Stalin

Could it be? As recently as the October 1931 party plenum, Mikoyan, speaking for Stalin, had flatly rejected suggestions to permit rural trade at market prices after fulfillment of state obligations.²¹⁴ But now peasants were permitted to maintain their own cows (though not horses), cultivate household plots, and sell a significant portion of the fruits of their labor at market prices.²¹⁵ To be sure, private property in the means of production remained outlawed (household plots could not be sold or inherited). Still, it turned out that peasants had to be incentivized with private livestock holdings and market sales of even some of their collective farm output. Workers, too, had to be provided incentives through wage differentiation.²¹⁶ State-owned and state-managed factories were not permitted to engage in direct marketlike relations with one another, but they did so illegally. “The necessity of avoiding a break in production,” one official at Magnitogorsk explained, “will compel the receiving factory to seek the necessary materials from other sources by every possible means.”

²¹⁷

The surprises kept coming. Stalin returned Shaposhnikov to a high-profile post in the capital, as director of the Frunze Military Academy, and on May 7, 1932, he even sent a written apology to Tukhachevsky for having denounced his January 1930 super-rearmament memorandum as Red militarism. “Two years later,” Stalin wrote, with a copy to Voroshilov, “when some unclear matters have become clearer for me, I must confess that my judgment was too severe, and that the conclusions of my letter were not correct in all respects.” Stalin noted that Tukhachevsky had been suggesting a peacetime army not of 11 million (per Shaposhnikov’s accusations) but of “8 million souls” and suggested that 6 million well-supplied, well-organized troops were “more or less within our capabilities.” (Soviet forces still numbered fewer than 1 million.) Stalin added: “Do not curse me for the fact that I corrected these shortcomings outlined in my [1930] letter with a certain tardiness.”²¹⁸

What was next? Stalin had long forbidden directing more consumer goods to villages to incentivize the flow of grain, but now he acquiesced in this, too.²¹⁹

He even agreed to importing grain (“54,000 tons of grain have already been purchased in Canada,” he telegrammed the party boss of Eastern Siberia on May 8. “You will get your share”).²²⁰ Tellingly, however, Stalin does not appear to have initiated a single one of these concessions, and invariably he issued barbed reminders of the need for unconditional fulfillment of centrally assigned procurement targets and the perfidy of capitalism.²²¹ Unlike Lenin in 1921, Stalin was not willing to admit a “retreat” or neo-NEP.²²² This reflected his touchiness about admitting

any mistakes, desire to maintain his authority at the system’s apex, and nonnegotiable ideological commitment.²²³

Mongolia, the Soviet satellite, provides a stark contrast. Zealots of the Mongolian People’s Party, egged on by Comintern advisers, had launched a “class war” against “feudalism,” confiscating estates, ransacking Buddhist lamaseries, killing nobles and lamas, and collectivizing herders.²²⁴ At least one third of the livestock—the country’s main wealth—was lost. Inflation soared, shortages proliferated. In spring 1932, revolts led by lamas overtook four provinces in the northwest, amid rumors that either the elderly Panchen Lama (from Tibetan exile) or the Japanese would arrive with troops to liberate Mongolia from Communist occupation.²²⁵

The uprisings took Stalin by surprise (“The latest telegrams reported successes; therefore, such an unexpected and sharp deterioration is incomprehensible”). The Soviets dispatched consumer goods and ten fighter planes, which strafed the rebels; about 1,500 would be killed. Facing annihilation, rebels engaged in murder and cannibalism.²²⁶ On May 16, the politburo condemned the Mongolian party for “blindly copying the policy of Soviet power in the USSR.” Mongolian ruling officials were ordered to abandon collectivization of nomads, proclaim an “all-people’s government,” and publicly repudiate the noncapitalist path in Mongolia’s current conditions. The shift would be confirmed at a Mongolian People’s Party plenum and be dubbed the New Course.²²⁷ It was the full reversal Stalin would not countenance at home.

PANIC AROUND HIM