Yet the Politburo’s unity was under strain. Zinoviev and Kamenev asserted that excessive compromise had been made with the aspirations of the peasantry. Bukharin stepped forward with a defiant riposte. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 he declared: ‘We shall move forward at a snail’s pace, but none the less we shall be building socialism, and we shall build it.’ Throughout the year Trotski had watched bemused as Zinoviev and Kamenev built up the case against official party policy. Zinoviev had a firm organizational base in Leningrad and assumed he was too strong for Stalin; but the Politburo majority were on the side of Stalin and Bukharin, and in 1926 Stalin’s associate Sergei Kirov was appointed to the party first secretaryship in Leningrad. Zinoviev and his Leningrad Opposition saw the writing on the wall. Overtures were made by Zinoviev to his arch-enemy Trotski, and from the summer a United Opposition — led by Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev — confronted the ascendant party leadership.
The United Opposition maintained that Stalin and Bukharin had surrendered entirely to the peasantry. This was not very plausible. In August 1925 Gosplan took a major step towards comprehensive state planning by issuing its ‘control figures for the national economy’. At the Fourteenth Congress in December, moreover, industrial capital goods were made the priority for longer-term state investment. The Central Committee repeated the point in April 1926, making a general call for ‘the reinforcement of the planning principle and the introduction of planning discipline’.20 Two campaigns were inaugurated in industry. First came a ‘Regime of Economy’, then a ‘Rationalization of Production’. Both campaigns were a means of putting pressure upon factories to cut out inefficient methods and to raise levels of productivity.
The USSR’s industrialization was never far from the Politburo’s thoughts. The United Opposition, for its part, was constantly on the defensive. Stalin sliced away at their power-bases as the Secretariat replaced opponents with loyalists at all levels of the party’s hierarchy; Bukharin had a merry time reviling his leading critics in books and articles. The United Opposition’s access to the public media was continually reduced. Prolific writers such as Trotski, Radek, Preobrazhenski, Kamenev and Zinoviev had their material rejected for publication in Pravda. Claques were organized at Party Congresses to interrupt their speeches. In January 1925 Trotski was removed as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, and in December he lost his Politburo seat. Zinoviev was sacked as Leningrad Soviet chairman in January 1926 and in July was ousted from the Politburo with Kamenev. In October 1926 the leadership of the Executive Committee of the Comintern passed from Zinoviev to Dmitri Manuilski.
The United Opposition leaders fell back on their experience as clandestine party activists against the Romanov monarchy. They produced programmes, theses and appeals on primitive printing devices, keeping an eye open for potential OGPU informers. They also arranged unexpected mass meetings where they could communicate their ideas to workers. They talked to sympathizers in the Comintern. They would not go gently into oblivion.
Yet although the Left Opposition, the Leningrad Opposition and the United Opposition exposed the absence of internal party democracy, their words had a hollow ring. Trotski and Zinoviev had treated Bolshevik dissidents with disdain until they, too, fell out with the Politburo. Their invective against authoritarianism and bureaucracy seemed self-serving to the Workers’ Opposition, which refused to co-operate with them. In any case, no communist party critic of the Politburo — from Shlyapnikov through to Trotski — called for the introduction of general democracy. The critics wanted elections and open discussion in the party and, to some extent, in the soviets and the trade unions. But none favoured permitting the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Kadets to re-enter politics. The All-Union Communist Party’s monopoly, while having no sanction even from the USSR Constitution, was an unchallenged tenet; and oppositionists went out of their way to affirm their obedience to the party. Even Trotski, that remarkable individualist, demurred at being thought disloyal.
Such self-abnegation did him no good: Stalin was out to get the United Opposition and the OGPU smashed their printing facilities and broke up their meetings. Stalin’s wish to settle accounts with Trotski and Zinoviev was reinforced by the débâcles in international relations. In May 1927 a massacre of thousands of Chinese communists was perpetrated by Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai. The Soviet Politburo had pushed the Chinese Communist Party into alliance with Chiang, and Trotski did not fail to point out that foreign policy was unsafe in the hands of the existing Politburo.
This time Stalin had his way: in November 1927 the Central Committee expelled Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev from the party. Hundreds of their followers were treated similarly. Kamenev and Zinoviev were so demoralized that they petitioned in January 1928 for re-admittance to the party. They recanted their opinions, which they now described as anti-Leninist. In return Stalin re-admitted them to the party in June. Trotski refused to recant. He and thirty unrepentant oppositionists, including Preobrazhenski, were sent into internal exile. Trotski found himself isolated in Alma-Ata, 3000 kilometres from Moscow. He was not physically abused, and took his family, secretaries and personal library with him; he was also allowed to write to his associates elsewhere in the USSR. But the activity of the United Opposition was in tatters, and Pyatakov and V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko were so impressed by Stalin’s industrializing drive that they decided to break with Trotski on the same terms as Kamenev and Zinoviev.
Victory for Stalin and Bukharin was completed by the winter of 1927–8. The NEP had apparently been secured for several more years and the Politburo seemed to be made up of nine men who gave no sign of serious divisions among themselves. Their record of achievement, furthermore, was substantial. The statistics are controversial, but there seems little doubt that the output of both industry and agriculture was roughly what it had been in the last year before the Great War. Economic recovery had more or less been achieved.21
And the skewing of official policy since 1925 had led to a re-attainment of the late tsarist period’s proportion of industrial production reinvested in factories and mines. The NEP was showing itself able not merely to restore industry but also to develop it further. The engineering sub-sector, which was almost wholly state-owned, had already been expanded beyond its pre-war capacity. But private small-scale and handicrafts output also increased: by 1926–7 it was only slightly less than in 1913. Later computations have suggested that an annual growth of six per cent in production from Soviet factories and mines was possible within the parameters of the NEP.22 The villages, too, displayed renewed liveliness. Agriculture was undergoing diversification. Under Nicholas II about ninety per cent of the sown area was given over to cereal crops; by the end of the 1920s the percentage had fallen to eighty-two. Emphasis was placed, too, upon sugar beet, potatoes and cotton; and horse-drawn equipment was also on the increase.23
The Politburo could take satisfaction inasmuch as this was achieved in the teeth of hostility from the capitalist world. Direct foreign investment, which had been crucial to the pre-revolutionary economy, had vanished: the Soviet authorities had to pay punctiliously for every piece of machinery they brought into the country. Even if they had not refused to honour the loans contracted by Nicholas II and the Provisional Government, the October Revolution would always have stood as a disincentive to foreign banks and industrial companies to return to Russia.
The central party leadership did not recognize its own successes as such, but brooded upon the patchiness of economic advance. It was also jolted by difficulties which were of its own making. In 1926 the party’s leaders had introduced large surcharges on goods carried by rail for private commerce; they had also imposed a tax on super-profits accruing to nepmen. Article No. 107 had been added to the USSR Criminal Code, specifying three years’ imprisonment for price rises found to be ‘evil-intentioned’.24 In the tax year 1926–7 the state aimed to maximize revenues for industrial investment by reducing by six per cent the prices it paid for agricultural produce. In the case of grain, the reduction was by 20–25 per cent.25 Simultaneously the state sought to show goodwill to agriculture by lowering the prices for goods produced by state-owned enterprises. The effect was disastrous. Nepmen became more elusive to the tax-collecting agencies than previously. Peasants refused to release their stocks to the state procurement bodies — and even the lowered industrial prices failed to entice them since factory goods were in exceedingly short supply after their prices had been lowered and they had been bought up by middlemen.