A friend of Duranty’s, H. R. Knickerbocker, got his own scoop: an interview with Stalin’s mother, Keke Geladze, in Tiflis, for the New York Evening Post (December 1, 1930). “Revolutionary posters and the eternal appeal for harder work on the Five-Year Plan reminded one that all the way from Siberia to the edge of Persia the Soviet Union is dominated today by a single purpose, and a single will,” Knickerbocker wrote. Keke, speaking through an interpreter of Georgian, took responsibility for Stalin’s failure to finish the seminary: “He was not expelled. I took him out on account of his health. He did not want to go. I took him out. He was my only [surviving] son.” She pointed at a pile of periodicals, all mentioning Stalin. “See how he works,” she said. “All this he has done. He works too hard.” The article was titled “Stalin Mystery Man Even to His Mother.”332
STOUT INNER CIRCLE
All authoritarian regimes require a sense of being under siege by sinister “enemies.” The inhabitants of the USSR found themselves exhorted to relentless vigilance against class enemies, supposedly longing for foreign military intervention to overturn the Soviet regime, restore capitalism, and exact revenge. Under such a vision, even diehard socialists could be denounced as “White Guards”—as Lenin and Trotsky had denounced the Kronstadt sailors in 1921—if they opposed the Soviet regime. Pervasive domestic difficulties rendered the treason tales plausible, press reports gave them life, and Stalin afforded them great intensity.333 During the proceedings against Syrtsov and Lominadze, he had interrupted Mikoyan to say of his Communist party critics, “Now they are all White Guards.”334 Working intimately with the obliging Mężyński, he had elaborated a comprehensive scenario: a right deviation, a right-left bloc, “bourgeois specialist” wreckers, and a military conspiracy with right-deviation links, all of them with foreign ties, aiming to bring on war, reverse collectivization, sabotage industrialization, and remove him.335 He was the fulcrum.
On December 1, 1930, Syrtsov became the first politburo official expelled by the method of merely polling Central Committee members over the phone, without a plenum.336 During the whole year, not a single multiday Central Committee plenum had taken place. One had been postponed, perhaps because Stalin had to cajole members into accepting the sacking of Rykov.337 Now Stalin wrote to Gorky in Sorrento, divulging Rykov’s imminent replacement by Molotov, calling it “unpleasant business” while championing Molotov as “a bold, smart, utterly modern leader.”338 As for Bukharin, Stalin wrote to him on December 13, in his now customarily put-upon fashion, that “I have never refused a conversation with you. No matter how much you cursed me, I have never forgotten that friendship that we had. I am leaving aside the fact that the interests of the cause require each of us unconditional forgetting of any ‘personal’ insults. We can always talk, if you want.”339
Finally, on December 17, 1930, the delayed plenum opened, and at the last minute it became a joint session of the Central Committee and the punitive Central Control Commission.340 On the third day, after Rykov’s report had been lacerated by all and sundry, Kosior suddenly proposed relieving Rykov of his post and nominated Molotov to head the government. No one could doubt who stood behind the move. The vote was unanimous.341 “Until now I have had to work mostly as a party functionary,” Molotov told the joint plenum. “I declare to you, comrades, that I go to the work in the Council of People’s Commissars as a party functionary, as a conductor of the will of the party and its Central Committee.”342 Bukharin, in a speech also delivered on December 19, mocked himself and his allies and joked about executions of rich peasants and the shooting of party oppositionists, eliciting laughter, while still managing to score points about Stalin’s wild-eyed industrialization and collectivization—a bravura performance. (“This is turning into an incoherent discussion. I am deeply sorry for this fact, but it is not my fault.”)343 Over repeated interruptions, Bukharin had finally just told Molotov that they would do whatever they wanted, since “all power and authority are in your hands.”
Molotov had no prior experience in government, but he would prove himself up to the task. Born the ninth of ten children, in 1890, to a shop clerk in central Russia, under the name Skryabin (he was a nephew of the composer and pianist Alexander Skryabin), he had joined the Bolshevik faction in 1908 while a teenager, and in 1912 took the name Molotov (“Hammer”). Bukharin, speaking to Kamenev, had fumed about “that blockhead Molotov, who tries to teach me Marxism,” but Molotov had attended the St. Petersburg Polytechnic and edited Pravda before Bukharin did. Molotov’s underground hardening and diligence had attracted him to Lenin, who called him Comrade Filing Cabinet. An underling recalled that “everything he was given to do was done faultlessly, in time, and at any price.”344 Another observer, who described Molotov as “fully conscious of his importance and power,” noted that he could sit for long hours of hard work and was informally called Stone Ass.345
On the final day (December 21), Rykov was expelled from the politburo; Orjonikidze assumed his spot on that supreme body.346 Kaganovich assumed Molotov’s place as Stalin’s top deputy in the party. Whereas Molotov had been methodical and wooden, Kaganovich was dynamic and showy. The Menshevik Socialist Herald rightly judged the latter to be “of quite exceptional abilities,” with an excellent memory for names and faces, “a quite exceptional ability to deal with people,” an immense capacity for work, and willpower.347 Kaganovich ran the orgburo, which oversaw personnel and ideology, but Molotov, as head of government, would now chair politburo meetings, by tradition going back to Lenin. Molotov had known Stalin since 1912, and Kaganovich had known Stalin since 1919.348 “He was generally personally always against me,” Molotov recalled of Kaganovich later in life. “Everybody knew this. He would say, ‘You are soft, you are an intelligent, and I am from the workers.’” Molotov added, “Kaganovich, he is an administrator, but crude; therefore, not all can stand him. He not only pressurizes, but is somewhat personally self-regarding. He is strong and direct—a strong organizer and quite a good orator.”349
Voroshilov and Orjonikidze were closer to Stalin personally (the former had known him since 1906, the latter since 1907), and while Voroshilov continued to oversee the military, Stalin appointed Orjonikidze head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, in place of the faltering loyal dog Kuibyshev, who was transferred to the state planning commission.350 Kuibyshev had gone from voicing skepticism about lunatic plan targets to promoting them zealously; now Orjonikidze went from sharply criticizing industrial cadres to being their protector, and gathered around him capable “bourgeois” experts, even if they had been imprisoned for a time.351 Sounding a bit like the sacked state bank chairman and former Trotsky supporter Pyatakov, whom Orjonikidze would make his deputy, he pointed out, in a long memorandum on industry in December 1930, that “money is being spent without any budget. . . . Accounting is exceptionally weak and muddled.” Stalin made only superficial notes on the memo; these were Orjonikidze’s worries now.352