From June 1 to 4, 1936, the Central Committee held its first plenum of the year. It was devoted to agriculture, the pending adoption of a new constitution, and the appeals/reinstatement process for party members expelled during the recent verification campaign (more than 200,000 total). With the regime under severe financial pressure, Stalin had reduced the interest paid on government bonds subscribed to by ordinary people from 8–10 percent to 4 percent, with maturity extended from 10 to 20 years, which he now felt compelled to mention. Some 50 million Soviet inhabitants were affected, most of whom had “subscribed” only under severe pressure from trade unions and party organizers. “As you are well aware, we spend an alarming amount of money on things that cannot be postponed,” he told the plenum attendees (June 3), who would have to face the people’s resentment back in their locales. “Much money has been spent, and is being spent, on such matters as building schools, teachers’ pay, urban improvement, irrigation, afforestation of a number of parts of the country, . . . and constructing canals. Money is being spent on defense and even more will be spent in the future. . . . We do not yet have a navy, and a new one must be established. . . . This is the situation, comrades.”343
These remarks were not reported in the press. Pravda, however, did castigate provincial-level party bosses for “mistakes” made in party expulsions.344 Yezhov in his report had admitted that far from everyone expelled was an enemy, but he ominously stated that “we ought not to think that the enemy, who yesterday was still in the party, will rest content with being expelled from the party and quietly wait for ‘better times.’” Stalin made some rambling interjections about clearer procedures for appeals, and allowed Yenukidze to be reinstated in the party. Several matters were not recorded even in the rough draft materials of the plenum, including an exchange between Yagoda and Stalin on the “Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc.”345
Gorky had taken gravely ill during the plenum, four days after visiting his son Maxim’s grave in Novodevichy Cemetery. “We came to see you at 2:00 a.m.,” Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov wrote in a short note (June 10). “They said your pulse was excellent (82, more or less). The doctors forbade us from seeing you. We had to comply. Greetings from all of us, a big greeting.”346 On the morning of June 18, he died at his dacha. Levitan, on Soviet radio, called him “a great Russian writer, brilliant artist of the word, friend of workers, and fighter for the victory of Communism.” Gorky’s brain was removed and taken in a bucket, by his secretary, to Moscow’s Brain Research Institute, which housed the brains of Lenin and Mayakovsky. That day and the next, the brainless body lay in state as half a million people paid their respects. (When Stalin entered for the solemn farewell, applause broke out, which was shown on newsreels.)347 On June 20, at the state funeral, Gide, on the Mausoleum, delivered one of the eulogies, along with Aleksei Tolstoy and Molotov. Rolland sent a letter from Switzerland, published in Pravda (June 20): “I recall his youthful ardor, his sparkling enthusiasm when he spoke of the new world in whose building he took part. I recall his goodness and the sorrow hidden in its depth.”
Gorky’s ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall. Stalin afforded Andreyev, his apparatchik for culture, the honor of placing the urn. The regime seized the writer’s archive (Yagoda especially was in for infuriating surprises).348 Rumors circulated of poisoning. One of those accused was Gorky’s former mistress Baroness Moura Budberg, who got her surname through marriage to an Estonian aristocrat, started an affair with H. G. Wells, and was thought to be a double British and Soviet agent. But the main suspect in the whisperings was Stalin.349 In fact, Gorky, who was sixty-eight, had been extremely sick, and was properly diagnosed and treated by a battery of top physicians.350 His autopsy revealed bronchitis, tuberculosis, and a damaged left lung. The writer had smoked nearly three packs of cigarettes a day, and needed an oxygen tank. Pravda gave the cause of death as “a cardiac arrest and paralysis of the lungs.” Gorky had never spiritually recovered from his son Maxim’s untimely death.351 “What has brought you to the Bolsheviks?” Yekaterina Kuskova, Gorky’s lifelong friend, recalled asking him once, in an obituary published in the emigration (June 26). “Do you remember how I began to read Marx with you in Nizhny Novgorod, and you proposed to throw the ‘German philistine’ into the fire?”352
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THE MARXIST-LENINIST REGIME that emerged in the blood and fever dreams of the years 1929–36 was buffeted by global structural forces, from fluctuations in commodity prices to innovations in tank designs, and by the deepening of a new historical conjuncture, the mass age. The most powerful countries achieved and maintained their great-power status by mastery of a set of modern attributes: mass production, mass consumption, mass culture, mass politics. Great Britain had not only powerful ships and airplanes, engineers and trained military officers, but also a broad-based political system, an integrated national culture, and a deep degree of societal cohesion. Every other aspiring great power had to achieve its own mass-based version of modernity, which imparted new impetus and form to their geopolitical rivalries. That competition took place not just across the liberal-illiberal divide but among the democratizing parliamentary countries Britain, France, and the United States, and among avowedly authoritarian regimes: fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. All of them either had to match the others in some way or risk becoming, like the rest of the world, colonies. Modernity was not a sociological but a geopolitical process.353
Stalin forced into being a socialist modernity, presiding over the creation of a mass-production economy, a Soviet mass culture, an integrated society, and a mass politics without private property.354, 355
This upheaval, in addition to geopolitics and ideology, reflected Russia’s long-standing sense of world-historical destiny combined with profound insecurity and relative weakness vis-à-vis the European powers. This gap had long goaded Russia into catch-up acquisition of Western technology to protect the country’s non-Western identity, borrowing not ideas and institutions of liberty but technology for industry and techniques for administration of resources and population—the social-engineering part of the Enlightenment. But even as Russia advanced, the West did not stand still and remained richer, more advanced, more powerful. Still, under Stalin the Soviets had imported and copied Western technology and skills, enforced deprivation on the populace, and created a massive land army and air force that would be the envy of other powers—just as imperial Russia had done.356 Stalin’s use of the state to force-modernize the country was far more radical and violent than that of his tsarist predecessors because of the Great War conjuncture, which accelerated the use of violence for political ends, and the anticapitalism, which coercion alone could achieve. Thanks to the Great Depression, Stalin was also able to secure technology transfer with greater independence from foreign desiderata.357
In imperial Russia, only a strong personality—a Sergei Witte, a Pyotr Stolypin—had been able to impose something of a unified will on the ministries, while toiling to implant loyalists across the entire bureaucracy, but the tsar and his agents deliberately undermined strong central government, because that threatened the prerogatives of the autocrat. Stolypin, arguably Russia’s greatest statesman, had occupied the position of prime minister, but Stalin occupied the position of supreme ruler, like the tsar, and he favored unified government.358 Through Molotov and others, he achieved coordination, and over a much larger apparatus. And while Stolypin had had to contend with a quasiparliament to legalize his policies, the Congress of Soviets possessed none of the powers even of the tsarist Duma. To be sure, Stalin had to obtain politburo approval. But he either manipulated the members or just acted unilaterally. He possessed instruments Stolypin could not have dreamed of: a single-party machine that enveloped the whole country, a Soviet secret police that vastly exceeded the tsarist okhranka in personnel and acceptable practice, a galvanizing ideology that morally justified any and all means, and housebroken nationalisms as well as a supranational Soviet identity that bound the peoples of the former Russian empire to the regime.359