Stalin

Stalin was ecstatic. “Obviously our fellows from the Far East Army gave [the Chinese] a good scare,” he crowed on December 5, 1929, to Molotov (now the one on holiday). “We rebuffed America and England and France rather rudely for their attempt to intervene. We could not have done otherwise. Let them know what Bolsheviks are like! I think the Chinese landowners will not forget the object lessons taught them by the Far East Army.” Stalin added: “Grain procurements are progressing. We are raising the supply allocations for industrial cities like Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kharkov, and so on. The collective farm movement is growing by leaps and bounds. Of course, there are not enough machines and tractors—how could it be otherwise?—but simply pooling peasant tools results in a colossal increase in sown acreage.”¹³¹

EVERYWHERE, VICTORY

From December 5 through 10, 1929, the regime staged the First All-Union Congress of Shock Brigades. “Workers took to the podium and spoke not only about their factory, their plant—they spoke about planning in general, about standardization, about control figures, and so on,” Valerian Kuibyshev, the head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, boasted from the dais. “That is how people can speak who feel themselves the masters of their country.”¹³²

On December 15, seven weeks after Black Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange, a Pravda editorial declared that a general economic crisis had engulfed the United States. As other customers for large capital orders became scarcer, Stalin shopped the great capitalist department store. Starting with the American companies Freyn Engineering and Arthur McKee, Moscow signed “technical assistance” contracts to import the new American wide-strip steel mills and heavy blooming mills with which to build brand-new integrated steel plants at Magnitogorsk (Urals), equivalent in size to the flagship U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, as well as others in Kuznetsk (Siberia) and Zaporozhe (Ukraine). Additionally, the Soviets contracted with the Ford Motor Company to build an integrated mass-production facility in Nizhny Novgorod for cars and trucks, on the basis of recent Ford patents and its famed River Rouge plant. Caterpillar was engaged to re-equip factories in Kharkov and Leningrad to mass-produce tractors and harvesters, while giant tractor plants were contracted for Stalingrad and, very soon, Chelyabinsk, intended to be the largest in the world. Contracts would be signed with DuPont and Nitrogen Engineering to manufacture ammonia, nitric acid, and synthetic nitrogen, and Westvaco for chlorine. There would be ball-bearings technology from Sweden and Italy, advanced plastics and aircraft from France, turbines and electrical technology from Britain.¹³³ Virtually every contract would contain at least one turnkey installation—an entire plant from scratch to operation.¹³⁴ The Soviets had to pay with foreign-currency-earning exports (grain, timber, oil) or gold reserves.¹³⁵ But now Stalin’s regime even managed to obtain foreign credits, which, although short term, were frequently on favorable terms with foreign government guarantees and did not even necessitate that they redeem the pre-Communist state debts.¹³⁶

On December 21, 1929, Stalin officially turned fifty. Pravda had begun printing congratulations three days earlier, and on the actual day, the paeans occupied six and a half of the issue’s eight pages, with some of the approximately 1,000 congratulatory telegrams coming from factories and organizations, but not from collective farmers.¹³⁷ Molotov sent a private note. “I know that you are diabolically busy,” he wrote. “But I shake your fifty-year-old hand.” ¹³⁸ The state publishing house issued a collection of the tributes in an edition of 300,000 copies. “Wherever Stalin is,” it stated, “there is success, victory.”¹³⁹ The Pravda birthday issue carried the iconic photograph of Stalin with Lenin at the latter’s dacha and hailed the dictator as “the best pupil, heir, and successor of Lenin.” But that made him a target: “Stalin stands at the head of the Leninist Central Committee. Therefore he is invariably the object of savage abuse on the part of the world bourgeoisie and the Social Democrats.”¹⁴⁰

Stalin struck a modest pose in a published response (December 22), crediting the Leninist party and the working class, “which bore me and reared me in its own image and likeness,” and making a solemn vow: “You need have no doubt, comrades, I am prepared to devote to the cause of the working class, the cause of the proletarian revolution and world Communism, all my strength, all my ability, and, if need be, all my blood, drop by drop.”¹⁴¹