In the course of Lenin’s illness, Stalin and his two weaker partners, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, formed an informal alliance (troika) in the Politburo. It was in place when Lenin died on January 24, 1924, and soon made its presence felt. In this alliance, Stalin’s “ruling style,” insofar as he had one, was collegial. By no means did he have everything his own way.
Arguably, the most powerful man in the country on Lenin’s death was Leon Trotsky, the famed people’s commissar for military affairs. However, Trotsky made careless mistakes, such as convalescing in the south and thus missing the great man’s funeral. It did not matter that Stalin had misled him about the date of that event. Moreover, in early 1924 the ruling troika leaked old documents showing that back in 1913 Trotsky had said horrible things about Lenin.2 Nor did Trotsky help himself when he said that the country would not accept him as leader because of his “Jewish origins.”3
Next in line were Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were also Jewish. Their major failing was opposition to Lenin’s decision to go for power in October 1917. Then there was the younger and dazzling Nikolai Bukharin, who, Lenin had thought, might not be “Marxist enough.”
Although Stalin’s record was mixed, his policies, which had once distanced him from many party members, were now beginning to make sense to them. He had stood almost alone in opposition to Trotsky’s goal of speeding up the spread of Communist revolution. Then several such plans to foment revolution in Germany went badly wrong, and Stalin’s criticism of the strategy gained traction. In the aftermath of the failed 1923 effort in Germany, the Soviet party generally moved to his side.
Along with troika partners Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin acted through the Central Committee to put mild pressure on Trotsky, who resigned early in the new year as people’s commissar for military affairs. Trotsky said that he had tired of the insinuations, though by quitting he left the field to his enemies. When in due course Zinoviev and Kamenev began challenging Stalin’s apparent readiness to abandon the long-standing commitment to revolution in Europe, the future dictator switched alliances and linked up with Bukharin (then only thirty-three), and the new duo soon emerged in control of the Politburo.4
The two friends differed on some important issues. Bukharin embraced the economic theory and political philosophy of the New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced by Lenin back in 1921, when agricultural production was down to 60 percent of its pre-1914 levels.5 The NEP indicated that the Communists had to “retreat” because the country was in turmoil and desperation. It introduced a proportional tax on peasants, who were then allowed to sell privately any surplus that remained. This sliver of freedom gave agricultural production a boost, and by 1926 under the NEP the reforms were working. But the economy soon entered “a real, systemic crisis” because of the demands made on it.6 Stalin came out strongly against the NEP, and in what would amount to a second Russian revolution, he advocated a planned economy based on the collectivization and modernization of agriculture. The promise was that this approach would feed the country better and also, through a “regime of the strictest economy,” allow for the accumulation of surplus funds to finance industry. Ultimately, these five-year plans strove to convert the Soviet Union into an industrial and military giant.
Thus, Stalin and his supporters opted to restart the revolution that Lenin had postponed, but it took time to decide on the exact course. In his speeches and articles during 1925, Stalin began to identify himself with the “unorthodox” Marxist view that “socialism in one country” was possible.7 As usual when he innovated, he invoked Lenin’s name and liberally quoted him.8
At the Fourteenth Party Congress (December 1925), Stalin was solemn while giving the conclusion to his political report. Workers in capitalist countries, upon seeing the Soviet successes, he said, would gain “confidence in their own strength,” and the rise in worker consciousness would be the beginning of the end of capitalism. In this scenario, as the Soviets created socialism at home, far from giving up on the international proletarian revolution, they were providing a model to inspire the workers of the world. His words were followed by thunderous applause.9
However, by 1927 food shortages and high unemployment demanded action. In January of the next year Stalin, Bukharin, and others in the Politburo decided on “emergency measures,” a euphemism for expropriation campaigns in the countryside. Stalin directed top officials, including Anastas Mikoyan, Lazar Kaganovich, and Andrei Zhdanov—all of them his firm backers—to designated parts of the country. He went off by train to the Urals and Siberia, where agricultural deliveries to the state were down, even though the harvest was good. He learned that the peasants preferred selling to private traders, who paid more. At each stop he browbeat officials into using Article 107 of the criminal code (on withholding grain) to prosecute these kulaks (the more affluent peasants) and other “speculators.”10
When Stalin returned to Moscow, Bukharin questioned these brutal “excesses.” However, for Stalin the trip east deepened his determination to solve the agricultural problem; it convinced him more than ever that peasant cultivation of small plots had to end and that collectivization was the ultimate solution. In all his years as leader, this was his only visit to the collective farms. Mostly he knew them only as abstractions, like chess pieces to be moved around.11
Scarcity of food worsened in 1928 and into 1929, the result of poor harvests in some places, though the main reason was that the state offered too little in payment for grain. However, anyone who suggested giving the peasants more for their crops, as did Bukharin, was attacked as a “right deviationist,” because they appeared to be leaning toward a market economy. Stalin berated Bukharin for saying the kulaks would “grow into socialism” and instead affirmed that the accumulated wealth generated by peasants on collective farms would be taken as “tribute.” It would finance the industrial development of the country and the five-year plans.12 And it did not matter in the slightest that shortly before, he had scorned precisely such an approach as exploiting the peasants.13
In April 1929, addressing the Central Committee, Stalin reiterated that the main idea of the first five-year plan—already being implemented—was not merely to increase production but “to guarantee the socialist sector of the economy.” Now he ridiculed Bukharin’s suggestion to incentivize peasants with higher prices so that they would deliver more to the state. That heresy, he believed, would raise the cost of bread in the cities; worse, it would strengthen “capitalist elements” in the countryside.
According to Stalin’s theory, these “last elements” were the problem, and he postulated that as socialism grew stronger, better-off peasants like the kulaks would struggle harder than ever because no dying class in history ever gave up without a final desperate fight.14 Bukharin thought it “strange” to point to an “inevitable law” that the more the Soviet Union advanced toward socialism, the more class warfare would intensify. Then, “at the gates of socialism, we either have to start a civil war or waste away from hunger and drop dead.”15