Stalin

The newsreel agency produced a six-part silent amalgamation of Stalin moments caught on film: smiling, waving, graciously accepting accolades, wise, benevolent.¹⁴² It conveyed his revolutionary bona fides with tsarist-police photographs and fingerprints and images of the shacks he inhabited during exile in Solvychegodsk and Kureika. Viewers also saw his birth hovel and hometown of Gori, with its medieval-fortress ruins on the hill, a pantheon of childhood photos, and a long interlude at the current Tiflis home of his bespectacled mother, Keke Geladze, as she assembled a care package with his beloved homemade walnut jam. Now Stalin also became the organizer of the Red Army, an innovation canonized in Voroshilov’s birthday pamphlet, “Stalin and the Red Army.” Trotsky was provoked to consider writing a history of the Red Army and the civil war in rebuttal, but that would not get done: a suspicious fire at his residence destroyed many of his papers and books on the subject.¹⁴³ Voroshilov’s draft, meanwhile, had been sent to Stalin for prior approval. The defense commissar had written that Stalin made fewer mistakes than the others. Stalin wrote back, “Klim! There were no mistakes—cut that paragraph.”¹⁴⁴

CLOSE TO THE MASSES (METAPHYSICALLY)

Those who wanted to be part of the world-historical building of socialism would have to fall in line. “It is now completely clear that one cannot be for the party and against the present leadership,” the Trotsky apostate and state bank head Georgy “Yuri” Pyatakov wrote in Pravda (December 23, 1929). “One cannot be for the Central Committee and against Stalin.”¹⁴⁵ Unlike Italian fascism, however, Marxism had trouble admitting a cult of the leader. This delicate question was directly addressed—for perhaps the last time under Stalin—in the lead article of the journal Party Construction, published in connection with Stalin’s jubilee. The author, K. Popov, characterized leadership as necessary and Stalin’s as “armed with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, forged by multiyear experience of the struggle for Leninism, hand in hand with Lenin.” Popov referred to a “leading group” within the party and to Stalin as “the genuine ‘first among equals,’” because, in his struggle for Leninism, he “invariably expresses the will of hundreds of thousands and millions.” Stalin’s illiberal regime, in other words, was democratic. Popov quoted Lenin to the effect that “one person can represent the will of hundreds and tens of thousands of people,” and underscored the “democracy” of party congresses, whereby “the will of the collective party leadership and the will of the leaders merge with the will of the masses.”¹⁴⁶

Soviet newspapers had taken to berating actual Soviet workers as shirkers, absentees, and drunks, ruining the regime’s industrial plan with indiscipline. The Menshevik émigré press speculated that “capitalist” types had regained control of the factories. Gorky, also abroad, was taken aback. “Negative reports must be balanced by positive reporting,” he urged in a letter to Stalin in late 1929. “Progress in carrying out the Five-Year Plan must be reported on a week-to-week and month-to-month basis . . . : the construction of housing, factories, plants, bakeries, community centers, canteens, and schools. . . . The press should keep reminding itself and its readers . . . that socialism is being built in the USSR not by sloppy individuals, hooligans, and raving morons, but by a genuinely new and mighty force—the working class.” Soon enough, updates on “socialist construction” and worker heroes—alongside the encomiums to Stalin and lurid tales of sabotage—would saturate the public sphere.¹⁴⁷

LIQUIDATION OF THE KULAKS AS A CLASS