teikovo were being fired upon because they agitated for bread, here, behind the store’s drawn curtains, Communist functionaries and Red police of the GPU were fattening themselves up.”²⁰⁴

Ten thousand demonstrators ransacked the party and police buildings (“Toss the Communists . . . out the window”). Stalin dispatched Kaganovich, who mobilized local party agitators to speak with workers and himself heard out their grievances.²⁰⁵

Ivanovo’s striking workers did not reject socialism, only its building at their expense, and mostly blamed local officials for their plight.²⁰⁶ They shared a resolute anticapitalism with the Soviet regime, but that anticapitalism afforded the regime bureaucratic control over workers’ employment, housing, and food. The strikers were further stymied by the state monopoly over newspapers, radio, and the public sphere. More profoundly still, the strikers were trapped in the socialist vocabulary of class war.²⁰⁷ Kaganovich’s report for Stalin unfurled clichés, but, unlike the workers, the regime drew power from Bolshevik language: in conditions of “capitalist encirclement,” Kaganovich could equate worker criticism with playing into the imperialists’ hands. He managed to browbeat most strikers back to the shop floor, after which the OGPU arrested worker organizers and officials accused of worker sympathies.

²⁰⁸

GRUDGING CONCESSIONS, PRIVATE APOLOGY

In parades on the May Day holiday in 1932, the Soviets offered the first public demonstrations of the Red Army’s mechanization—not only in Moscow, but in Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, Tiflis, and Khabarovsk.²⁰⁹ That same day, the first stage of the Dneprostroi hydroelectric dam supplied power, and this launch would prove durable. (“We are talking to you from the roof of an immense Bolshevik triumph!” gushed Soviet radio.)²¹⁰

Still, workers could not eat or clothe themselves with tanks and electricity.²¹¹ On May 4, Stalin led a politburo discussion that culminated in reduced procurement targets and acceptance of a commission’s recommendation to purchase hundreds of thousands of livestock from Mongolia, western China, Iran, and Turkey.²¹² On May 6 and 10, the regime issued decrees announcing the grain procurement reductions for collective farmers and the remaining individual household farmers, from 22.4 million to 18.1 million tons. The targets for state farms were raised, from 1.7 to 2.5 million, for a new overall target of 20.6 million. This was just 81 percent of actual 1931 procurements. The decrees even forbade further liquidation of individual household farms, ordered the return of confiscated livestock and an end to lawlessness, and stipulated that, after peasants had met procurement quotas for the harvest (deadline: January 15, 1933), they could freely trade in any surplus directly with consumers at “collective farm markets.”²¹³