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

by Stephen Kotkin

Zagumyonny’s defiance had spurred a sharpening of policy, but it may have accomplished far more. Stalin, who usually played his cards extremely close to his vest, offered a look into his deepest thinking.

He recounted how in the revolution, the gentry class had been expropriated and their large farms subdivided, but mostly into small peasant households that failed to specialize, growing a little bit of everything—grain, sunflowers, keeping cows for milk. “Such a mixed economy, the small household variety, is a misfortune for a large country,”

“Whence the strength of the kulak?” Stalin asked. “Not in the fact he was born strong, nothing of the kind, but in the fact that his farming is large scale.” Size was how the kulak could take advantage of machinery and modernize.

“Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms . . . for us is the only path.”

The hard men of the Stalin faction looked to him to figure out a practical way forward.

but the core dilemma of the NEP was ideological: seven years into the NEP, socialism (non-capitalism) was not in sight. NEP amounted to grudgingly tolerated capitalism in a country that had had an avowedly anticapitalist or socialist revolution.

This is one of the core thesis of the book, Stalin was a true beliver in the Communist system. He was not going to plah the safe route of keeping the NEP. The time for tactical flexibility was over

that “there cannot be two socialisms, one for the countryside and one for the city.”

Scholarly arguments that “no plan” existed to collectivize Soviet Eurasia are utterly beside the point.86 No plan could have existed because actually attaining near complete collectivization was, at the time, unimaginable in practical terms. Collectivize one sixth of the earth? How? With what levers?

Trotsky, in a speech a few years back, had called a “transition to collective forms” of agriculture a matter of “one or two generations.

At the same time, administratively, the regime had attained only a minimal presence in the countryside: outside the provincial capitals, traces of the red banners, slogans, and symbols of the new order vanished, and dedicated personnel were shockingly thin on the ground.

In his mind, the regime had become caught in something far worse than a price scissors: namely, a class-based vicious circle.

Stalin had connected the ideological dots, reaching the full logic of a class-based outlook.

Oddly enough, having exiled the Trotskyites, Stalin was discovering that his problem was not the small numbers of oppositionists. It was the party as a whole.117

“It’s OK to drink, but only in our narrow circle of Chekists and not in a public place” (presumably including driving around in easily identifiable, scarce vehicles with hookers in view).

Rural party officials were aching to marry kulak daughters. Such anecdotes ignited Stalin’s class sensibilities: Soviet officialdom was becoming dependent materially, and hence, in his Marxist mind, politically, on the rural wealthy.

Still more confounding to the regime, rural conflict was turning out to be not class based but mostly generational and gender based;

Yevdokimov’s photo-album approach to fast-track executions just in case constituted an innovation. He won a nearly unprecedented third Order of the Red Banner.

Shakhty case materials fell into Stalin’s hands not long after he had returned from his trip to Siberia and confirmed his suspicions that the kulaks were running wild and the rural Communist party was in bed with class enemies.

The next day, a group of the politburo examined the draft indictments, which they completely rewrote (much of the document is crossed out), altering dates and other alleged facts.

Shakhty represented a jumble of fact, fabrication, and twisted laws.

Sabotage under Soviet law did not have to be deliberate: if someone’s directives or actions resulted in mishaps, then counterrevolutionary intent could be assumed.

Neither he nor Yevdokimov were stupid: they understood there was no deliberate sabotage.

Five German engineers, four of whom were employees of AEG who installed turbines and mining machines, had been arrested in connection with Shakhty. (The politburo had decided English specialists were to be interrogated but released.)

Bukharin was also looking to avoid giving Stalin a pretext to accuse him of schism and factionalism.

But Shakhty was less about a political attack on the party’s defenders of the NEP than about Stalin’s outflanking his own loyal faction.

Stalin was also appealing directly to the workers, seeking to win them back and mobilize them for industri...

Daily life necessities (food, clothes, shelter) consumed three quarters of a worker’s paycheck,

One in four industrial workers even in the capital was unemployed, a shameful circumstance that cried out for explanation or scapegoats.

Doubts about the proletariat’s steadfastness had induced party officials to look to themselves, the apparatchiks, as the social base of the regime, an awkward circumstance even without the Trotskyite critique of “bureaucracy.”

Forget about Lenin’s wager on poor peasants, let alone Stolypin’s wager on prosperous peasants, Stalin was going to wager on young, male strivers from the urban lower orders to spearhead a socialist remake of the village many of them had only recently left behind.

“The NEPmen lie in wait for the worker-director, he is undermined by this or that bourgeois specialist, his own wife attacks him, and despite all that, he sustains the struggle.”

Stalin, Leninist to the core, pressed his offensive relentlessly on Shakhty, but on grain procurements executed a tactical retreat.

Lower-level party officials who scoured newspapers for subtle differences in the published speeches of top leaders had begun to whisper about a schism between Stalin and Rykov.

He took as his model the large-scale mechanized farm (95,000 acres) of Thomas Campbell in Montana, perhaps the largest and most productive single farm in the world.

Whereas England had industrialized thanks to its colonies, Germany had drawn upon the indemnity imposed as a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and the United States used loans from Europe, the USSR had no colonies, indemnities, or long-term foreign loans, leaving solely “internal resources.” On this point no Bolshevik could readily disagree.

Lenin during the civil war had hit upon the idea of escalated resistance by implacable foes as their defeat approached.

And in one of those uncanny coincidences that always accompany a well-executed strategy—that is, an improvisation in a certain strategic direction—the five Shakhty death sentences were carried out the very day of Stalin’s plenum speech.

Bukharin was still so afraid of falling into the trap of allowing Stalin to accuse him of “opposition” to the Central Committee line that he refused to air his differences, essentially failing to appeal to the large, top-level audience, upward of 160 people, including guests.

But not even Bakhmeteff, indeed not even regime insiders, foresaw that Stalin’s momentous turn to force collectivization and rapid industrialization became centered upon a drawn-out, painstakingly sadistic humiliation of Bukharin.

He attributed the lingering bad blood inside the politburo merely to the recent grain procurement campaign, without acknowledging that such heavy coercion was the new permanent reality, and that Stalin perceived critics of this policy as enemies.

Scholars who argue that Stalin’s collectivization was necessary in order to force a peasant country into the modern era are dead wrong.

Forced wholesale collectivization only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology and its repudiation of capitalism.

Collectivization would give the Communists control over the vast countryside, a coveted goal no regime in Russia had ever had.

collectivization, like state-run and state-owned industry, constituted a form of ostensible modernization that negated capitalism. Thus did Stalin “solve” the Bolsheviks’ conundrum of how, in the words of Lenin’s last public speech, “NEP Russia could become socialist Russia.”

And in 1928, with the grain procurement shortfall, hardworking peasants were subjected to criminal sanctions.

NEP, via its own middling success, was producing kulaks who, in turn, were the ones producing the harvest.

“One can persecute the kulak as much as possible, but we must make peace with the middle peasant.” But out in the countryside where such decisions were made by officials following the same class analysis, a farmer with three cows in 1925 who had six by 1928 suddenly became registered as a “class-enemy.”

Bukharin presented no genuine alternative to Stalin, even leaving aside the fact that he lacked political heft or an organizational power base.

His position was less that the NEP would alchemize capitalism into socialism (Bukharin) than that forced collectivization could simply not be done, and that any attempt to do so would merely destroy what progress had been made since the civil war and famine, bringing on renewed catastrophe.

That being Rykov

Rykov turned out to be bleakly prescient about forced collectivization’s dire, destabilizing consequences, but on the question of what to do instead he had little idea, other than staying the failing course of the NEP.