Hostile as the factional struggle thus far had been, nothing prepared—or could prepare—the country for its final act. In 1928–9, Stalin moved against what he labelled the ‘right opposition’ led by Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov (head of the Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom), and the trade unionist Mikhail Tomskii. Neither the party nor the public had reason to expect this offensive. Certainly the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 had endorsed nothing stronger than greater restrictions on the most prosperous peasants, the gradual and voluntary collectivization of agriculture, and an increased effort to develop heavy industry. The congress gave no strong signal that the party was about to scuttle NEP, yet when this final phase concluded, NEP had ended and the USSR was engulfed in class warfare.
Stalin proceeded cautiously, but as always with a strong sensitivity to the prevailing political opinion. By the late 1920s the belief that the revolution had failed to fulfil expectations of 1917 became widespread in Soviet society; a renewed socialist radicalism pervaded the Central Committee and many rank-and-file communists as well. The population outside the party deeply resented the privileges still accorded to managers, engineers, and technical personnel a full decade after Red October. The fact that such a large proportion of state officials were neither workers nor peasants provided an additional irritant. Many also believed that kulaks (the pejorative term for the most prosperous peasants) were withholding their grain from the market in an economy of scarcity. And everywhere one encountered bitterness and jealousy towards those who had used NEP to enrich themselves.
Stalin did not create this mood or control it, but he knew how to exploit it. His first target was a shortage of grain. Marketings by the end of 1927 were down 20 per cent from the previous year. Due to low prices being paid by the state, peasants with a surplus simply held it back in the hope of better terms, used it to fatten livestock for slaughter, diverted it to the illegal production of grain alcohol, or in some cases shifted to planting more profitable industrial crops. These factors, compounded by poor harvests in several areas, accounted for the drop. Stalin, however, placed the blame elsewhere. On a three-week tour of Siberia that began in mid-January 1928, he repeatedly declared the same culprits to be greedy kulaks and local officials too lenient in dealing with them.
He also fanned class hostilities in industry. In March 1928, at Stalin’s personal invitation, the state initiated a show trial of fifty engineers, the first of several against the ‘bourgeois specialists’. Stalin made the class underpinnings of this Shakhty affair, as it became known, the main theme in a speech to the party in April 1928. The defendants, primarily men who had held responsible posts under tsarism and three Germans working under state contracts, were charged with sabotaging coal-mining in the vital Donets basin and conspiring with foreign capitalists. The Shakhty Trial, held in May-July, became a mass spectacle. Newspapers prominently featured the proceedings and sought to intensify class antagonisms.
The General Secretary broadened his assault on the right opposition. In the second half of 1928, Bukharin worried that Stalin would use the power of the Secretariat to replace the editorial staffs of important national publications with his own appointees. And that is precisely what he did. By the end of the year he had also replaced the leading officials in the Moscow branch of the party and in the national trade-union organizations, both of which had previously eluded his control. In February 1929, Stalin led a Politburo attack on Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii for factionalism; the denunciation came into full public view in August. Bukharin was removed from the Politburo in November 1929; Rykov and Tomskii would suffer the same fate in 1930.
This was not, however, merely an exercise in power politics: vital policy issues played a significant role in the outcome. When he made public the specific charges against the ‘right deviation’ in 1929, Stalin accused his rivals of an excessive and non-socialist sympathy for independent economic development. His own formula therefore called for a more rapid, centrally planned, and avowedly ideological transformation to pure socialism. Against detractors who considered its high quotas and objectives unrealistic, Stalin sponsored the First Five-Year Plan in April 1929 (declared retroactively to have begun in October 1928). Its emphasis on accelerated development of heavy industry was the direct converse of Bukharin’s call for a gradual transition and non-centralized endeavours. With his role as party leader secure, in late 1929 Stalin pressed for the immediate collectivization of agriculture and liquidation of the kulaks as a class.
Stalin had read the national mood correctly. His campaign against gradualists and bourgeois specialists was replicated in practically every administrative and professional institution in the country as impatient radicals attacked their more cautious colleagues and those who remained from the tsarist period. The state taxed the private economic sector out of existence, ended the market experiment, and dispossessed even small-scale entrepreneurs. Workers and peasants received preferential treatment in spheres such as education, and NEP’s permissive social and artistic experiments came under full-scale attack. The succession to Lenin was over, NEP was abandoned, and a cultural revolution had begun.
But consolidating the revolution entailed more than seizing the commanding heights of politics. Better than any other high-ranking Bolshevik, Stalin had understood the significance of the changing size and character of the party in the 1920s. From 23,600 in January 1917 it had expanded to 750,000 at the beginning of NEP. This number contracted to fewer than 500,000 at the time the Lenin Enrolment began in 1924, but by the end of the decade total membership had climbed to 1.5 million (including candidate members). In general, the new recruits were young, urban, male, and poorly educated.
Numbers alone, however, do not tell the full story. The All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)—the party’s official name until 1952—differed significantly from pre-revolutionary Bolshevism. Whereas participation in an illegal, underground cadre required a special revolutionary dedication, the new circumstances demanded other things of those who joined after 1921. Whereas the pre-revolutionary party put a premium on loyalty and proficiency in ideological matters (with sophistication in Marxist theory a prerequisite for a leading position), NEP required different criteria, not always appreciated by the old guard. An ability to carry out assignments, even a certain ruthlessness, proved more important once the party was in power. Indeed, Stalin’s dubious credentials as a theorist, which had first caused experienced Bolsheviks to underestimate him, were not nearly as important to the new recruits. Moreover, Stalin appealed to the idealism that appeared, especially among the young, in the last years of NEP. Appointment powers and the ferocity of Soviet politics notwithstanding, Stalin could not have triumphed had he been supported only by ideologues, cynics, and opportunists. His supporters also included many idealists who believed that measures like the Five-Year Plan, collectivization of agriculture, and cultural revolution held the key to the transition to genuine socialism. For the young radicals attracted by Stalin’s opposition to NEP, the policy had never been a pragmatic retreat, but a betrayal of the basic ideals and goals of the revolution.