Stalin and His Hangmen (27 page)

Clearing the Terrain

In mid-January 1928 Stalin and Trotsky each took trains across the Urals. One travelled by choice, the other by compulsion. Stalin was beginning his first year of tyranny, of ruling without allies; Trotsky was in exile, on the road to oblivion. How had Stalin managed to outmanoeuvre and silence men more articulate than him, more educated in political theory and economics; men who had thirty years of intrigue and opposition under their belts; men who were better known to, and sometimes better liked by, the public?

Stalin’s chief technique had been dissimulation. He was the con man who pretends to be duped. Three forces – Kamenev and Zinoviev’s uncompromising Marxist left, Bukharin and Rykov’s flexible right and Trotsky’s militancy – aimed to take power after Lenin’s death. All three sides had seen Stalin and his cronies as the centre ground that had to be captured if they were to overthrow the other two. Kamenev and Zinoviev, certain that they were Lenin’s ideological heirs, had embraced Stalin in order to disempower Trotsky. When Trotsky had been sidelined, Bukharin, Rykov and the other ‘soft’ Social Democrats had supported Stalin against Kamenev and Zinoviev to prevent the New Economic Plan coming to a premature end.

Now in 1928, with Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky all out of the running, Stalin and his underlings Kaganovich, Molotov and Menzhinsky turned against Bukharin. In a volte-face, they were going to deal with the peasantry as Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky had proposed: they would take their grain and their liberty and use their wealth and their labour to create an industrialized and militarized totalitarian society. Only Zinoviev and Kamenev would have no part to play in the industrialization, and Trotsky had been removed from control of the armed forces. The rationale for letting Bukharin share power vanished once liberal economic policies were disavowed and Stalin began a ten-year game that would end with a bullet in Bukharin’s neck.

Stalin’s skill in ousting all the old guard while implementing many of
their ideas shows his profound understanding firstly of the weaknesses of human nature, especially the self-esteem of the intellectual in power, and secondly of the importance of the levers of power, primarily the intelligence apparatus. From January 1928 Stalin gathered the power, as well as the will, to destroy the lives not only of Lenin’s Politbiuro, but of millions of peasants, intellectuals and workers. There would be no more constraints on his paranoia.

A few months before, in September 1927, apart from on the street and in the semi-legal press, there was just one forum where Trotsky might challenge Stalin, the Comintern. To foreign communists Trotsky repeated Lenin’s warnings about Stalin and Bukharin: ‘Stalin’s personal misfortune, which is more and more that of the party, is a grandiose disproportion between Stalin’s resources in ideas and the might which the party-state apparatus has concentrated in his hand.’ Kuusinen and Bukharin parried this attack and Stalin did not need to say a word. The Comintern voted unanimously to expel Trotsky.

Stalin had let Bukharin and Trotsky argue each other to exhaustion, now he used Menzhinsky to deliver the knockout blow. In November 1927, Stalin presented to the Central Committee a sensationally imaginative report by Menzhinsky in which OGPU said it had proof that Trotsky and ‘the opposition’ were planning a coup.
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The aim was to seize the Kremlin, the post office and the radio stations, and to blow up railway lines. The conspirators had also supposedly fomented mutiny in army garrisons in Leningrad and the Ukraine. Menzhinsky outbid Stalin: he recommended ‘liquidating’ the opposition leaders ‘before it is too late’.

Stalin postponed any liquidation and kept a moderate face. Three months later, Trotsky was handed his sentence by OGPU: ‘Inaccordance with the law punishing any person for counter-revolutionary activity, citizen Lev Davidovich Trotsky is to be deported to Alma-Ata. No time limit for his stay there is indicated. The date for dispatch to exile is lóJanuary 1928.’

Stalin was bombarded with protests from Trotsky’s admirers. An anonymous letter of 1927 runs:

Comrade Stalin,… You and your colleagues are wrong to curse Trotsky. You’re told the workers curse him, not true, not true. Comrade Stalin, I call to you from the depths of the party:
Trotsky is more loved than you or Zinoviev, etc. by the workers
… Trotsky’s been toppled and you’re kicking him when he’s down. Trotsky is a fighter, he’s a force and a decent party member…
With the rotten Leninism you’ve taken up we’ll soon collapse
…
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The last spontaneous demonstration in Moscow for sixty years took place at the railway station where Trotsky’s train was waiting, and a dozen OGPU agents were beaten up, although Trotsky was actually still at home. After OGPU came for him two days later, a telegram was sent to Stalin’s train in Siberia: ‘they had to use force and carry him out in their arms, since he refused to come, had locked himself in his room and the door had to be broken down’. Trotsky was accompanied by his wife, his elder son Lev and thirty followers.

When Trotsky arrived in Kazakhstan, Stalin was in Siberia, implementing his version of Trotsky’s policies. The ‘scissors’ problem of the NEP was to be resolved by force. One blade of the scissors was the decreasing price of grain, which deterred peasants from selling surpluses or planting more. The other blade was the sluggishness of Russia’s factories, where the incompetently managed workers on their seven-hour days and rickety production lines were making too few shoddy goods too expensively: a metre of cotton cloth cost the same as fifteen kilos of wheat. The peasants might survive without goods from the cities, but the workers could not live without grain. By the end of 1927, shortages had led to rationing of basic commodities. Stalin understood sticks not carrots. His solution, to the dismay of Bukharin and other liberals, was not to raise factory productivity or prices for farm produce; it was to terrorize the peasantry into handing over grain and money to the state, to confiscate whatever they hid and arrest those who hid, or traded in, grain.

This policy required the peasantry to be sorted into three categories: the rich peasant or kulak (tight fist) to be eliminated, the poor peasant to inherit the earth, and the middle peasant to be left where he was. A kulak was a peasant who farmed more land than his own family could cope with; a poor peasant was one who had lost his land or was unable to subsist on it, and hired out his labour; the middle peasant, on whom Bukharin wanted to stake the future, produced enough both to subsist and to pay his taxes. At first Stalin’s organized pillage of the kulak and middle peasant worked: a million extra tonnes of grain were collected and
famine in the cities was averted in 1928. But over large tracts of Siberia and southern Russia the peasants understood that the years of peace during which, by working hard, they had fed themselves were over.

Stalin’s expedition to Siberia in 1928 was a trial run for a crime against humanity. In the next two years, requisition and dispossession under the names of collectivization and ‘dekulakization’ would lay waste virtually all the arable lands of the USSR. Arrests, deportations and killings escalated, probably beyond what even Stalin and Menzhinsky had anticipated, into a holocaust unmatched in Europe between the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century and Hitler. Stalin’s attack on the peasantry ravaged Russian agriculture and the Russian peasant to such an extent that for perhaps a century Russia would be incapable of feeding itself It introduced irrational and unquestioned rule by fear and turned people back into beasts of burden. Stalin was now using OGPU to repress not counter-revolutionaries but a peaceful population.

Most of what Stalin did, however brutal, before 1928 can be ascribed to necessity, to the logic of events. The violence of the civil war can be explained as pre-emptive self-defence against an enemy who, given the chance, would have hanged Lenin’s Politbiuro from public gallows in Moscow. Stalin’s dirty tactics in the battle for the succession to Lenin can be justified by the view, which was not just Stalin’s, that only a dictator could rule the country and that his rivals were even worse. But Stalin’s collectivization and the eradication of the rich peasant as a class makes little sense on economic grounds. The war on the peasantry that Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev had proposed and which Stalin implemented was ideological, like Hitler’s war on the Jews, but it lacked even the populist basis that underpinned Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. Half of Europe could enthusiastically unite behind anti-Semitism, but few Russians blamed the kulak for their misery.

The arbitrary violence of 1928 left the authorities no other option but to go further and enslave the peasantry on collective farms. Russia would never have voluntarily produced surplus grain again, and private trade in grain or withholding it from the state now became criminal offences.
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Resistance, even by shouts or a show of fists, was terrorism.

For the first time since the civil war and the last time ever, Stalin travelled the country to enforce a policy rather than take a holiday. He took with him a train-load of OGPU, party and government workers; his
cronies worked in parallel. The Armenian Bolshevik Anastas Mikoyan, to whom Stalin had transferred Bukharin’s economic tasks, was terrorizing the grain belt of the north Caucasus; Viacheslav Molotov was taking his train through the black earth of European Russia, the middle and south Volga. At each stop Stalin, Mikoyan and Molotov mobilized local officials and issued targets for grain. Kulaks, traders and lax officials were arrested. The poorer peasants and officials in each area did OGPU’s dirty work. Sometimes they acted out of fear or in a frenzied mass; sometimes they were covetous or just vindictive. The poor peasant wanted the tools, clothes, houses and livestock of the rich; the local party or soviet worker hoped to earn himself promotion. In any case, party workers knew that going too far was far less dangerous than not going far enough. They seized even the seedcorn for next spring and the sixteen kilos of grain per head per month that the peasant was allotted for personal survival.

OGPU enforced confiscation wherever Stalin, Mikoyan and Molotov were unable to visit. For example, on 19 January 1928 Menzhinsky telegraphed the GPU chief in Bashkiria: ‘Communicate by telegraph immediately what you have undertaken to ensure the process of grain requisitioning. What operations have been carried out, how many have been arrested, and who? Has there been any supervision of the movement of factory goods to the country and requisitioned grain to the railways? Are those who buy up coupons for goods in the country being arrested?’

Menzhinsky, with Stalin’s sanction, was implementing what he had proposed in his university thesis thirty years ago: breaking up the peasant community. All Menzhinsky’s senior staff were requisitioned by Stalin for the task in 1928. Iakov Agranov, deputy director of the secret department of OGPU, was taken off his espionage duties and was soon taking his interest down to village level: ‘Carry out an investigation urgently on the pillaging of the collective farm at Lutsenkovo parish, paying most attention to the leading kulaks. At the same time process the anti-Soviet element in the parish. Inform the secret department of results in detail.’ Genrikh Iagoda, too, was roped in to see that OGPU, not the courts, dealt with those arrested for speaking out against requisitioning or for ‘sabotage’.
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OGPU’s regular reports also warned Stalin that even from the cowed peasantry there might be a backlash. The Red Army was recruited from the peasantry; the letters soldiers had from
home undermined morale and made it unwise to use the army to put down peasant uprisings.

Molotov, touring the Volga, was more cautious than Stalin. He enforced party policy but protested at arbitrary arrests or at local officials using the campaign to settle private scores. Not that there was a grain of humanity in Molotov: he rated bureaucratic efficiency above all else, and blamed party disorganization rather than the kulak for the breakdown in the supply of grain. Stalin used every trick: the peasantry were not allowed to pay in money; every purchase and every tax was in grain. They had to pay taxes in advance and buy government bonds and compulsory insurance until nothing was left. The mills only gave back to the peasants a tiny proportion of their grain as flour.

OGPU was flooded with reports of discontent and open rebellion, as well as abuse from drunken officials ‘discrediting Soviet power’. A few officials were killed by peasants; many were assaulted or had their houses burnt down. So many peasants were arrested after Stalin’s stay in Novosibirsk that the local GPU could not cope; Iagoda had to hand over kulaks to the militia and the courts.

The peasantry were perplexed by this renewed assault. Was the Soviet Union about to go to war and therefore requisitioning grain? Was the rouble about to collapse and therefore money not being accepted? They concluded, in the words of a letter intercepted by OGPU, ‘For food we are left with 16 kilos a month per head, but we’re against that and we say we’ll fight to the death, rather than die of famine.’ Support for kulaks grew: ‘Now we shan’t vote for the paupers, we voted for them for two years and they ruin everything; we must vote for a well-off peasant who has property as a pledge so that he is answerable,’ wrote another peasant.
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Stalin’s entourage was enslaved to doctrine. The kulak was to be eliminated even though he was rarely rich enough to be an exploiter, but often employed the poor peasants, giving them corn to survive the winter and buying them tools. Worse, to meet targets for confiscation, middle peasants were arrested as kulaks. The idiocy of Stalin’s policy was that the peasants who could farm the land and worked hard were turned off it, very often to die, and those who could not farm and would not work inherited the earth as members of collective farms. All the achievements of Piotr Stolypin, the prime minister who had in 1908
granted the incentives that revived Russian agriculture and sent wagon-loads of butter from Siberia to Britain and grain from Odessa to Germany, were nullified.