Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

That Stalin was fortunate in his rivals, from Trotsky on down, has long been understood.

But what may be less well appreciated is that Trotsky proved to be less the obstacle to than the instrument of Stalin’s aggrandizement. Just as the Bolshevik regime needed the civil war to form a state, so Stalin needed “opposition” to consolidate his personal dictatorship—and he found it.

Stalin certainly showed guile, maneuvering always to seize the orthodox middle ground and to drive his critics into the position of apparent schismatics and factionalists, while employing the classic device of changing political alliances to his advantage, but such textbook stratagems ultimately have their limits.

Nothing is more powerful than a compelling story, especially in the framework of a revolution, which entails a struggle to create new symbols, new vocabularies, new ways of looking at the world, new identities, new myths.14 In 1924, Stalin produced a greater written output than even in 1917.

On the day before Lenin’s sudden death, one functionary who visited Stalin’s small Kremlin apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace’s outbuilding noted “an abundance of books.”44 That is how Stalin had and would always relate to Lenin: through his writings, and how Stalin would express himself.

Of course, to do all that, Trotsky needed to perceive Lenin’s death as a strategic opportunity, and he needed a persuasive story line about how the grand socialist dream could be revived, why all those harsh exchanges he had had with Lenin were incidental, and why he (Trotsky) was uniquely qualified to carry forward the sacred Leninist cause. A tall order, to put it mildly. But who could doubt that if Lenin had found that others were conspiring against him, he would have mounted a coup against his own party?

Within days of Lenin’s death, the ex-seminarian had unveiled the winning formula he would pursue: zealously dedicating his life and the entire party to fulfillment of Lenin’s sacred “behest.”

But in a hall packed with Stalin loyalists, a voice shouted out: “It’s nothing. We are not frightened by rudeness, our whole party is rude, proletarian.”

Stalin’s inability to understand fascism was sorely evident. He followed Lenin, who had insisted that the non-Bolshevik left—Mensheviks, SRs, other moderates—were the most dangerous of all counterrevolutionaries, because they hid behind the mask of socialism.

Their foolish act was reminiscent of the Mensheviks and SRs who in October 1917 abandoned the Congress of Soviets.

Additionally, Stalin recognized that world revolution afforded the Soviet Union a tool to pursue a special global mission and to break out of its enclosed geopolitical space.

Struggle, conflicts, and wars between our enemies are, I repeat, our greatest ally.”196 Soviet geopolitics had been born.

Like Lenin, Stalin saw Britain as the principal pillar of global imperialism, refracting a familiar imperial-Russian Anglophobia through the prism of Marxism-Leninism.

He also stressed the games of British conservatives, whom he suspected of scheming to use Poland against the USSR.

But Trotsky was no longer Stalin’s sole target. Already in late 1924, Stalin had begun to move against his allies Kamenev and Zinoviev.

But on November 7, 1924, the revolution’s seventh anniversary, Stalin visited the Moscow factory Dynamo and offered a glimpse into his deeper thinking. “I wish for the workers of Dynamo, and the workers of all Russia,” he wrote in the visitors’ book, “that our industry expands, in order that the number of proletarians in Russia in the near term climbs to 20-30 million, that collective agriculture flourishes in villages and subordinates to its influence private farming.”

Stalin relished demonstrating his superior leadership skills with people, not least because the others at the top viewed him as inferior.

Stalin would invariably take the floor to explain matters, employing his canonical style (first point, second point, third point).

Stalin personally edited Trotsky’s final text.

Even skeptical emigres clued in to OGPU methods wanted to believe their homeland could somehow be seized back from the godless, barbaric Bolsheviks, and speculated endlessly about a Napoleon figure to lead a patriotic movement,

As long as Germany entertained hopes of Western rapprochement, the USSR was a means to that end.

Stalin defeated Trotsky on the plane where the Georgian was perceived as most vulnerable yet proved strong—ideology.

“Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, even Trotsky were much less familiar with the texts of Lenin’s writings than Stalin. . . . Unlike them, Stalin studied Lenin’s texts and knew the printed Lenin intimately. He had no trouble selecting a quotation from Lenin if he needed it.”

Strange to say, Stalin demonstrated a far better capacity for empathy than Trotsky as well.

Regime personnel had a hard time navigating the fine line between Stalin’s sincere commitment to modest living and the sycophancy sprouting all around him.

A dark cloud accompanied every hard-earned advance over the opposition.

Kuusinen, the Comintern secretary general, who referred to Zinoviev behind his back as the satrap, had been reporting all serious business to Stalin.

Lenin had taught that capitalism would be weakened, perhaps fatally, if it could be cut off from its colonial and semicolonial territories, from which it extracted cheap labor, raw materials, and markets.

At the same time, large numbers of Soviet advisers in the country helped transform a loose collection of militant intellectuals into the Chinese Communist party,

Ideologically, Leninism conflated anti-imperialism with anticapitalism, but many Chinese intellectuals, including those who had become Marxists, concluded that the depredations China suffered at the hands of foreign powers made anti-imperialism the bedrock task.

“the main criterion for us [in China] is not the constant fact of national oppression but the changing course of the class struggle,” precisely the opposite of the sentiment in China.

Stalin had boasted that an eventual betrayal was built into the bloc within, and he was right—but he was not the one to do the betraying. Chiang Kai-shek had beat him to the punch and, in the meantime, Stalin was still wholly dependent on Chiang as the instrument against British influence (“imperialism”) in China.

but the war scare emerged directly out of the inbuilt structural paranoia of the revolution (capitalist encirclement) combined with the regime’s defiant foreign policy.

He defended the OGPU as “more or less equivalent to the Committee of Public Safety created during the Great French Revolution,”

The police paid special attention to women in food lines, based on historical precedent, and overheard them lamenting it took an entire day to procure flour and that their husbands were coming home from work to find nothing to eat.

Mikhail Fortus, who went by the name Pavel Mif. He called for a retreat to the remote northwest, where the Communists could gather forces for a subsequent assault on “imperialist strongholds.”297 Mao Zedong had been urging the need to build a rural base and peasant armies rather than try to seize the cities. But it was Chiang Kai-shek who drove the Communists, an urban movement, into the countryside.

What was this, the expression of a deep well of resentment? The voicing of his darkest fears, his removal by the Central Committee? A provocative test of the inner regime? An odd way that Stalin savored his triumph and the opposition’s expulsion? A gesture of false modesty by a man who treasured posing as the humble, albeit indispensable, servant of the party? It was perhaps all of the above—supremacy and siege, elation and self-pity, the paradoxes of Stalin’s power.

“At the present time, the task of transformation and amalgamation of small individual farms into large-scale collective farms must be set as the party’s fundamental task in the countryside.”

To be sure, Soviet agricultural levels surpassed that of China or India. But the USSR competed with Britain, France, and Germany, and despite some improvement in implements and machines, credit, and marketing cooperatives, farming remained decidedly unmodern.

A 1927 decree on trusts had stressed output quotas, not profits, as the guiding criteria, which compounded the already perverse incentives of greater subsidies for worse performance.

The regime’s inability to resist the urge to finance desperately needed industrial expansion by the printing of money resulted in inflation, which, in turn, elicited further clumsy price controls, worsening the market’s operation.

“If there is a choice between the industrialization program and equilibrium in the market, the market must give way,”

Paying peasants substantially higher prices for grain and ruthlessly restricting monetary emissions would have closed the blades, but the former measure would have necessitated charging workers higher prices for bread, while also hurting industrialization (domestic grain purchases at higher prices would reduce earnings from exports); the latter measure would have entailed scaling back ambitions for industrial expansion.

Stalin ratcheted up the pressure on two tracks. One was the secret police, which had been granted the prerogative of imposing sentences outside judicial channels.

But peasants met their cash obligations by selling meat, dairy, or hides, whose prices were predominantly market driven and high because of demand. Grain, which was readily stored, they held back.

Politburo members, mindful of possible spring famine and urban unrest if food supplies failed, as well as harm to industrialization without grain to export, had cautiously consented to Stalin’s insistence on “emergency measures.”

Just as the peasants were refusing to sell their grain, foreign capitalists, at a minimum, could aim at the Red regime’s demise by refusing to sell their advanced technology.

“This break is a prelude to war, which should, in light of the low level of USSR military technology and internal political and economic difficulties caused by a war, finish off Bolshevism once and for all.”

For Stalin, his inner circle, too, had become suspect. Without consulting them, and with only the vaguest notion of how it would unfold, he embarked in 1928 upon the greatest gamble of his political life.

He denied that he was abrogating the NEP, but reminded those present that “our country is not a capitalist country, but a socialist country, which, in allowing NEP, at the same time retained the final word for the state, so we are acting correctly.”