EVERYWHERE, VICTORY
From December 5 through 10, 1929, the regime staged the First All-Union Congress of Shock Brigades. “Workers took to the podium and spoke not only about their factory, their plant—they spoke about planning in general, about standardization, about control figures, and so on,” Valerian Kuibyshev, the head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, boasted from the dais. “That is how people can speak who feel themselves the masters of their country.”132
On December 15, seven weeks after Black Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange, a Pravda editorial declared that a general economic crisis had engulfed the United States. As other customers for large capital orders became scarcer, Stalin shopped the great capitalist department store. Starting with the American companies Freyn Engineering and Arthur McKee, Moscow signed “technical assistance” contracts to import the new American wide-strip steel mills and heavy blooming mills with which to build brand-new integrated steel plants at Magnitogorsk (Urals), equivalent in size to the flagship U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, as well as others in Kuznetsk (Siberia) and Zaporozhe (Ukraine). Additionally, the Soviets contracted with the Ford Motor Company to build an integrated mass-production facility in Nizhny Novgorod for cars and trucks, on the basis of recent Ford patents and its famed River Rouge plant. Caterpillar was engaged to re-equip factories in Kharkov and Leningrad to mass-produce tractors and harvesters, while giant tractor plants were contracted for Stalingrad and, very soon, Chelyabinsk, intended to be the largest in the world. Contracts would be signed with DuPont and Nitrogen Engineering to manufacture ammonia, nitric acid, and synthetic nitrogen, and Westvaco for chlorine. There would be ball-bearings technology from Sweden and Italy, advanced plastics and aircraft from France, turbines and electrical technology from Britain.133 Virtually every contract would contain at least one turnkey installation—an entire plant from scratch to operation.134 The Soviets had to pay with foreign-currency-earning exports (grain, timber, oil) or gold reserves.135 But now Stalin’s regime even managed to obtain foreign credits, which, although short term, were frequently on favorable terms with foreign government guarantees and did not even necessitate that they redeem the pre-Communist state debts.136
On December 21, 1929, Stalin officially turned fifty. Pravda had begun printing congratulations three days earlier, and on the actual day, the paeans occupied six and a half of the issue’s eight pages, with some of the approximately 1,000 congratulatory telegrams coming from factories and organizations, but not from collective farmers.137 Molotov sent a private note. “I know that you are diabolically busy,” he wrote. “But I shake your fifty-year-old hand.” 138 The state publishing house issued a collection of the tributes in an edition of 300,000 copies. “Wherever Stalin is,” it stated, “there is success, victory.”139 The Pravda birthday issue carried the iconic photograph of Stalin with Lenin at the latter’s dacha and hailed the dictator as “the best pupil, heir, and successor of Lenin.” But that made him a target: “Stalin stands at the head of the Leninist Central Committee. Therefore he is invariably the object of savage abuse on the part of the world bourgeoisie and the Social Democrats.”140
Stalin struck a modest pose in a published response (December 22), crediting the Leninist party and the working class, “which bore me and reared me in its own image and likeness,” and making a solemn vow: “You need have no doubt, comrades, I am prepared to devote to the cause of the working class, the cause of the proletarian revolution and world Communism, all my strength, all my ability, and, if need be, all my blood, drop by drop.”141
The newsreel agency produced a six-part silent amalgamation of Stalin moments caught on film: smiling, waving, graciously accepting accolades, wise, benevolent.142 It conveyed his revolutionary bona fides with tsarist-police photographs and fingerprints and images of the shacks he inhabited during exile in Solvychegodsk and Kureika. Viewers also saw his birth hovel and hometown of Gori, with its medieval-fortress ruins on the hill, a pantheon of childhood photos, and a long interlude at the current Tiflis home of his bespectacled mother, Keke Geladze, as she assembled a care package with his beloved homemade walnut jam. Now Stalin also became the organizer of the Red Army, an innovation canonized in Voroshilov’s birthday pamphlet, “Stalin and the Red Army.” Trotsky was provoked to consider writing a history of the Red Army and the civil war in rebuttal, but that would not get done: a suspicious fire at his residence destroyed many of his papers and books on the subject.143 Voroshilov’s draft, meanwhile, had been sent to Stalin for prior approval. The defense commissar had written that Stalin made fewer mistakes than the others. Stalin wrote back, “Klim! There were no mistakes—cut that paragraph.”144
CLOSE TO THE MASSES (METAPHYSICALLY)
Those who wanted to be part of the world-historical building of socialism would have to fall in line. “It is now completely clear that one cannot be for the party and against the present leadership,” the Trotsky apostate and state bank head Georgy “Yuri” Pyatakov wrote in Pravda (December 23, 1929). “One cannot be for the Central Committee and against Stalin.”145 Unlike Italian fascism, however, Marxism had trouble admitting a cult of the leader. This delicate question was directly addressed—for perhaps the last time under Stalin—in the lead article of the journal Party Construction, published in connection with Stalin’s jubilee. The author, K. Popov, characterized leadership as necessary and Stalin’s as “armed with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, forged by multiyear experience of the struggle for Leninism, hand in hand with Lenin.” Popov referred to a “leading group” within the party and to Stalin as “the genuine ‘first among equals,’” because, in his struggle for Leninism, he “invariably expresses the will of hundreds of thousands and millions.” Stalin’s illiberal regime, in other words, was democratic. Popov quoted Lenin to the effect that “one person can represent the will of hundreds and tens of thousands of people,” and underscored the “democracy” of party congresses, whereby “the will of the collective party leadership and the will of the leaders merge with the will of the masses.”146
Soviet newspapers had taken to berating actual Soviet workers as shirkers, absentees, and drunks, ruining the regime’s industrial plan with indiscipline. The Menshevik émigré press speculated that “capitalist” types had regained control of the factories. Gorky, also abroad, was taken aback. “Negative reports must be balanced by positive reporting,” he urged in a letter to Stalin in late 1929. “Progress in carrying out the Five-Year Plan must be reported on a week-to-week and month-to-month basis . . . : the construction of housing, factories, plants, bakeries, community centers, canteens, and schools. . . . The press should keep reminding itself and its readers . . . that socialism is being built in the USSR not by sloppy individuals, hooligans, and raving morons, but by a genuinely new and mighty force—the working class.” Soon enough, updates on “socialist construction” and worker heroes—alongside the encomiums to Stalin and lurid tales of sabotage—would saturate the public sphere.147