These biographical details would be only curiosities of the time if they did not come into play when real and basic issues arose in the party leadership over the future of the country. The most important of these was the controversy over “socialism in one country,” both for its own sake and for the implications it had for decisions in so many areas.
The struggle began in the last years of Lenin’s life, the first major one being Trotsky’s 1923 opposition platform. Trotsky’s main point was that the party was becoming less democratic and more bureaucratic through the practice of appointing its officials through Stalin’s secretariat rather than by election. His letter to the party leadership on this issue sparked an intense discussion that eventually came out into the open just on the eve of Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924. His opponents were Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev on this issue, the three forming a triumvirate that ruled the party and the country after Lenin’s death. Trotsky’s opposition for the moment produced some concessions, but the triumvirate remained in control. In any case the dispute was not as radical as it might seem, as Trotsky was a principled supporter of a centralized and authoritarian party. All he wanted was a little room for maneuver. More basic disagreements quickly emerged. Trotsky believed that the revolution could not survive, and socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union unless there were revolutions in the advanced countries of the West. Only fraternal socialist aid could overcome Russia’s backwardness. In the meantime, the USSR needed to pursue a policy of super-accelerated industrialization. The economist Evgenii Preobrazhenskii supported Trotsky on the issue of party structure, but also propounded a more detailed economic platform. His idea was simply to strip resources from the countryside by confiscations and other methods reminiscent of War Communism and use them for extremely rapid industrialization. The dilemma, as Preobrazhenskii saw it, was that the existence of private, small-scale peasant farming would lead to the strengthening of capitalism within the Soviet Union. He shared with Trotsky the idea that the Soviet Union could never survive as a socialist society encircled by capitalism: revolution in the advanced countries was essential to the building of socialism in the USSR, but in the short run extreme measures were necessary to ensure that the country would still be around when the revolution came in the West. This was the platform of the Left Opposition, as it came to be known.
This perspective met furious rejection from Bukharin, whose position as editor of Pravda meant that his views would receive wide circulation. Bukharin’s platform was a strident defense of NEP. He ridiculed the super-industrialization schemes of the opposition and explained that the crucial issue was the recovery of agriculture and the gradual enrichment of the peasants. As long as the party controlled the state and industry remained in state hands, there was nothing to fear from the peasants and the country would move rapidly toward a socialist industrial society. Stalin allied with Bukharin and himself began to formulate the notion of “socialism in one country,” the idea that the USSR alone could totally transform its society, including its agriculture, before the ultimate triumph of socialism in the West. For Stalin did not reject the prospect of world revolution, as he was convinced that the capitalist powers would eventually unleash a new world war and that revolution would come out of it if not earlier. Where he differed from Trotsky was in the belief that the Soviet Union could manage to build a socialist society on its own while waiting for revolution abroad.
The effect of the struggle was first to marginalize Trotsky, who lost his position as head of the War Commissariat and other offices in 1925. In that same year Zinoviev and Kamenev switched their allegiance, coming out in opposition to Stalin and Bukharin. For Zinoviev and Kamenev the main issue before had been fear of Trotsky: now they feared Stalin more. The now united opposition failed to win much support in the party and in 1926 Stalin had Zinoviev removed from his position as head of the party in Leningrad (Petrograd had acquired another new name on Lenin’s death). Thus the opposition had no longer any substantial base in the organization of the party. Stalin and Bukharin triumphed at the end of 1927. The NEP policy triumphed, it seemed, if with an increased push toward industrialization. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were expelled from the party along with their followers. Zinoviev and Kamenev soon recanted their errors and were readmitted, but Trotsky went first into exile in Alma-ata, and then was expelled from the country in 1929. Stalin had utterly defeated the opposition, and it seemed that NEP might continue.
Stalin’s victory went along with increasing prohibitions on dissent in the party and particularly on the formation of factions and oppositional platforms. Before the principle of absolute ideological unity could triumph, one last major dispute shook up the party leadership. Starting early in 1928, Stalin and his supporters changed their plans entirely. The cause was a drop in grain procured by the state agencies to feed the cities at the end of 1927. Stalin believed that the peasantry, mainly the kulaks, were simply holding grain back in the hopes of better prices or even to harm the Soviet state. His response was to organize an expedition of party officials led by himself into the Urals and Siberia early in 1928 to seize the grain. His expedition returned with freight cars loaded with grain, and he proclaimed it a success. Stalin and his allies now moved toward a policy of rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, effectively the end of NEP. The new policy provoked opposition from Bukharin as well as from Mikhail Tomskii, the head of the trade unions, and Aleksei Rykov, the Soviet Prime Minister. Basically their platform was simply that NEP was working out well, in spite of occasional problems, and that there was no need to force the pace, either in industry or the countryside. The Right Opposition was less of a defined group than the Left and had much more support in the party than the small group of Trotskyists and followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Nevertheless, Stalin fought it to extinction, expelling the Rights from the leadership and from the party by the end of 1929. Their many followers, especially in the party organization in Moscow, followed them into defeat. Stalin now had complete control over the central leadership of the party.
NEP, for all the concessions to the peasantry, implied a centralized, state-owned, and managed industry, and that implied a new kind of state. The Soviet state did not just regulate industry, it also directly managed it at every level. The overall structure was a refined form of the one established in 1918, the Supreme Economic Council placed at the center over a series of units for each branch of industry, one for iron and steel, another for coal, yet another for machine-building, grouped along regional lines. These units made the decisions that in capitalist economies are made by businessmen, and the decisions were subject to a single overall plan. That plan was the work of the State Planning Committee, or Gosplan. For most of the time from its foundation in 1921 to 1930 Gosplan worked under the leadership of Gleb Krzhizhanovskii. An exception to the norm among Bolshevik leaders, he was both a trained electrical engineer (from the St. Petersburg Technological Institute) and an Old Bolshevik. The original Gosplan was primarily an advisory office for the Supreme Economic Council, but it soon worked out an electrification plan for the whole country. By 1925 it was compiling “control figures,” a sort of crude general economic plan, and by the late twenties it moved to writing the first five-year plan adopted in 1929.