Stalin, however, went off as usual to the south for his vacation. His assumption was that he could leave the Central Control Commission, chaired by Ordzhonikidze, to handle the disciplining of the Opposition. Papers were couriered to him regularly. What he read threw him into a rage. Somehow Zinoviev and Trotski had succeeded in turning the Central Control Commission’s enquiries into an opportunity to challenge the Central Committee. And Ordzhonikidze seemed to have lost control of developments. ‘Shame!’ wrote Stalin to Molotov in anticipation of a more aggressive stance being taken by the men he had left in charge of Moscow.20
In June and July he peppered his letters with detailed instructions on both Britain and China.21 Yet he did not lift his eyes from the internal threat: Trotski had to be dealt with. Stalin raised with Molotov and Bukharin the question of whether their enemy would be best deported to Japan.22 The decision was taken to proceed in stages. At the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in October 1927, some of Trotski’s followers shouted out that the Politburo was burying Lenin’s Testament. Stalin was ready for them:23
The Opposition is thinking of ‘explaining’ its defeat by personal factors: Stalin’s crudity, the uncompromising attitude of Bukharin and Rykov and so on. It’s a cheapskate explanation! It’s less an explanation than superstitious nonsense… In the period between 1904 and the February [1917] Revolution Trotski spent the whole time twirling around in the company of the Mensheviks and conducting a campaign against the party of Lenin. Over that period Trotski sustained a whole series of defeats at the hands of Lenin’s party. Why? Perhaps Stalin’s crudity was the cause of this? But Stalin was not yet secretary to the C[entral] C[ommittee]; [Stalin] at that time was cut off and distant from foreign parts, conducting the struggle in the underground whereas the struggle between Trotski and Lenin was played out abroad. So where exactly did Stalin’s crudity come into that?
His handling of the plenum was a masterpiece of persuasion. He reminded the Opposition that previously he had rejected calls for the expulsion of Trotski and Zinoviev from the Central Committee. ‘Perhaps,’ he waspishly suggested, ‘I overdid the “kindness” and made a mistake.’
The joint plenum excluded Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Central Committee. On 14 November 1927 Trotski and Zinoviev were expelled from the party entirely, and this decision was ratified by the Fifteenth Party Congress in December. The Stalin–Bukharin axis had triumphed. Their version of revolutionary policies at home and abroad had prevailed after a decade of constant factional strife among Bolsheviks. Bukharin maintained friendly relations with his defeated adversaries. But Stalin refused to compromise. At the Fifteenth Party Congress the further exclusion of seventy-five oppositionists, including Kamenev, was announced. Stalin and Bukharin had seen off the acute threat to the NEP. No one imagined that within a month the political settlement would be destroyed and that the two victors would become enemies. In January 1928 the New Economic Policy was about to be torn apart by the Party General Secretary.
PART THREE
Despot
23. ENDING THE NEP
Suddenly at the end of the 1920s Stalin trampled on the New Economic Policy like an angry bull. The economic compromise inaugurated by Lenin’s Politburo seven years earlier was rejected. Massive violence was used to introduce a system of collective farms. Forced-rate industrialisation began. Persecution of kulaks, nepmen and ‘bourgeois specialists’ was intensified. Politics too underwent change. The internal party regime was further tightened and show trials were resumed against surviving leaders of the moribund rival parties. An offensive began against every kind of nationalist tendency.1 The boundaries of cultural expression were drastically reduced and organised religion became the object of violent assault. The controversial settlement that had held since 1921 fell apart.
Stalin initiated the changes after the shortfall in grain supplies became critical at the end of 1927. On 6 January 1928 the Secretariat sent out a secret directive threatening to sack local party leaders who failed to apply ‘tough punishments’ for grain hoarders.2 Stalin let his feelings show in a letter to Sergei Syrtsov and the Siberian party leadership:3
We hold that this is the road to panic, to the raising of prices — the very worst form of barter when it is plainly impossible to meet the needs of a countryside full of peasants with marketable grain stocks: it strengthens the capacity of the powerful stratum of the countryside to resist… The peasant will not hand over his tax on the basis of a Pravda editorial — compulsory schedules are crucial for him.
Siberian communists were put on notice that an immediate increase in grain procurements was demanded. Unlike Ukraine and the north Caucasus, Siberia — which had supplied a third of Soviet wheat exports — had experienced a warm summer. Stalin was determined to extract the grain from its kulak owners. He and a select group of party functionaries set off by train from Moscow on 15 January 1928. Politicians like Mikoyan, Kirov, Zhdanov, Shvernik, Postyshev and Kosior made similar trips, accompanied by thousands of party officials, to the agricultural regions of the USSR.4
State grain procurements had tumbled to only 70 per cent of the total obtained a year before. The difficulties had arisen from the Politburo’s mishandling of the economy. Since 1926 several measures had been introduced to squeeze additional revenue from the private sectors. A class tax was levied on the kulaks: fiscal revenue from them rose by over 50 per cent in 1926–7. ‘Evil-intentioned’ hoarding of industrial and agricultural products was in 1926 made a criminal offence under Article 107 of the Criminal Code. Surcharges were imposed on the traffic of private goods on the railways. The government expropriated many private flour-mills. These measures followed the reorientation of immediate economic objectives proposed by Stalin and Bukharin at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December. Party policy was being geared to an accelerated pace of industrialisation through a steady expansion of state capital accumulation. This emphasis was reaffirmed in July 1926. Gosplan — the State Planning Committee, which was responsible for drawing up a plan for the country’s economic development — was told to prepare for a situation where enterprises would become subject to greater instruction and supervision. Moves were made towards bringing the entire economy under central governmental authority.5
Politburo members became impatient about the NEP; and as they turned policy in the direction of radical change they committed themselves to the socialist and industrialising aims of the makers of the October Revolution. In opting for rapid and fundamental change they were intensifying the transformation of the USSR in the direction of ‘modernity’. The vestiges of the old order were to be eradicated. Irked by Trotski, they wished to demonstrate their credentials. They also knew that the slow pace of economic transformation made fertile soil for the United Opposition’s propaganda among party leaders in the provinces6 — and despite the ceaseless political centralisation since mid-1918 there was reason for the ascendant leaders to fear a sudden flaring up of resistance to their supremacy. But they believed in what they were doing. Stalin lived for Bolshevism; but he combined ideological adherence with feelings towards his rivals — jealousy, rancour and vengefulness — that were far from pure.