“CONGRESS OF VICTORS”
The year 1934 dawned. Soviet industry was booming. The capitalist world remained mired in the Great Depression. The United States had recognized the Soviet Union. The famine was mostly over. It was time to gloat. In “The Architect of Socialist Society” (Pravda, January 1, 1934), sycophant supreme Karl Radek depicted a future historian giving lectures in the revolution’s fiftieth year at the School of Interplanetary Communications. The lecturer, looking back from 1967, would emphasize the surprise among the world bourgeoisie that a new leader had succeeded Lenin and built socialism, at a necessarily furious pace, against the fierce resistance of capitalist elements and their facilitators. Stalin was called “the great pupil of great teachers who himself had now become the teacher, . . . the exemplar of the Leninist Party, bone of its bone, blood of its blood.” His success was attributed to his “creative Marxism,” his proximity to cadres, his resolve, and his fealty to Lenin. “He knew that he had fulfilled the oath taken ten years earlier over Lenin’s casket,” the essay observed. “And all the working people of the world and the world revolutionary proletariat knew it, too.”182
Ten years to the day after Stalin had been sworn that oath, January 26, the 17th Party Congress opened in the Grand Kremlin Palace, bringing together 1,225 voting and 739 nonvoting delegates, representing 2.8 million members and candidates. Party statutes had specified an annual congress, but three and a half years had elapsed, the longest interval yet.183 Pravda headlined it as the “Congress of Victors.” Magnanimously, the dictator had allowed high-profile opposition figures back into the party after they had again publicly admitted their errors. From the rostrum they issued self-flagellating calls for “unity,” with Kamenev defending Stalin’s personal dictatorship (in contrast to his bold denunciation of it back at the 14th Party Congress).184 Bukharin, whom Stalin would appoint editor of Izvestiya, told the congress regarding the right deviation: “Our grouping was unavoidably becoming the focus for all the forces fighting against the socialist offensive, and primarily for the strata most threatened by the socialist offensive—the kulaks and their urban intellectual ideologists,” which had heightened the danger of “an untimely foreign intervention.” He praised the plan and quipped, “Hitler wants to drive us into Siberia, and the Japanese imperialists want to drive us from Siberia, so the entire 160 million population of our country would have to be located on one of the blast furnaces of Magnitogorsk.”185
Stalin delivered a five-hour keynote on opening night. “He spoke unhurriedly, as if conversing,” one witness wrote in his diary. “He was witty. The more he spoke, the closer he became to the audience. Ovations. Explosions of laughter. Full-blooded. But a practical, working speech.”186 The dictator issued a call to accountability, speaking of “difficulties of our organizational work, difficulties of our organizational leadership. They are concentrated in us ourselves, in our leading functionaries, in our organizations. . . . The responsibility for our failures and shortcomings rests, in nine out of ten cases, not on ‘objective conditions’ but on ourselves and only on ourselves.” He denounced chancellery methods of management (“resolutions and decrees”) and called for criticism from below, worker competitions, getting bosses into the factories and farms, getting skilled workers out of offices and into production, and refusing to tolerate people who failed to implement directives. “We must not hesitate to remove them from their leading posts, regardless of their services in the past.”187
After the applause died down, Stalin offered an example of empty-words leadership:
STALIN: How goes the sowing?
FUNCTIONARY: The sowing, comrade Stalin? We have mobilized. (Laughter.)
STALIN: And?
FUNCTIONARY: We posed the question squarely. (Laughter.)
STALIN: And then?
FUNCTIONARY: We have a breakthrough, comrade Stalin, soon there’ll be a breakthrough.
(Laughter.)
STALIN: And in fact?
FUNCTIONARY: There is movement. (Laughter.)
STALIN: But in fact, how goes the sowing?
FUNCTIONARY: So far, the sowing is not happening, comrade Stalin. (General guffaws.)188
Stalin pointedly added that provincial officials, “like feudal princes, think the laws were written not for them but for fools.”
Against capitalism’s “raging waves of economic shocks and military-political catastrophes,” Stalin contrasted how “the USSR stands apart, like an anchor, continuing its socialist construction and struggle for keeping the peace.” He accused the capitalists, without irony, of “deepening their exploitation via strengthening the intensity of their labor, and at the expense of farmers, by further reduction in the prices of products of their labor.” Fascism, and especially National Socialism, he averred, “contained not an atom of socialism,” and “should be seen as a sign of the bourgeoisie’s weakness, of its lack of power to rule by the old parliamentary methods, forcing it to turn internally to terrorist methods of rule” and externally to a “policy of war.” Without naming the likely aggressor, he foresaw a “new imperialist war” that “will certainly unleash revolution and place the very existence of capitalism in question in a number of countries, as happened during the first imperialist war.”189
Stalin observed that fascism in Italy had not prohibited good bilateral relations with the USSR, and dismissed as “imaginary” German complaints that the Soviet Union’s many nonaggression pacts signified a “reorientation” toward Western Europe. “We never had any orientation toward Germany, nor have we [now] any orientation toward Poland and France,” he insisted. “We were oriented in the past and are oriented in the present only on the USSR. (Stormy applause.)” He also warned Japan: “Those who desire good peace and relations would always meet a positive response, but those who try to attack our country will receive a crushing rebuff to teach them in future not to poke their pig snouts into our Soviet garden. (Thunderous applause.)”190
RUDELY INTERRUPTED
As Stalin basked in the Grand Kremlin Palace spectacle, Hitler intruded, announcing a ten-year nonaggression “declaration” with Poland. The text contained no recognition of existing borders, but, sensationally, each side vowed not to “resort to force in the settlement of such disputes” as might arise between them.191 Hitler’s foreign policy adviser, Alfred Rosenberg, had vowed to annihilate Poland. Poland’s participation was no less head spinning: it had a military alliance with France as well as a defensive alliance with Romania (both dating to 1921). But Poland had only a poorly equipped army to defend long borders facing two dynamic dictatorships, both of whose predecessors had made the country disappear from the map. Adding to that sense of vulnerability, the Versailles Treaty had made the predominantly ethnic German city of Danzig an autonomous “free city” under the League of Nations, leaving Poland without a Baltic port, and placed a so-called Corridor of Polish territory between German East Prussia and the rest of Germany, a recipe for instability.192
Even though the declaration did not legally invalidate the Franco-Polish alliance, Hitler had effectively broken the encirclement ring. Poland’s political class, meanwhile, dreamed of playing an independent role in European affairs. “It was,” one interwar observer noted, “a tragedy for Poland to have been reborn too weak to be a power, and strong enough to aspire to more than the status of a small state.”193 French officials privately called Poland a bigamist.194 But of course, Paris was in talks with Berlin as well. Piłsudski received the French ambassador after the signing (January 29, 1934), explaining that “he had hesitated, had dragged things on, but the Franco-German negotiations had made him decide to expedite them, because if the [French] proposals were accepted by Germany, France would openly abandon the [Versailles] peace treaty.”195 The nonaggression declaration with Germany promised Poland reduced economic tensions as well (an end to trade and tariff wars). Moreover, even though France based its security on relations with Britain, not its eastern alliances, French foreign ministers now finally began to visit Warsaw.196