Stalin

Soviet industry, construction, and transport employed, at most, 6 million workers in 1929—of whom 4.5 million performed manual labor—out of a working population of well more than 60 million.⁴⁶ Alongside familiar output norms, piece rates, and labor discipline, Soviet factories were supposed to be crucibles for new forms of socialist labor. “Shock work,” connoting overfulfillment of work norms via all-out exertion and rationalization, spread during the Five-Year Plan in conjunction with so-called socialist competitions among brigades for honors and better rations.⁴⁷ In early 1929, Pravda had published “How to Organize Competition?” This previously unpublished article by Lenin, about unleashing workers’ creative energies, was part of a campaign in which workers took vows, often in writing, not to slack off or show up drunk or go AWOL, and to fulfill the plan. Some work collectives were afforded Union-wide publicity.⁴⁸ Stalin had never really been a worker himself, had clashed bitterly with the one genuine worker in the politburo (Tomsky), and rarely visited factories. But he nurtured a deep populist streak.

A journalist for the newspaper Female Peasant, Yelena Mikulina (b. 1906), was having difficulty publishing her pamphlet, “Socialist Competition of the Masses,” on textile workers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. In early May 1929, she boldly dropped the manuscript off for Stalin at the party secretariat, imploring his aides for an audience. Stalin, surprising his functionaries, had his top aide, Ivan Tovstukha, summon her to Old Square on May 10. “You wanted to tell me something?” he was said to have asked Mikulina, who recalled answering, “‘I have nothing to say, because I am frightfully afraid, and completely stunned.’ . . . ‘Ha, ha ha,’ Stalin laughed. And in his laugh he showed his teeth. And his entire face, sown with large pockmarks, also laughed.” They talked about where else Mikulina might venture to write firsthand about socialist construction—perhaps Kazakhstan, where the Turkestan–Siberian Railway was being built.⁴⁹ She asked Stalin to write a preface to her essays, which he did the next day, sending it by courier to her dormitory. The preface, which touted how “the powerful production rise of the toiling masses has begun,” was published in Pravda (May 22, 1929). The state publishing house immediately issued Mikulina’s pamphlet in a print run of 100,000. She sent Stalin an autographed copy, with the dedication “I cannot tell you how powerfully I love you.”⁵⁰

Stalin, in his preface, warned anyone who dared to impede “the creative initiative of the masses.”⁵¹ Then the reviews arrived. One, from a newspaper editor in Yaroslavl, told Stalin that “workers greet the pamphlet with mocking laughter,” but nonetheless inquired whether his own censorious draft review (which he enclosed) merited publication.⁵² Another, forwarded to Stalin by the party boss of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, provoked a response. “It is not so easy to take in comrade Stalin,” the dictator wrote. “I am decisively against writing prefaces only for pamphlets and books of literary ‘big-shots,’ literary ‘names.’ . . . We have hundreds and thousands of young capable people, who are striving with all their might to rise up from below.”⁵³

“SOCIAL FASCISTS”

Bolshevism, like Italian fascism, was an insurrection against both a liberal constitutional order and European Social Democracy. In Stalin’s formulation, codified at the Sixth Comintern Congress (1928), a bourgeoisie desperate to retain its hold on power sought to establish extreme fascist regimes by co-opting Social Democrats. Therefore, Social Democracy—which reconciled workers to capitalism, and thus lured them away from their supposed true home in the Communist party—constituted a handmaiden of fascism (“social fascism”).⁵⁴ Social Democrats returned and often instigated the enmity, expelling Communists from trade unions and agitating against the Soviet regime. During clashes on May Day 1929, the German Social Democrat Party supported the police against banned worker street rallies encouraged by German Communists; 30 people were killed, nearly 200 injured, and more than 1,000 arrested.⁵⁵ The Comintern condemned the Berlin events as Social Democratic “terror.” A German Communist party congress the next month resolved that “Social Democracy is preparing . . . the establishment of the fascist dictatorship.”⁵⁶