We have carried out a series of the hardest tasks. We have overthrown capitalism. We have constructed large-scale socialist industry. We have turned the middle peasant on to the path of socialism. We’ve done the most important thing from the viewpoint of construction. There’s still a little left to do: to learn technology and to master science. And when we do that, we’ll have tempos which at present we daren’t even dream about.
And we’ll do that if we really want to!
Stalin was a bureaucrat, conspirator and killer and his politics were of a monstrous species. Yet he was also inspiring. Nobody listening to him on that occasion could fail to be impressed by his performance.
He was summoning his subordinates, in the republic and the provinces as well as in Moscow, to effect a gigantic political and economic transmutation. He knew that he could not know everything that went on. He was adept at getting thousands of officials to show the required zeal by setting out a general policy or handing down fixed delivery quotas. Many subordinates were appalled by the ‘excesses’. But many others — out of conviction, fear or ambition — co-operated eagerly. Once the project had been formulated in 1928–9, officialdom in all Soviet institutions competed with each other to obtain a share of the increased resources. They also aspired to the power and privileges dangled as a bait in front of them. The direction of policy had been made abundantly clear and they wanted to take advantage of the journey about to be embarked upon.36
His summons was successful. The First Five-Year Plan, scheduled to last to the end of 1933, was completed a year ahead of schedule. National income had nearly doubled since the tax-year 1927–8. Gross industrial output had risen by a remarkable 137 per cent. Within industry, the output of capital goods registered a still more impressive increase of 285 per cent. The total employed labour force had soared from 11.3 million under the New Economic Policy to 22.8 million. The figures have to be treated with caution. Stalin and his associates were never averse to claiming more for their achievements than they should have done; and indeed they themselves derived information from lower echelons of party and government which systematically misled them. Disruption was everywhere in the economy.37 Ukraine, south Russia and Kazakhstan were starving. The Gulag heaved with prisoners. Nevertheless the economic transformation was no fiction. The USSR under Stalin’s rule had been pointed decisively in the direction of becoming an industrial, urban society. This had been his great objective. His gamble was paying off for him, albeit not for his millions of victims. Magnitogorsk and the White Sea–Baltic Canal were constructed at the expense of the lives of Gulag convicts, Ukrainian peasants and even undernourished, overworked factory labourers.
25. ASCENT TO SUPREMACY
Stalin had once paraded before the party as the paladin of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. As Party General Secretary he had ordered searches of the archives and exposed every disagreement between his enemies — Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin — and Lenin. Stalin himself had fallen out badly with Lenin in 1922–3. Yet when Trotski’s American supporter Max Eastman published documents on that dispute in 1925, Stalin got the Politburo to command Trotski to reject them as forgeries. Implicitly he was making the claim that he alone loyally tended the flame of Lenin’s memory.
Prudence held him back from announcing the NEP’s abandonment. In economics, moreover, there was more than a hint of Trotski’s ideas in his new measures. Better for Stalin to pretend that he was building up the legacy of Lenin. At the same time, though, he wanted to assert his status as supreme party leader. It was no longer enough to appear as his master’s voice: Stalin had to impose his own persona. A fine chance came with his fiftieth-birthday celebrations in December 1929.1 Pravda fired a barrage of eulogies about his past and present contribution to the revolutionary cause. There had been nothing like it since Lenin’s fiftieth birthday in April 1920 when Stalin had been among the leading eulogists. Stalin could gloat. He had survived the storms of censure about Lenin’s Testament and subsequent public criticism in the decade. At the banquet in Stalin’s honour he listened to the series of speeches itemising his virtues and achievements. The underestimated General Secretary had scaled the peak of the All-Union Communist Party, the Soviet state and the Communist International.
He behaved imperiously. Earlier he had been renowned for his common touch and had seemed so ‘democratic’ in comparison with most other party leaders.2 A young Nikita Khrushchëv never forgot the impression Stalin made on him at the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925. His Ukrainian delegation asked Stalin to have his photograph taken with them. Petrov the photographer shouted instructions about the pose he wanted. Stalin quipped: ‘Comrade Petrov loves to order people around. He orders people around even though that’s now prohibited here. No more ordering people around!’3 Khrushchëv and his friends were entranced: Stalin appeared one of their own sort. It was a proletarian revolution, they thought, and a working-class fellow was running the party which had made it. But the gap between him and his followers was widening. He demanded complete obedience and often interfered in their private lives. Taking a dislike to Kaganovich’s beard, he ordered him to shave it off and threatened to do the job himself with his wife Nadya’s scissors.4 Probably Stalin wanted the Politburo to be identified with beardless modernity, but he had a crusty way of obtaining his purposes.
He had clambered up the ziggurat of power whose apex was the Politburo. Its members took the great decisions on political, economic, national and military policy. The Politburo’s agenda regularly included items on culture, religion and law. Stalin had no rivals among its members. These included Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan and Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Though dominant in the Politburo, Stalin did not chair it. The tradition persisted that the chairman of Sovnarkom should perform this task.5 Stalin understood the instincts of the party. Like the Roman emperor Augustus who avoided awarding himself the title of king (rex) while founding a monarchy, he sacrificed personal vanity to the reality of supreme power. His main title was Party General Secretary — and sometimes he just signed himself as Secretary.6 His most important supporters were Molotov and Kaganovich. Both were determined and ideologically committed politicians — and Stalin had steadily imposed his will on them. They referred to him as the Boss (Khozyain). (They did this out of his hearing. Although he allowed a few old comrades to call him Koba, his growing preference was for fellow politicians to use ‘comrade Stalin’ or ‘Iosif Vissarionovich’.) Scarcely an important Politburo matter was settled in contradiction of his wishes.
He never stopped working even on holiday by the Black Sea. His personal assistants went with him and he dealt with important matters requiring his immediate adjudication by telegram. Molotov and Kaganovich kept in regular contact. Stalin himself continued to consult other communist leaders on the coast: they queued to have meetings with him. But this was a sideshow to the main drama. Moscow was Stalin’s preoccupation and he ensured that the two men he left in the capital shared his general vision of what kind of revolution was desirable. He had chosen well.