Stalin

In the regime’s urban strongholds, money was giving way to barter amid galloping inflation, coins (which contained silver) were being hoarded, and even cigarettes could not be had. “At Moscow Tricotage no. 3,” a trade union functionary wrote in his diary (March 14), “one worker gave a speech stating, ‘Stalin wrote a correct article, only late. Bukharin wrote about this half a year ago and now it is being done Bukharin’s way. Ilich was right, saying, “Don’t trust Stalin, he will ruin you.” ’”¹⁸⁹ Moscow provincial party boss Kārlis Baumanis—who had been ahead of Stalin in publicly promoting wholesale collectivization—was now made a sacrificial lamb, accused of extreme leftism. Kaganovich replaced him as party boss for Moscow in April 1930, while remaining a Central Committee secretary. Dispatched to Western Siberia that month (Roberts Eihe, the party boss there, was said to have appendicitis), Kaganovich got an earful, but he forced the local party bureau to adopt a secret resolution condemning as “leftist” their complaints against Stalin’s scapegoating of them.¹⁹⁰

Nikolai Kin, a worker in the southern Ukraine city of Kherson, sent Stalin a blistering rebuttal to “Dizzy with Success,” detailing how the Central Committee was at fault, the party’s authority was damaged, and regime policies were self-defeating: “We are liquidating the kulak, and developing orphans and the indigent, throwing the children of kulaks, who are guilty of nothing, on the street.” Stalin responded privately. “Time will pass, the fury will subside, and you will understand that you are incorrect from beginning to end,” he wrote (April 22), admonishing Kin not to take pride in being a worker. “Among workers all kinds of people are found, good ones, bad ones. I know old workers with long experience in production who are still following the Mensheviks and even now cannot emancipate themselves from nostalgia for the old capitalist masters. Yes, comrade Kin, all kinds of workers are found on the earth.”¹⁹¹

PROPAGANDA AND HUNGER

To immense fanfare, on April 25, 1930, the separate constructions of the northern and southern sections of the Turkestan–Siberian Railway, known as Turksib, were joined at Aina-Bulak, some eight months ahead of schedule, using excavators purchased abroad and gargantuan amounts of manual labor, amid climate extremes and self-generated chaos. The Soviets engaged and persecuted “bourgeois” specialists and Kazakh jataki (horsemen without herds); unemployed Slavic workers had flocked in for the ration cards. The upshot would be Siberian grain imported to Central Asia to allow further expansion of cotton crops, and, in the short term, a propaganda coup.¹⁹² To the ceremony/banquet for thousands in the steppes (“Long Live Turksib! Long Live Stalin!”), a special train from Moscow carried officials and foreign guests, “a microcosm of the Soviet world . . . and its capitalist encirclement,” quipped an American journalist.¹⁹³ A single Turksib could occlude many fiascoes, especially for people who wanted to believe. Not every person would be ideologized to the same depth, but life outside Communism was becoming unthinkable.¹⁹⁴

The Rostov Agricultural Engineering Works followed, the largest of its kind in Europe, pronounced complete on June 1, 1930, after three years of construction.¹⁹⁵ An iconic power station, Dneprostroi, at the cataracts of the Dnieper in Soviet Ukraine, was under fevered construction. Never mind that, for a time, half the derricks were occupied picking up the other half: the symbolism of harnessing nature in order to power a new industrial complex of projected aluminum plants and an integrated steel plant at Zaporozhe was linked in saturation coverage to individual transformation. “We build the dam, and the dam builds us” became the oft-repeated slogan.¹⁹⁶ Epic constructions of the state-of-the-art steel blast furnaces—and of new people—at far-off Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk were bathed in bright spotlights, too, attracting hordes of foreign correspondents, many of whom were moved to renounce their skepticism.