Stalin

The Central Control Commission, now overseen by the Stalin minion Jānis Rudzutaks, deemed the lubricated conversations a “counterrevolutionary grouping.”³⁵⁶ Stalin added the disgraced rightist Mikhail Tomsky (head of the state publishing house) to the “conspiracy,” and summoned a joint session of the politburo and the Control Commission presidium on November 27. “These people,” the attack dog Yemelyan Yaroslavsky fulminated, “are like the Ryutin group, only in a different form.” By now, though, the crisis under Stalin’s rule was pervasive and even some arch-loyalists shrank from full-throated condemnation of their loose-tongued comrades. Kuibyshev referred to Smirnov by his nickname (“Foma”) and recalled their long association, dating back to Narym exile. (Stalin had been there, too, and Smirnov had fed him.) Mikoyan, who used to be Eismont’s boss, awkwardly said almost nothing (until the very end).³⁵⁷

Rumors again circulated that Stalin had verbally offered to resign, and that after an awkward silence Molotov had spoken up to reassure him he had the party’s confidence.³⁵⁸

Be that as it may, Stalin found himself defending his policies.³⁵⁹ He grumbled that the conspirators “represent matters as if Stalin were guilty of everything” and warned that the choice was between becoming a victim of the imperialists—the fate of China—or a socialist industrial power that could defend itself. “What matters is not Stalin, but the party,” he concluded. “You can remove Stalin, but things will continue just as they are.”³⁶⁰

Eismont and Tolmachev were the ones expelled from the party, and Smirnov from the Central Committee, although they were not arrested.³⁶¹

Stalin had a transcript of the proceedings made for circulation to party organizations. He sent another vituperative telegram (also signed by Molotov), this one to officials in the Urals (December 7, 1932), condemning as “unpersuasive” their explanations for local state farms’ failures to fulfill procurement quotas. “The provincial leadership cannot escape its responsibility,” it said, asking for names of the state farm directors. “Announce to the directors that a party card will not save them from arrest, that an enemy with a party card warrants greater attention than an enemy without a party card.”³⁶²

SHARPENING THE CLASS STRUGGLE

On December 12, 1932, the Soviet Union restored diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Nanking. The next day, Japan belatedly replied to the Soviet offer of a nonaggression pact in a note to Soviet envoy Alexander Troyanovsky with a rejection.³⁶³

The Japanese leaked distorted versions of the exchange; the Soviet press published the originals, aiming to demonstrate Japan’s belligerence.³⁶⁴ Stalin, meanwhile, decided to widen the party purge he had imposed on the North Caucasus: on December 11, Pravda had carried a resolution in the name of the Central Committee announcing a multiregion party cleansing for 1933.³⁶⁵

His mood was captured in his greeting to the secret police on the fifteenth anniversary of their founding, December 20, which Pravda printed that day—“I wish you success in your difficult task of extirpating the enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat!”³⁶⁶

Stalin also took the time to repudiate Thomas Campbell, an agricultural expert from Montana who several years earlier had been afforded an audience, and had now published a book about his experiences and meeting with Stalin (“piercing black eyes which concentrate on you even while talking through an interpreter”). It was mostly sympathetic, but on the touchy subject of Comintern subversion, he wrote that Stalin had “unhesitatingly admitted, with disarming frankness, that under Trotsky there had been an attempt to spread Communism throughout the world. He said this was the primary cause of his break with Trotsky. . . . He explained that they had neither the time nor the money to try to communize the whole world, even should they wish to do so.” In his published repudiation (December 23, 1932), Stalin denied that Trotsky’s name had come up, and noted that Campbell’s book mentioned a transcript of their conversation but shrank from including it. Stalin’s rebuttal contained a purported transcript, which had him stressing the need for diplomatic recognition to normalize trade relations and had Campbell mentioning meeting with then President-elect Herbert Hoover prior to setting out for the Soviet Union and promising to convey the Stalin conversation back to Hoover.³⁶⁷