Stalin

The Soviets would export just over 5 million tons of grain at an average price of only 30 rubles per ton (half that of 1926); they would earn 157.8 million foreign-currency rubles, equivalent to a bit more than $80 million.²⁵⁰ But whereas Soviet cereals had effectively accounted for zero percent of world market share in 1928, before 1930 was over the USSR would capture fully 15 percent.²⁵¹

Stalin continued to insist that the economic troubles in the capitalist world had only reinforced the dependence of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states on the imperialist powers, which eyed these states as platforms for attacking the Soviet Union. In fact, the Polish government had secretly rebuffed the urgent entreaties of the Ukrainian national movement in Poland to invade the Soviet Union, evidently deterred by Soviet military measures on the frontier.²⁵² Still, Stalin warned Molotov about likely provocations by Poland or Romania and about Polish diplomacy. “The Poles are certain to be putting together (if they have not already done so) a bloc of Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Finland) in anticipation of a war against the USSR,” he wrote (September 1, 1930). “To repulse both the Polish-Romanians and the Balts we should prepare to deploy (in the event of war) no fewer than 150 to 160 infantry divisions, that is, (at least) 40 to 50 divisions more than are provided for under our current guidelines. This means that we will have to bring our current army reserves up from 640,000 to 700,000 men.” Otherwise, Stalin asserted, “we are not going to be able to defend Leningrad and the right bank of Ukraine.”²⁵³

CONSPIRACY OF LOGIC

The bulkiest papers in Stalin’s holiday mailbag had become OGPU reports of plots and accompanying protocols of interrogation. Thousands of specialists had been sentenced.²⁵⁴ From Sochi, Stalin had instructed Molotov to circulate to Central Committee members new “testimony” extracted from specialists in two agencies (food supply and the statistical administration). That same day, in a belated and indirect response to Pyatakov’s devastating memo on state finances, Stalin wrote to Mężyński demanding a report on “the struggle” against speculators.²⁵⁵ He had also written to Molotov “that two or three dozen wreckers from the [finance commissariat] must be executed.” He wanted them linked to the rightists, adding that “a whole group of wreckers in the meat industry must definitely be shot and their names published in the press.”²⁵⁶ Pravda (September 3) duly publicized arrests of prominent specialists. Executions would follow.

Privately, Stalin acknowledged his didactic purposes. “By the way,” he wrote to Molotov, apropos of a “Menshevik Party” trial, “how about Misters Defendants admitting their mistakes and disgracing themselves politically, while simultaneously acknowledging the strength of the Soviet government and the correctness of the method of collectivization? It would not be a bad thing if they did.”²⁵⁷ A scapegoat dimension was also manifest: on September 13, he wrote that supply commissariat “wreckers” had plotted to “cause hunger in the country and provoke unrest among the broad masses and thus facilitate the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”²⁵⁸ Pravda announced the executions of forty-eight “food wreckers,” and the OGPU reported worker approval and intelligentsia disapproval of the sentences. (“In tsarist times there were also executions, but they were rare; now they look at people as if they are dogs.”)²⁵⁹ Stalin issued instructions for a trial of a “Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine,” which was staged in Kharkov’s Opera House with forty-five defendants: writers, theologians, philologists, schoolteachers, a librarian, medical personnel. “We ought not to hide the sins of our enemies from the workers,” he wrote to the bosses of Soviet Ukraine. “In addition, let so-called ‘Europe’ know that the repressions against the counterrevolutionary part of the specialists who try to poison and infect Communists-patients are completely justified.”²⁶⁰

The entire country, it seemed, was honeycombed with wreckers—including in the Red Army command: on September 10, 1930, Mężyński sent Stalin interrogation protocols incriminating Tukhachevsky and other high-placed military men in a conspiracy against the regime.²⁶¹