The predictable consequence of the economic measures from 1926 was the disruption of the market economy. Even before hacking at the roots of the NEP, Stalin — together with Bukharin until the expropriations of January 1928 — had been giving them a serious bruising. They had disturbed the garden still earlier by lowering prices for products from state-owned factories as a means of resolving the ‘scissors crisis’ in 1923. The effect was cumulative. A shortage of goods was reported as traders bought up what was available. Three years later Stalin and Bukharin also brought down prices they were willing to pay for grain. The result was a decline in the marketing of the cereal harvest. The two leading individuals in the Politburo had competed with each other in incompetence. Only one of them, Bukharin, saw the error of his ways by indicating to the Central Committee that retail prices needed to be raised to avoid calamity. Stalin faced him down. He had had enough: the NEP in its early years had restored the economy but could not secure industrial advance at a pace rapid enough for Politburo members. The Central Committee plenum in February 1927 backed the measures taken in the previous year.
Stalin and Bukharin had tipped the economy downhill, and Stalin refused to recognise their stupendous blunder. What was he thinking of in 1927? Stalin never explained his strategy in detail. Some have suggested that he merely wanted power and had to pick a fight with Bukharin on terrain where he could count on him taking a stand out of line with opinion in wider party circles. This is a possibility. But the more plausible explanation is that Stalin, having agreed with Bukharin on a more militant approach to industrialisation, refused to back down. He had a blunted faculty of judgement. The NEP had always left a bad taste in the mouth of Stalin and many leading Bolsheviks at the centre and in the provinces. The recurrent emergencies had kept them edgy. There had been the terrible famine in 1922 and the ‘scissors crisis’ in commerce in 1923. The party had tried to squeeze more out of the workers in factories and mines by rationalising the process of production. But this was never enough to satisfy the critics on the political left. In their diverse ways the oppositionists — the Democratic Centralists, the Workers’ Opposition, the Left Opposition, the Leningrad Opposition and the United Opposition — made the Politburo edgy by castigating it for ideological cowardice and betrayal.
The NEP had achieved more than its critics allowed. The volume of industrial and agricultural output by 1926–7 by most estimates had wholly or nearly reattained the level of the last year before the Great War; and the Soviet state was raising its rate of investment in capital projects. The NEP appeared capable of generating a moderate pace of economic development in the years ahead. There was also much political and social stability. Party, OGPU and Red Army held unchallengeable power. A Georgian uprising occurred in 1924; there were also disturbances in central Asia. But otherwise there was tranquillity. The clamp-down on public dissent was effective.
The question remained whether the pace of economic development was sufficient for the USSR to protect itself against potential external enemies. By the late 1920s the main dangers were thought to be Britain (which broke diplomatic relations in May 1927), France (which continued to demand the repayment of Russia’s old state loans) and Japan (which greedily eyed Soviet possessions in the Far East). It was doubtful that the Red Army was well enough equipped to deal with any of them in a war. Although industrial development was proceeding, the technological gap between the Soviet Union and the West’s most advanced economies was growing. The Bolsheviks had come to power as firm believers in the vital necessity of science and engineering as vehicles of socialist progress. A decade after the October Revolution nothing had happened in the USSR which suggested that the gap could soon be closed. The USA and Germany were racing ahead. Stalin and his associates were concerned about the Soviet regime’s persistent failure.
The party’s mood did not rest only on calculations of economic development. Nepmen made fortunes while manufacturing little. A wealthy stratum of peasants, whom the Bolsheviks referred to as the kulaks, again emerged in the countryside. Priests, imams and rabbis spread the word of God. Marxist–Leninist atheism was unpopular. Sections of the intelligentsia, especially among the non-Russian peoples, were cultivating nationalist ideas. Concessions on the national question had been promoted since the October Revolution and reinforced under the NEP. In Ukraine there was a systematic campaign of ‘Ukrain-ianisation’ of schools, press and public personnel. Similar drives were undertaken in other Soviet republics. Yet nationalism was on the rise everywhere in the USSR and was outmatching the spread of socialist consciousness. The basic policy of Lenin and Stalin was backfiring spectacularly. Moscow responded in 1926 by endorsing measures to deport a number of religious and tribal leaders in Azerbaijan.7 The handling of the national question grew harsher at the same time as severity increased in economic policy. Stalin’s associate Kaganovich, who headed the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1925–6, mooted measures to deport Poles from the western borderlands to the USSR’s internal regions. His purpose was to prevent Ukraine being infiltrated by Piłsudski’s intelligence agencies.8
The same party which had made the October Revolution in the name of the working class and the poorest peasants looked out on a society where capitalism, religion and nationalism were growing in strength. Even the ranks of the party caused concern. Membership in 1927, after an intensive recruitment campaign, rose to 1,200,000. Although this was a substantial total, it disguised official worries that the quality of recruits in terms of ideological fervour and educational accomplishment left much to be desired.9
It was against this background that the destabilising economic measures had been introduced from the mid-1920s. Stalin had long had a penchant for economic autarky. Unless state policy produced indigenous industrial growth, he assumed, it was inappropriate. He had written to Molotov in June 1925:10
Either we resolve [this serious question] correctly in the interests of the state and of the workers and the unemployed, whom it would be possible to set up in expanded production or else, if we don’t resolve it correctly, we’ll lose tens of millions — apart from everything else — to the benefit of foreign manufacturers.
Whereas Bukharin advocated industrialisation at a slowish pace and tried to discourage demands for acceleration, Stalin displayed increasing frustration. The partnership of Stalin and Bukharin was disintegrating without either of them yet anticipating that a decisive rupture was about to occur. They still got on well in the Politburo. They also saw each other socially. But Stalin’s ideas were hardening. In December 1926 he denied that the USSR would take fifty or more years to match the volume of the economics of foreign capitalist powers. Indeed he declared that ‘giant steps’ forward could and should be taken.11
Stalin’s contribution to discussions of economic policy until January 1928 had been of a measured nature and — apart from his licensed attacks on the internal party oppositions — his outward behaviour had been calm since Lenin’s death. His rivals had some excuse for misreading the situation; but it was not a mistake they were going to be able to repeat without pain. Stalin was acting craftily. He breathed not a word to Bukharin about the war on the countryside he was about to start. Closeted for two days on the Trans-Siberian Railway with his aide Alexander Poskrëbyshev and others, though, he was in a pugnacious frame of mind. (Poskrëbyshev was the latest of Stalin’s personal assistants and was to remain in post until 1953.) Anybody who got in Stalin’s way on his trip was going to receive ferocious treatment. On arrival in Novosibirsk, he ordered arrests of ‘anti-Soviet’ kulaks. Grain procurement quotas were to be fulfilled. The campaign started to ‘expand the establishment’ of collective farms.12 Squads were assembled in west Siberia and the Urals to collect the quotas set for grain collection. They travelled out to the farms armed to the teeth and grabbed whatever produce they discovered. As in 1918–20, Bolsheviks entered villages, summoned peasant gatherings and demanded immediate compliance at gunpoint.