Stalin

On November 5, 1929, following protracted negotiations between Britain and the Soviet Union, the House of Commons ratified restoration of diplomatic relations by a wide margin (324 to 199).¹⁰⁷ Each government continued to accuse the other of treachery, but for Stalin, diplomatic recognition by the world’s “leading imperialist power” denoted acknowledgment of the Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization.¹⁰⁸ That same day, a politburo decree ordered the execution of the OGPU espionage operative Yakov Blyumkin. His fatal act had been to meet on Prinkipo with Trotsky, his former patron, who revealed that he had managed to carry out secret documents, which he intended to publish to expose Stalin, and predicted the regime’s downfall, averring that the underground “Bolshevik-Leninists” needed to strengthen their opposition. Blyumkin evidently sensed that Trotsky was fantasizing, yet he had agreed to carry messages to Moscow from Trotsky, written inside books in invisible ink.¹⁰⁹ He became one of the first Communist party members executed by the Soviet regime for a political crime.

A GREAT BREAK

The permanency, or not, of ad hoc regime violence in the countryside was set to be clarified at the year’s second Central Committee plenum, scheduled to open November 10, 1929, and Stalin went on the offensive, with a newspaper article, “The Year of the Great Break,” in Pravda on the revolution’s anniversary (November 7). “We are going full speed ahead by means of industrialization to socialism, leaving behind our traditional ‘Russian’ backwardness,” he declared. “We are becoming a country of metal, a country of the automobile, a country of the tractor.” In the run-up to the plenum, regime officials had begun to boast of fulfilling the Five-Year Plan in just four years, and, at the plenum itself, this would become a “vow” attributed to “the proletariat” and, soon, a ubiquitous slogan—“ 5 in 4.”¹¹⁰ His article predicted giant new farms of 125,000 to 250,000 acres, larger than even the biggest U.S. farms of the time, and insisted that “the peasants are joining collective farms . . . as whole villages, whole counties, whole districts, even sub-provinces”—a supposed movement from below, refuting the rightists. He further boasted that “the country in something like three years will become one of the most grain-rich, if not the most grain-rich, in the world.”¹¹¹ That would allow for vast grain exports, to pay for imported machinery.¹¹²

Local party committees, under intense central pressure, claimed to have doubled the number of collectivized households since June 1929—the basis of Stalin’s plenum’s assertions—but even so collectivization still amounted to only 7.6 percent of households.¹¹³ And it was eyewash anyway. “We had wholesale collectivization on the territory of dozens of villages,” the Ukraine party boss Stanisław Kosior admitted to the plenum, “and then it turned out that all of it was inflated, artificially created, and that the population did not take part and knew nothing.” Critical comments were also uttered by Sergei Syrtsov, who had hosted Stalin in Siberia the year before and been brought back to Moscow by him in 1929, becoming a candidate member of the politburo and head of the Russian republic’s Council of People’s Commissars (Rykov’s lesser position, taken away from him).¹¹⁴ When Syrtsov bemoaned the lack of thought given to policy implementation, Stalin interrupted, “You think everything can be ‘prepared beforehand’?”¹¹⁵

Stalin had the plenum compel a new capitulation from the rightists, which Pravda would publish (“We consider it our duty to declare that . . . the party and its Central Committee have proved right”), and on the final day (November 17) he prompted them to expel Bukharin from the politburo.¹¹⁶ But the dictator, passing a handwritten note to Orjonikidze acknowledging the hall’s sentiment, proved unable to finish off Rykov.¹¹⁷ Still, plenum resolutions warned of “the sharpening of the class struggle and the stubborn resistance by capitalist elements to socialism on the offensive.”¹¹⁸ In fact, before the year was out, the secret police would record at least 1,300 spontaneous, uncoordinated peasant protests against party policy.¹¹⁹ But Stalin forced through a decree that transformed his theretofore ad hoc pronouncements into an official mandate for wholesale Union-wide collectivization.¹²⁰

SHOW OF FORCE