Stalin

In Moscow, the Comintern opened its tenth expanded plenum on July 3, 1929, with seventy-two delegates, half of whom had voting rights. Otto Kuusinen, the Finnish-born Comintern secretary general, noted that “factories would determine the outcome of the next war and the next civil war,” a summons to close ranks behind Soviet industrialization.⁵⁷ Stalin had inserted the following into the theses: “The Comintern executive committee plenum suggests paying special attention to strengthening the fight against the ‘left’ wing of Social Democracy, which is retarding the disintegration of Social Democracy by sowing illusions about this wing’s opposition to the policies of Social Democracy’s leadership, but in fact strongly supports social fascism.”⁵⁸ Bukharin, formally chairman of the Comintern executive committee, had not even been showing up at headquarters, and on the plenum’s final day (July 19) he was replaced by Molotov.⁵⁹ Privately, Clara Zetkin, the high-profile German Communist, had confided to a Swiss comrade that “the Comintern has turned from a living political body into a dead mechanism, which, on the one hand, is capable only of swallowing orders in Russian and, on the other, of regurgitating them in different languages.” Publicly, she continued to lend her prestige to the cause by keeping her mouth shut.⁶⁰

Other foreign Communists exulted in the Soviet party’s militant turn under Stalin. Klement Gottwald, responding to allegations that the Czechoslovak Communist party was under Moscow’s thumb, boasted to his country’s National Assembly, “We go to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to wring your necks. (Outcry). And you know the Russian Bolsheviks are masters at it! (Uproar).”⁶¹

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY, ARRESTS

Voroshilov, as he wrote privately (June 8, 1929) to Orjonikidze, who was away convalescing, had gotten into a row with Bukharin at a politburo session. “I lost my self-control and blurted out in Little Nikolai’s face, ‘You liar, bastard, I’ll punch you in the face,’ and other such nonsense and all in front of a large number of people,” he lamented. “Bukharin is trash and is capable of telling the vilest fabrications straight to your face. . . . Still, I did not behave properly. . . . After this scene Bukharin left the politburo meeting and did not return.” Voroshilov had just voted to accommodate Bukharin’s wishes in the matter of his next appointment, forming part of a rare politburo majority in that vote against Stalin.⁶² Soon thereafter, Stalin had the politburo revisit the military aspect of industrialization, just months after formal approval of the maximalist variant of the Five-Year Plan. On July 15, two secret decrees were issued that, to a considerable degree, belatedly sided with Voroshilov and the Red Army against Rykov’s fiscal prudence.⁶³

The first decree underscored the long-standing view that all the states neighboring the USSR to the west needed to be viewed as a “likely enemy,” which required attaining military parity with them. It also called for acceleration of the components of the Five-Year Plan that served defense (nonferrous metals, chemicals, machine building) by means of “foreign technical assistance and aid, and acquisition of the most vital prototype models.”⁶⁴ Red Army growth was set to reach 643,700 active troops by the end of the Five-Year Plan. Improvements were mandated in soldiers’ housing and vigilance against “kulak moods, anti-Semitism, [and] distorted disciplinary practices” (hazing). The second decree, on military factories proper, complained that they were overseen by “the caste of old tsarist-era specialists,” many of whom stood accused of “wrecking.” Voroshilov tasked the army staff—headed by Boris M. Shaposhnikov, a tsarist-era officer descended from Orenburg Cossacks—with redoing its economic plans and administration to facilitate mass production of advanced aircraft, artillery, and tanks.⁶⁵ “Everyone has a magnificent impression,” the commissariat’s business manager wrote to Voroshilov of the secret decrees. “Boris Mikhailovich even declared that he got more effect from this document than from his medical treatment in Germany.”⁶⁶