Stalin

Before the year was out, Stalin pushed through a decree on an internal passport system to purge urban areas of “alien” and “non-laboring elements.”³⁶⁸ Recipients were to include permanent residents aged sixteen or older in cities and towns, and at construction sites, as well as transport workers and state-farm laborers, but not collective farmers. He aimed to diminish the pressure on the urban food supply and force peasants back into the collectives.

³⁶⁹ On December 29, 1932, a furious directive in the name of the politburo threatened collective farms that failed to meet procurement quotas with a compulsory early repayment of credits, a cutoff from machine-tractor-station equipment, and confiscation of “all the grain they had, including the so-called seed funds”—the basis for the spring sowing campaign.³⁷⁰

Despite the greater repression, procurements as of January 1, 1933, had reached only 17.4 million tons, 3.7 million fewer than collected by the same time the previous year (and 3 million below the plan).³⁷¹ On January 7, Stalin opened another joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, boasting that “we had no iron and steel industry. . . . We now have one. We had no tractor industry. We now have one. We had no automobile industry”—and so on, through aircraft and more. He admitted that the first Five-Year Plan prioritized heavy industry but baldly asserted that living standards had improved. He had reduced industrial growth targets for the second Five-Year Plan to a more realistic 13–14 percent per annum.

³⁷²

Stalin’s most important declaration concerned a sharpening of the class struggle as the country got closer to socialism, a cudgel he had used against Bukharin in 1928 (and a concept Trotsky had articulated a decade earlier). “We need to keep in mind that the increase in the power of the Soviet state will strengthen the resistance of the last holdovers of dying classes,” Stalin asserted. “Precisely because they are dying out and in their last days, they will switch from some forms of striking to other, sharper forms, appealing to the backward strata of the population. . . . On this soil, smashed groups of old counterrevolutionary parties of SRs and Mensheviks, bourgeois nationalists of the center and periphery, may stir and come to life, shards of counterrevolutionary elements of Trotskyites and right deviationists may stir and come to life.” He added: “This, of course, is not scary. But all this needs to be kept in mind if we want to do away with these elements quickly and without especially large numbers of victims.”³⁷³

Opposition, according to Stalin, now worked “on the sly,” masked behind simulated loyalty. In a second set of remarks to the plenum (January 11), he asserted—in line with the reports he received—that “our harvest was not worse, but better than in the previous year.” He blamed any problems on “anti-Soviet elements” and concealed “nests of counterrevolution.” “They sit right in the collective farm, holding positions as storemen, business managers, bookkeepers, secretaries, and so on,” he averred. “They will never say ‘Down with the collective farm.’ They are ‘for’ the collective farm.”³⁷⁴

Trotsky was ever present—his writings had been demanding that 1933 be the year of the major overhaul, an otherwise obscure proposal condemned at the plenum as “slander.”³⁷⁵

The politburo closed ranks around the dictator, and the others fell in line. “We, as members of the Central Committee, vote for Stalin because he is ours. (Applause.),” declared Rudzutaks. “You won’t find a single instance when Comrade Stalin hesitated or retreated. That is why we are with him. Yes, he vigorously chops off what is rotten, he chops off what is slated for destruction. If he didn’t do this, he would not be a Leninist.” Similarly, the disgraced Bukharin stated, “We have won dazzling victories in the building up of the Five-Year Plan. We are currently at war and must exercise the strictest discipline. . . . That is why such groupings must be hacked off without the slightest mercy, without being in the slightest troubled by any sentimental considerations concerning the past, concerning personal friendships.” Smirnov, in futile self-defense, denied that he or any other party member could have uttered the words about the need to “remove comrade Stalin”: “I think that only someone drunk out of his mind or insane could ever say such a thing.”³⁷⁶