The Russian Revolution (20 page)

In the mid-192os, this issue was the subject of a debate between Preobrazhensky, an Oppositionist, and Bukharin, then a Stalinist. These two, who had earlier co-authored The ABC of Communism, were both noted Marxist theoreticians, specializing respectively in economic and political theory. In their debate, Preobrazhensky- arguing as an economist-said that it would be necessary to exact `tribute' from the peasantry to pay for industrialization, largely by turning the terms of trade against the rural sector. Bukharin found this unacceptable in political terms, objecting that it was likely to alienate the peasants, and that the regime could not afford to risk breaking the worker-peasant alliance that Lenin had described as the political basis of NEP. The result of the debate was inconclusive, since Bukharin agreed that it was necessary to industrialize and therefore to accumulate capital somehow, and Preobrazhensky agreed that coercion and violent confrontation with the peasantry were undesirable.25

Stalin did not participate in the debate, which led many to assume that he shared the position of his ally, Bukharin. However, there were already some indications that Stalin's attitude to the peasantry was less conciliatory than Bukharin's: he had taken a tougher line on the kulak threat, and in 1925 he explicitly dissociated himself from Bukharin's cheerful exhortation to the peasantry to `Get rich' with the blessing of the regime. Moreover, Stalin had committed himself very firmly to an industrialization drive; and the conclusion to be drawn from the Preobrazhensky-Bukharin debate was that Russia should either postpone its industrialization or risk a major confrontation with the peasantry. Stalin was not a man to announce unpopular policies in advance, but with hindsight it is not hard to guess which conclusion he preferred. As he noted in 1927, the economic recovery of NEP, which had brought industrial output and the size of the industrial proletariat almost up to prewar levels, had changed the balance of power between town and countryside in favour of the town. Stalin intended to industrialize, and if this meant a political confrontation with the countryside, Stalin thought that `the town'-that is, the urban proletariat and the Soviet regime-would win.

In introducing NEP in 1921, Lenin described it as a strategic retreat, a time for the Bolsheviks to rally their forces and gather strength before renewing the revolutionary assault. Less than a decade later, Stalin abandoned most of the NEP policies and initiated a new phase of revolutionary change with the First FiveYear Plan industrialization drive and the collectivization of peasant agriculture. Stalin said, and no doubt believed, that this was the true Leninist course, the path that Lenin himself would have followed had he lived. Other party leaders including Bukharin and Rykov disagreed, as will be discussed in the next chapter, pointing out that Lenin had said that the moderate and conciliatory policies of NEP must be followed `seriously and for a long time' before the regime could hope to take further decisive steps towards socialism.

Historians are divided on Lenin's political legacy. Some accept Stalin as Lenin's true heir, whether for good or ill, while others see Stalin as essentially the betrayer of Lenin's revolution. Trotsky, of course, took the latter view and saw himself as the rival heir, but he had no real disagreements in principle with Stalin's abandonment of NEP and his drive for economic and social transformation during the First Five-Year Plan. In the 1970s, and then briefly in the era of Gorbachev's perestroika in the Soviet Union, it was the `Bukharin alternative' to Stalin that attracted scholars who saw a fundamental divergence between Leninism (or `original Bolshevism') and Stalinism.26 The Bukharin alternative was, in effect, a continuation of NEP for the foreseeable future, implying at least the possibility that, having gained power, the Bolsheviks could achieve their revolutionary economic and social goals by evolutionary means.

Whether Lenin would have abandoned NEP at the end of the 192os had he lived is one of the `if' questions of history that can never be definitively answered. In his last years, 1921-3, he was pessimistic about the prospects for radical change-as were all the Bolshevik leaders at that time-and anxious to discourage any lingering regrets in the party for the policies of War Communism that had just been jettisoned. But he was an exceptionally volatile thinker and politician, whose mood-like that of other Bolshevik leadersmight have changed sharply in response to the unexpectedly rapid economic recovery of 1924-5. In January 1917, after all, Lenin had thought it possible that `the decisive battles of this revolution' would not come in his lifetime, but by September of the same year he was insisting on the absolute necessity of seizing power in the name of the proletariat. Lenin in general did not care to be a passive victim of circumstance, which was essentially the Bolsheviks' understanding of their position under NEP. He was a revolutionary by temperament, and NEP was by no means a realization of his revolutionary objectives in economic and social terms.

Beyond the debate about Lenin, however, lies the broader question of whether the Bolshevik Party as a whole was ready to accept NEP as the end and outcome of the October Revolution. After Khrushchev's denunciation of the abuses of the Stalin era at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, many Soviet intellectuals of the older generation wrote memoirs of their youth in the 1920S in which NEP seemed almost like a golden age; and Western historians have often taken a similar view. But the virtues of NEP in retrospect-relative relaxation and diversity within the society, a comparatively laissez-faire attitude on the part of the regime-were not qualities much appreciated by Communist revolutionaries at the time. Communists of the 1920S were afraid of class enemies, intolerant of cultural pluralism, and uneasy about the lack of unity in the party leadership and the loss of a sense of direction and purpose. They wanted their revolution to transform the world, but it was very clear during NEP how much of the old world had survived.

To Communists, NEP had the smell of Thermidor, the period of degeneration of the great French Revolution. In 1926-7, the struggle between the party leadership and the Opposition reached new heights of bitterness. Each side accused the other of conspiracy and betrayal of the revolution. Analogies from the French Revolution were cited frequently, sometimes in connection with the threat of `Thermidorian degeneration', sometimes-ominouslyby reference to the salutary effects of the guillotine. (In the past, Bolshevik intellectuals had prided themselves on the knowledge of revolutionary history that taught them that the downfall of revolutions come when they start to devour their own.)27

There were signs, too, that the sense of malaise was not limited to the party's elite. Many rank-and-file Communists and sympathizers, especially among the young, were becoming disillusioned, inclined to believe that the revolution had reached an impasse. Workers (including Communist workers) were resentful of the privileges of `bourgeois experts' and Soviet officials, the profits of sharp-dealing Nepmen, high unemployment, and the perpetuation of inequality of opportunity and living standards. Party agitators and propagandists frequently had to respond to the angry question `What did we fight for?' The mood in the party was not one of satisfaction that finally the young Soviet Republic had entered a quiet harbour. It was a mood of restlessness, dissatisfaction, and barely subdued belligerence and, especially among party youth, nostalgia for the old heroic days of the Civil War.28 For the Communist Party-a young party in the 192os, moulded by the experiences of revolution and Civil War, still perceiving itself as (in Lenin's phrase in 1917) `the working class in arms'-peace had perhaps come too soon.

5 Stalin's Revolution

THE industrialization drive of the First Five-Year Plan (1929-32) and the forced collectivization of agriculture that accompanied it have often been described as a `revolution from above'. But the imagery of war was equally appropriate, and at the time-'in the heat of the battle', as Soviet commentators liked to put it-war metaphors were even more common than revolutionary ones. Communists were `fighters'; Soviet forces had to be `mobilized' to the `fronts' of industrialization and collectivization; `counter-attacks' and `ambushes' were to be expected from the bourgeois and kulak class enemy. It was a war against Russia's backwardness, and at the same time a war against the proletariat's class enemies inside and outside the country. In the view of some later historians, indeed, this was the period of Stalin's `war against the nation'.'

The war imagery was clearly meant to symbolize a return to the spirit of the Civil War and War Communism, and a repudiation of unheroic compromises of NEP. But Stalin was not simply playing with symbols, for in many ways the Soviet Union during the First Five-Year Plan did resemble a country at war. Political opposition and resistance to the regime's policies were denounced as treachery and often punished with almost wartime severity. The need for vigilance against spies and saboteurs became a constant theme in the Soviet press. The population was exhorted to patriotic solidarity and had to make many sacrifices for the `war effort' of industrialization: as a further (if unintentional) re-creation of wartime conditions, rationing was reintroduced in the towns.

Although the wartime crisis atmosphere is sometimes seen purely as a response to the strains of crash industrialization and collectivization, it actually predated them. The psychological state of war emergency began with the great war scare of 1927, when it was widely believed in the party and the country as a whole that a renewed military intervention by the capitalist powers was imminent. The Soviet Union had recently suffered a series of rebuffs in its foreign and Comintern policy-a British raid on the Soviet trade mission (ARCOS) in London, the nationalist Kuomintang's attack on its Communist allies in China, the assassination of a Soviet diplomatic plenipotentiary in Poland. Trotsky and other Oppositionists blamed Stalin for the foreign policy disasters, especially China. A number of Soviet and Comintern leaders publicly interpreted these rebuffs as evidence of an active anti-Soviet conspiracy, led by Britain, which was likely to end in a concerted military onslaught on the Soviet Union. Domestic tension was increased when the GPU (successor to the Cheka) began rounding up suspected enemies of the regime, and the press reported incidents of anti-Soviet terrorism and the discovery of internal conspiracies against the regime. In expectation of a war, peasants began to withhold grain from the market; and there was panic buying of basic consumer goods by both the rural and urban population.

Most Western historians conclude that there was no actual, immediate danger of intervention; and this was also the view of the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and, almost certainly, of Politburo members like Aleksei Rykov who were not conspiracy-minded. But others in the party leadership were more easily alarmed. They included the excitable Bukharin, currently head of the Comintern, where alarmist rumours flourished and hard information on the intentions of foreign governments was scarce.

Stalin's attitude is harder to gauge. He remained silent during some months of anxious discussion of the war danger. Then, in the middle of 1927, he very skilfully turned the issue back on the Opposition. Denying that war was immediately imminent, he nevertheless pilloried Trotsky for his statement that, like Clemenceau during the First World War, he would continue active opposition to the country's leadership even with the enemy at the gates of the capital. To loyal Communists and Soviet patriots, this sounded close to treason; and it was probably decisive in enabling Stalin to deliver the final blow against the Opposition a few months later, when Trotsky and other Opposition leaders were expelled from the party.

Stalin's struggle with Trotsky in 1927 was the occasion for an ominous raising of the political temperature. Breaking a previous taboo in the Bolshevik Party, the leadership sanctioned arrest and administrative exile of political opponents and other forms of GPU harassment of the Opposition. (Trotsky himself was sent into exile in Alma-Ata after his expulsion from the party; in January 1929 he was deported by Politburo order from the Soviet Union.) At the end of 1927, responding to GPU reports of the danger of an Opposition coup, Stalin presented the Politburo with a set of proposals that can only be compared with the infamous Law of Suspects in the French Revolution.2 His proposals, which were accepted but not made public, were that

persons propagating opposition views be regarded as dangerous accomplices of the external and internal enemies of the Soviet Union and that such persons be sentenced as `spies' by administrative decree of the GPU; that a widely ramified network of agents be organized by the GPU with the task of seeking out hostile elements within the government apparatus, all the way to its top, and within the party, including the leading bodies of the party.

Stalin's conclusion was that `Everyone who arouses the slightest suspicion should be removed'.'

The crisis atmosphere generated by the showdown with the Opposition and the war scare was exacerbated in the early months of 1928 by the onset of a major confrontation with the peasantry (see below, pp. 124-6), and charges of disloyalty directed against the old `bourgeois' intelligentsia. In March 1928, the State Prosecutor announced that a group of engineers in the Shakhty region of the Donbass was to be tried for deliberate sabotage of the mining industry and conspiracy with foreign powers.' This was the first in a series of show trials of bourgeois experts, in which the prosecution linked the internal threat from class enemies with the threat of intervention by foreign capitalist powers, and the accused confessed their guilt and offered circumstantial accounts of their cloak-anddagger activities.

The trials, large portions of which were reported verbatim in the daily newspapers, conveyed the overt message that, despite its claims of loyalty to Soviet power, the bourgeois intelligentsia remained a class enemy, untrustworthy by definition. Less overt, but clearly audible to the Communist managers and administrators who worked with bourgeois experts, was the message that party cadres, too, were at fault-guilty of stupidity and credulousness, if not worse, for having been hoodwinked by the experts.5