Stalin

Stalin played the victim (“Let them abuse me. I’m used to that”) and sought to accentuate the seriousness of the affair.³⁰⁴ “School pupils gathered, fancied themselves big politicians, and decided to playact as the politburo—is it worth it for us to waste time on these pupils?” he asked. “In another time and under different circumstances, one could agree with that assessment. But in the current conditions, when the class struggle has sharpened to the ultimate degree, when every factional sally against the party leadership strengthens the front of our class enemies, and double-dealing of unprincipled people is transformed into the most dangerous evil of interparty life—in such conditions, such an assessment of the ‘left’-right bloc would, at the least, be careless.” He characterized talk that blamed him as an invitation to “a host of terrorists.” Before closing, he turned his fangs on Rykov: “Your post does not exist for ceremonial purposes, but for implementing party orders on a daily basis. Is this the case now? Unfortunately not. . . . Such a state of affairs cannot last long.”³⁰⁵ When it came to the decision on Syrtsov and Lominadze, Stalin sought to appear the moderate, as usual, proposing only their demotion from full to candidate status. But a vote for expulsion from the Central Committee had already passed.³⁰⁶

SELLING OUT TO THE CAPITALISTS

Soviet newspapers (November 11, 1930) published lengthy indictments of prominent scientists and engineers accused of establishing a clandestine Industrial Party. It was said to contain more than 2,000 members who had worked undetected for years to wreck Soviet industry and transport and, ultimately, overthrow the regime with the assistance of foreign military intervention (by half a dozen countries), thereby delivering Ukraine’s wealth to Poland and France, and Caspian oil to Britain. “If the enemy does not surrender,” Gorky, from Italy, obligingly wrote in Pravda (November 15), “they will be annihilated.”³⁰⁷ Under klieg lights in the chandeliered House of Trade Unions (the former nobility club) on November 25, in front of scores of Soviet and foreign correspondents, eight engineers stood in the dock. Meetings at Soviet factories and the Academy of Sciences approved resolutions demanding the death penalty. Columns of workers were marched through snow in Moscow and other cities carrying banners: NO MERCY FOR THE CLASS ENEMIES.³⁰⁸ Thirteen days of delirium and treason tales ensued, with blanket coverage. The politburo decree specified the headlines, including “Our answer to the class enemy—millions of workers in the ranks of shock workers.”³⁰⁹

The problems faced by Soviet workers were all too real. An internal report (November 10) from a secret OGPU survey of cafeterias noted that half were being patronized far beyond capacity, and that “in all cafeterias (even in restricted ones) there are long queues, which causes worker dissatisfaction and negatively affects labor discipline.” The OGPU found rats (dead and alive), cockroaches, and flies (including in the soup), a lack of spoons, forks, and knives (forcing long waits for their reuse), lunches far below daily caloric norms, theft by employees, and filth beyond description.³¹⁰

Just as in the Shakhty trial two years earlier, the only “evidence” in the Industrial Party trial consisted of confessions recorded in secret police custody, which were repeated at the proceedings. (The published indictments had noted that one arrested engineer had “died under questioning.”) No witnesses were called. All eight defendants pleaded guilty. Leonid Ramzin, director of the All-Russian Thermal Engineering Institute, confessed to leading the underground “party,” and spoke of foreign panic at Soviet successes and of a pending invasion by Romania, to be joined by Poland, then France, and supported by the British Royal Navy, with émigré collusion.³¹¹ Two of the émigrés named had died before the supposed meetings took place. Also, Ramzin named as the prospective head of a replacement “bourgeois” republic a Russian engineer who admired Herbert Hoover (as an engineer) but who had already been executed, without a public trial, in a previous case.³¹² Never mind: Nikolai Krylenko, the prosecutor, hinted at veiled links between the “bourgeois specialists” and rightists in the party. All in all, the published trial transcript might be the best extended record to date of the workings of Stalin’s mind: the possible and the actual were fused into a narrative that could be—must be—true.³¹³