Stalin

Sedov wrote to his father—in invisible ink—that a “bloc” had formed inside the USSR of “Zinovievites, the Sten-Lominadze group, and Trotskyites,” an apparent reference to the small Ryutin conspiracy. But Trotsky fretted that the “left” was incorrectly throwing its lot in with the “rightists” and instructed Lev that, with the émigré Constitutional Democrat “Milyukov, the Mensheviks and Thermidorians of all sorts” demanding Stalin’s removal, “we may temporarily have to support him. . . . The slogan ‘Down with Stalin’ is ambiguous and should not be raised as a war cry at this moment.”²⁹¹

THE FOUR HORSEMEN

In September 1932, back from his three-month holiday, Stalin quietly softened his August 7 law: no death penalty for theft of tiny amounts of grain, just sentences of ten years.²⁹²

The 1932 harvest was coming in at fewer than 60 million tons, and possibly as low as 50 million, which was close to the horrific result in the famine year of 1921.²⁹³ Reports to Stalin would peg the harvest as bad but much higher than reality, up to 69 million tons, a discrepancy he never came to appreciate.²⁹⁴

Half of all Kazakhs—as many as 2 million—had picked up their tents and remaining herds and fled the collectives. Half of the party functionaries in that republic were said to have deserted their posts.²⁹⁵

One official report to Stalin in August had noted that the Kazakh autonomous republic now counted 6 million head of livestock, down from 40 million in 1929.²⁹⁶ Finally, on September 17, he presented a decree for a politburo voice vote that loosened the form of collective farms in Kazakh territories, allowing each household to own eight to ten cattle, up to 100 sheep and goats, and three to five camels, but still insisted that forced settlement would continue “to eradicate economic and cultural anachronisms.”²⁹⁷ He also authorized reductions in grain collections for the Kazakh regions (47,000 tons), along with food assistance (33,000) and postponement of repayment of seed and food advances (98,000)—which together totaled more than one quarter of their original procurement plan.²⁹⁸

Quotas had already been reduced for Ukraine, but “it is completely incontrovertible that Ukraine will not deliver this amount of grain,” the Ukraine official Mendel Khatayevich had courageously written to Stalin, who underlined this passage in red pencil.²⁹⁹ At the end of September, the North Caucasus received a massive 660,000-ton grain procurement reduction, albeit to a level still unattainable.³⁰⁰

Exports cratered. In 1932, the regime would export just 1.73 million tons of grain, down from 5.06 million in 1931 and 4.76 in 1930. Tsarist Russia in 1913 had exported more than 9 million tons of grain.³⁰¹

With the country in famine’s death grip, Stalin convened a joint Central Committee–Central Control Commission plenum (September 28–October 2, 1932) devoted to trade, consumer goods, and ferrous metallurgy. With the harvest over, he aimed to reduce the spring concessions to household plots and private markets. The plenum also condemned the Ryutin group “as traitors to the party and to the working class who, under the flag of a spurious ‘Marxism-Leninism,’ have attempted to create a bourgeois-kulak organization for the restoration of capitalism and particularly kulakdom in the USSR.” Ryutin, under OGPU interrogation, had claimed sole authorship, to shield his comrades. The plenum adopted Stalin’s resolution calling for immediate expulsion of all who knew about but did not report the group.³⁰² Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Uglanov, who visibly wept, repented yet again, but they were nevertheless kicked out of the party yet again and sentenced to internal exile for three years (Zinoviev to Kustanai, Kazakhstan; Kamenev to Minusinsk, Eastern Siberia).³⁰³

Several tons of meat, sausage, chicken, and fish, 300 kilos of caviar, 600 kilos of cheeses, and large amounts of fruit, vegetables, and mushrooms had been ordered up for the plenum, some of which the attendees were allowed to haul home.