Stalin and His Hangmen (28 page)

Why was there no effective protest from within or outside the party at this campaign of unprovoked violence against the class that all of Russian society had long professed to be the core of the nation? Was it ignorance of what was happening? Did people believe the Stalinist propaganda that the USSR had to become industrially strong, if necessary at the expense of the peasantry? Did dissenters fear deadly reprisals? All three factors deterred intellectuals and party workers from taking a stand. The deafening silence must lead us to conclude that Stalin’s apparatus on the one hand and Menzhinsky’s OGPU on the other had by 1928 established their reputations for omniscience and ruthless intolerance.

One man did remonstrate with Stalin: Georgi Chicherin, commissar for foreign affairs. Stalin had inherited him from Lenin and for all his allegiance to Marxism-Leninism Chicherin was as fastidious and rational as any traditional minister of foreign affairs. Stalin put up with Chicherin partly because he quite liked him – Chicherin was a genteel decadent in the style of Menzhinsky – partly because there was nobody else as competent as Chicherin or as acceptable to Western governments and partly because Chicherin, mortally ill, would soon vanish from the scene of his own accord. In March 1929, from his sanatorium in Germany, Chicherin expressed lukewarm support for Stalin’s ‘general line in peasant policies’ but refrained from judging the details and pointed out that it was Stalin’s fault there was no meat to be had in Moscow. He also said, ‘How good it would be, if you, Comrade Stalin, could change your appearance and travel abroad for some time, with a proper interpreter, not a biased one. Then you’d see reality. You’d learn the value of these outbursts about a final struggle. You’d see the utterly revolting rubbish in
Pravda
in its real nakedness.’
⁶
Chicherin was a voice crying out in the wilderness, but a disinterested one. Bukharin’s protests could be dismissed as the whining of a dismissed satrap.

In a typical manoeuvre, Stalin put right a nominal amount of the damage he had done: by March 1929 a few unjustly arrested and destitute peasants had been amnestied. OGPU also cut down on its executions: officially, in 1928 only 869 were shot in the Soviet Union, a third of the
figure for 1927 when Trotskyism was being suppressed. But OGPU noted that ‘class warfare has now become more acute in the countryside’ and they were eager to proceed with mass arrests of the kulaks they had flushed out.

To the July 1928 plenum of the Central Committee, Stalin justified what he had done: Russia had to hit the peasantry hard in order to build railways and hydroelectric power stations. ‘England squeezed the juice out of all its colonies for hundreds of years… Germany built its industry on five billions of reparations after the Franco-Prussian war… America developed its industry by raising loans in Europe… our country cannot, must not, go in for robbing colonies or foreign countries…’ Extraordinary measures, Stalin insisted, ‘have saved the country from a general economic crisis’. He claimed that in future years there would be reserves of grain and that the requisitions had been a one-off measure. Bukharin bickered about the brutality and Stalin set his cronies on him: ‘Give us your panacea,’ shouted Voroshilov. When Bukharin complained that he had to spend two days at OGPU to get the facts, Menzhinsky was asked, ‘Why did you lock him up in OGPU?’ to which Menzhinsky replied, to loud laughter, ‘For panicking.’

Bukharin’s group had to grovel in order to hang on to a shred of power. They applauded the first show trials, knowing that the allegations were absurd and the confessions forced; they assented to exporting grain in order to finance industrialization. Only in June 1928, when Stalin decided that the peasantry would have to enter collective farms not just the cooperatives that Bukharin had envisaged, did he protest to Stalin: ‘Koba, I’m writing to you, not orally, since anyway I am too upset to talk and I fear you won’t hear me out, while you will still read a letter to the end. I consider the country’s internal and external situation to be very bad… people are afraid to talk… I shan’t fight and I don’t want to…’
⁷
He was ready, once he had finished presiding over the Comintern, ‘to go wherever you like, with no fight, no noise, no struggle.’

Bukharin knew very well that all his movements and conversations were monitored by OGPU and that Stalin had installed a fifth telephone in his office to monitor calls made by any senior member of the party or government.
⁸
Stalin had read to Bukharin a transcript of Zinoviev’s most intimate telephone conversations. Nevertheless, on 11 July, when
Kamenev came to Moscow, Bukharin phoned him to arrange a meeting. How did Bukharin imagine that Kamenev and Zinoviev would deal with him after years of relentless hounding in which Bukharin had sided with Stalin? Did Bukharin fear that Stalin, having turned against the peasantry, might bring Kamenev and Zinoviev back into power, in which case Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky would be isolated? Bukharin’s desperate ploy was to recruit them first.

Kamenev was sceptical and yet gullibly optimistic – he expected a counter-offer from Stalin. He took notes on the conversation in order to brief Zinoviev. Later, Kamenev made sure that Trotsky, too, had a summary. Kamenev had known Stalin for over twenty years; he must have known OGPU and Stalin would find out everything. His behaviour was as staggering as Bukharin’s, but the prospect, however dim, of retaining power clearly blinded them both to Stalin’s inexorable vindictiveness.

In 1930 Kamenev’s secretary was arrested by OGPU, who found concealed in a relative’s bedstead minutes of the conversation. Bukharin’s bridge-building to the left opposition gave Stalin the material in order to destroy, one after the other, the left and right deviations in the party. Only now did Bukharin appreciate Trotsky’s point. Calling Stalin a ‘Genghis Khan who had read Marx’ he said, ‘Stalin knows only one means: vengeance and putting a knife into your back at the same time’. Kamenev knew that too; he had been present in 1923 when Stalin told Dzierżyński that his ideal of happiness was to prepare revenge and then go to bed.

During their conversation Bukharin told Kamenev that Stalin had said to Bukharin in 1928, when preparing the Politbiuro’s agenda, ‘You and I are Himalayas, the rest are nonentities…’ When Kamenev asked Bukharin who was backing him, the latter named the rest of his troika, Rykov and Tomsky. Bukharin also said that the deputy head of OGPU Genrikh Iagoda and its head of foreign intelligence Meer Trilisser were sympathetic, an allegation that was to damn Iagoda and Trilisser in Stalin’s eyes. Bukharin posed the dilemma: ‘1) If the country perishes, we perish; 2) If the country manages to get out of the crisis, Stalin steps back in time and we still perish.’ Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky felt that it ‘would be far better if, instead of Stalin, we now had Zinoviev and Kamenev’.

Kamenev and Zinoviev saw that it was mad to take part in a half-baked
plot: there was no hope even of making Stalin revert to the collective leadership of 1923, let alone of his stepping down. When Rykov heard the phrases Bukharin had uttered, and to whom, he yelled at Bukharin (according to Anna Larina, who was to be Bukharin’s last wife), ‘You’re an old woman, not a politician!’ Gods like Stalin demented their victims before destroying them. It boggles the mind that Kamenev and Bukharin, who had spent decades before 1917 evading detection, could be such bungling conspirators.

Stalin had from Iagoda and Agranov in OGPU a full record of these damning discussions and Kamenev’s reflections, too. Just after Stalin gracefully let Kamenev and Zinoviev back into the party, OGPU reported Kamenev speculating, ‘The only progressive cause that this group (Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky) can achieve is to remove Stalin from the post of general secretary… I think their chances are less than 25 per cent… But actually removing Stalin by this group would mean a right-winger taking Stalin’s place… It is extremely likely that when Stalin has beaten the right, he will himself turn doubly right.’ Kamenev outlined five courses of action of which only one appealed to him: ‘To seek a union with Stalin on acceptable terms’.
⁹
He decided to avoid Bukharin, to attack him in print, and to contact Stalin – a meeting which Stalin had just refused. Kamenev feared Stalin might outmanoeuvre him by making a pact with Trotsky and his notes end on a pessimistic note with a very astute prediction of Stalin’s future entourage: Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Orjonikidze, Kalinin, Kirov.

Martemian Riutin, a Moscow Bolshevik who would mount in 1932 the last attempt to depose Stalin, recalled Bukharin ‘totally demoralized, in tears’ and saying, ‘I now feel that I have been literally smeared with shit from head to toe.’ Bukharin recovered sufficiently by the end of 1929 to publish an article, ‘An economist’s notes’, denouncing the collectivization of the peasantry as ‘irresponsible and opportunist’. When attacked in the Politbiuro, Bukharin boldly called Stalin a ‘petty oriental despot’. Bukharin lost his posts. In November 1929 Stalin removed him from the Politbiuro. Then Bukharin broke. He variously grovelled or snorted defiance, as in his letter to Stalin of October 1930:

Koba. After our telephone conversation I immediately left work in a state of despair. Not because you ‘frightened’ me – you can’t scare me and won’t frighten me off. But because those monstrous accusations you threw at me clearly point to the existence of some satanic, foul and low
provocation
which you believe, on which you build your policies and
which will end badly
even if you were to destroy me physically with the same success with which you are destroying me politically…

I consider your accusations
monstrous
mad slander, crazy and, in the final count, stupid… Or does the fact that I don’t lick your behind or write articles in your praise
à la
Piatakov make me ‘a preacher of terror’? Then say so! God, what hellish madness is happening now! And you, instead of explanations, ooze spite against someone who is full of just
one
thought: to help in any way, to pull the cart with everybody, but not to turn into a sycophant, there are a lot of them and they are ruining us.
¹⁰

Stalin had paralysed his opponents. Trotsky still conducted a copious correspondence from Alma-Ata – all the better for OGPU to keep track of the opposition – but he was about to be deported. Zinoviev and Kamenev were grateful for small mercies. Bukharin writhed like a worm on the hook. All would be physically destroyed in a decade; already they were corpses politically. OGPU used provocateurs against them. While Bukharin recuperated in the high Caucasus from the shock of his fall – now he had lost the editorship of
Pravda
– he was doorstepped by a young man called Platonov who claimed to be a Communist Youth member horrified by the treachery of OGPU towards the workers and Bukharin. Platonov elicited enough from Bukharin for Stalin to damn him in the eyes of the Central Committee. In a similar sting, OGPU ‘unmasked’ as a former White Guards officer Trotsky’s printer.

The events of 1928 demonstrated the speed and ruthlessness of Stalin as a politician. He had rehearsed his methods for eliminating not only political rivals but also any class from which future opposition might spring. He had one more device still to try out: the fabricated show trial, a spectacle which Menzhinsky and his subordinates including Iakov Agranov had been rehearsing for nearly a decade.

The First Show Trials

With him, pretence was so spontaneous that it seemed he himself
became convinced of the truth and sincerity of what he was saying.

Milovan Djilas,
Conversations with Stalin

In 1926 Stalin asked Menzhinsky to stage a show trial that would swing public opinion at home and abroad. Not until 1930 did Menzhinsky do this, although in 1928, under Genrikh Iagoda’s less expert supervision, OGPU staged the Shakhty trial of mine engineers from the Don basin in southern Russia. Like the grain requisitions of 1928, the trial was counter-productive. If the country needed grain, why terrorize the producers? If the country needed engineers, why arrest hundreds and put fifty on trial? If foreign specialists were needed to pass on modern technology, why arrest thirty-two German engineers and try three of them? Stalin, accusing others of sabotage, was throwing spanners in his own works.

Each repression was followed by token relenting: individuals in the judiciary and OGPU were reprimanded for overdoing the persecutions; engineers were praised as a caste whom the state would cherish. Foreigners, however, remained vulnerable: in 1930 British electrical engineers from Metro-Vickers stood trial for sabotage and corruption. The repercussions of such trials forced Stalin to guarantee the safety of foreign specialists and in 1932, when the great Dnepr dams were built, the American engineer Hugh L. Cooper was rewarded not with arrest but with the Red Banner of Labour.

The motives behind the Shakhty trial related to the disparity between promised prosperity and the actual penury of the country. This had to be blamed on someone and foreign saboteurs were an easy target. Moreover Stalin loathed foreign specialists and wanted Soviet citizens to shun them. In addition, the effects of a show trial on the judiciary and public needed to be tested again, and Stalin wanted to see if OGPU could make defendants repeat their confessions in open court before he used show trials on famous old Bolsheviks, not just obscure engineers.