Stalin presented the mass collectivisation of 1929-30 as the triumphal outcome of Lenin's kto-kogo scenario. Kto-kogo acquired its aura of hard-line coercion from Stalin's use of it during this period: 'we live by the formula of Lenin - kto-kovo: will we knock them, the capitalists, flat and give them (as Lenin expresses it) the final, decisive battle, or will they knock us flat?'[365] Yet Stalin's claim to embody the original spirit of kto-kogo contains some paradoxes. Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders who picked up on his phrase had used kto-kogo to justify an economic competition with the Nepmen who dominated trade activities - a competition that would result in new forms of agricultural production only after an extremely high level of industrial technology was available. Stalin used kto-kogo to justify a policy of mass coercion against peasant kulaks to implant collective farms long before industry reached a high level.
These paradoxes make the often-heard claim that Stalin was simply carrying out Lenin's plan a bizarre one. Nevertheless, a close reading of Stalin's speeches in 1928-9 shows that the rationale - and perhaps even the real motivation - for his radical strategy was strongly based on the narrative of class leadership. His key assertion was that 'the socialist town can lead the small-peasant village in no other way than by implanting collective farms [kolkhozy] and state farms [sovkhozy] in the village and transforming the village in a new socialist way'. This was because class leadership would be qualitatively different within the collective farms from what it would be in a countryside dominated by single- owner farms:
Of course, individualist and even kulak habits will persist in the collective farms; these habits have not fallen away but they will definitely fall away in the course of time, as the collective farms become stronger and more mechanised. But can it really be denied that the collective farms as a whole, with all their contradictions and inadequacies but existing as an economic fact, basically represent a new path for the development of the village - a path of socialist development as opposed to a kulak, capitalist path of development?[366]
The role of the collective farms as an incubator of the new peasantry helps account for de-kulakisation, the most brutal aspect of Stalin's strategy. If the kulaks were not removed from the village or, even worse, they were allowed into the collective farms, they would simply take over and continue to exercise leadership in the wrong direction. As Stalin lieutenant Mikhail Kalinin put it, excluding the kulaks was a 'prophylactic' measure that 'ensures the healthy development of the kolkhoz organism in the future'.[367]
In Kalinin's defence of Stalin's murderous form of class leadership, we still hear a faint echo of the original meaning of kto-kogo: 'You must understand that de-kulakization is only the first and easiest stage. The main thing is to be able to get production going properly in the collective farms. Here, in the final analysis, is the solution to the question: kto-kogo.' Nevertheless many Bolsheviks were appalled by Stalin's version of kto-kogo. In the so-called 'Riutin platform' that was circulated in underground fashion among sections of the Bolshevik elite in 1932 (it is unclear how much of the 100-page document was written by Martemian Riutin himself), it is argued that the Leninist path towards liquidation of the class basis of the kulak meant showing the mass of peasants 'genuine examples of the genuine advantages of collective farms organised in genuinely voluntary fashion'. But Stalin's idea of class leadership of the peasants had the same relation to real leadership as Japan's Manchuria policy did to national self-determination. As a result, 'pluses have been turned into minuses, and the best hopes of the best human minds have been turned into a squalid joke. Instead of a demonstration of the advantages of large- scale socialist agriculture, we see its defects in comparison to the small-scale individual farm.'[368]
We have traced the path of kto-kogo starting with Lenin's coinage of the term to express the logic of NEP and ending with Stalin's contested claim that mass collectivisation was the decisive answer to the kto-kogo question: who will win the class allegiance of the peasantry? Kto-kogo establishes a link between Lenin and Stalin but it also demonstrates the inadvisability of turning that link into an equation. Most importantly, kto-kogo refers us back to the narrative of class leadership and the basic assumptions guiding the Bolsheviks as they tackled their most fateful task, the socialist transformation of the countryside.
From path to treadmilclass="underline" the next sixty years
Out ofthe turmoil of the early 1930s emerged the system that remained intact in the Soviet Union until near the very end: collective farms, centralised industrial planning, monopolistic party-state. The construction of this system entailed a fundamental shift in the nature of the authoritative class narrative. Stalin officially declared that no hostile classes still existed in the Soviet Union, nor were there any substantial numbers of still unpersuaded waverers. This new situation meant that although there still existed a long road ahead to full communism, the heroic days of class leadership were over.
In one sense, the new class narrative of the early 1930s remained unchanged for the next six decades. Within its framework, there were various attempts to realise 'the advantages of socialism', either in frighteningly irrational attempts to rid the system of saboteurs or more reasonable attempts to tinker with the parameters of the planning system. This 'treadmill of reform' (as the economist Gertrude Schroeder famously described the process) was bathed in an atmosphere of constant celebration about the achievements and prospects of the united Soviet community as it journeyed towards communism. But underneath this resolutely optimistic framework we can discern a real history of the changes in the way people related to the narrative emotionally and intellectually - a history in which uncertainty and anxiety play a much greater role. By focusing on certain key moments in the presentation of the authoritative class narrative, we can provide an outline of this history.
In March 1938, the big story in Pravda was the trial of the Right-Trotskyist bloc - the last of the big Moscow show trials at which Bukharin, Rykov and other luminaries were condemned as traitors and sentenced to death. But alongside transcripts and reports 'from the courtroom' were continuing stories on topics such as Arctic exploration, the party's attempts to apply the plenum resolution of January 1938, campaigns to fulfil economic targets and the crisis- ridden international situation.
The Moscow show trial was intended to dramatise the need for 'vigilance' and for a 'purification' of Soviet institutions from disguised saboteurs and spies. The terror of 1937-8 was paradoxically explained and justified by the premiss that there no longer existed hostile classes and undecided groups in the Soviet Union. Therefore, if the 'advantages of socialism' were not immediately apparent, the problems were not caused by the understandable interests of an identifiable group - and certainly not by structural problems - but only by individual saboteurs who were wearing the mask of a loyal Soviet citizen or even party member. Stalin insisted that the danger of isolated saboteurs was potentially immense. Class leadership was therefore no longer described as persuading wavering groups to follow the lead of the party but simply as 'vigilance', as ripping the maskfrom two-faced dvurushniki or 'double-dealers'.
365
Stalin,
368
The title ofthe 'Riutin platform'was 'Stalin and the Crisis ofthe Proletarian Dictatorship'; it can be found in