Voices were being raised. “Although you, comrade Stalin, are a pupil of Lenin, your behavior is not Leninist,” the delegate Fedorintseva of the rural soviet “Soldier,” in the Black Earth region, wrote to Izvestiya in spring 1932. “Lenin taught: factories to the workers, land to the peasants, and what do you do? You confiscate not only land but livestock, huts, and possessions from the middle and poor peasants. You threw out Trotsky and call him a counterrevolutionary, but you, comrade Stalin, are the real and first Trotskyite, and a pupil not of Lenin but of Trotsky. Why? They taught us in political circle that Trotsky proposed to build socialism with force at the expense of the muzhik.”197 Trotsky added his own voice. “Separated from the apparatus, Stalin is . . . a nullity, an empty void,” he wrote in a new “open letter” to the party, in his Bulletin of the Opposition (March 1, 1932), predicting that “the man who yesterday was the symbol of the might of the apparatus tomorrow might become in everyone’s eyes the symbol of its bankruptcy.”198
Suddenly, the regime backed down from socialization of all livestock, with a decree (March 26, 1932) initiated by land commissar Yakovlev and accepted by Stalin. Functionaries in the commissariat interpreted it as a retreat from collectivization—some asked whether it contained a typo—but the aim was tacticaclass="underline" to end flight from the collectives. Local officials did not hurry to return collectivized animals.199
Not coincidentally, speculation about the dictator’s health, typical in any dictatorship, intensified. “This is not the first time that false rumors that I am ill have circulated in the bourgeois press,” Stalin wrote in a letter published in Pravda (April 3). “Sad though it may be, the fact is that I am in perfect health.”200
Ukraine party boss Kosior reported to Stalin that one quarter of the republic’s horses had died, and that the surviving ones were “skin and bones.”201 The OGPU reported that in Borisov, in the Belorussian republic, a crowd had seized grain warehouses, and several hundred women and children had marched on the local Red Army barracks (“signs of commiseration could be seen among the soldiers and officers”).202 In the textile mills of the Ivanovo region, ration cuts of up to one half, on top of labor intensification measures, provoked strikes and spontaneous assemblies.203 A sign placed in a shopwindow read “Even as the starving workers of Vichuga and Teikovo were being fired upon because they agitated for bread, here, behind the store’s drawn curtains, Communist functionaries and Red police of the GPU were fattening themselves up.”204 Ten thousand demonstrators ransacked the party and police buildings (“Toss the Communists . . . out the window”). Stalin dispatched Kaganovich, who mobilized local party agitators to speak with workers and himself heard out their grievances.205
Ivanovo’s striking workers did not reject socialism, only its building at their expense, and mostly blamed local officials for their plight.206 They shared a resolute anticapitalism with the Soviet regime, but that anticapitalism afforded the regime bureaucratic control over workers’ employment, housing, and food. The strikers were further stymied by the state monopoly over newspapers, radio, and the public sphere. More profoundly still, the strikers were trapped in the socialist vocabulary of class war.207 Kaganovich’s report for Stalin unfurled clichés, but, unlike the workers, the regime drew power from Bolshevik language: in conditions of “capitalist encirclement,” Kaganovich could equate worker criticism with playing into the imperialists’ hands. He managed to browbeat most strikers back to the shop floor, after which the OGPU arrested worker organizers and officials accused of worker sympathies.208
GRUDGING CONCESSIONS, PRIVATE APOLOGY
In parades on the May Day holiday in 1932, the Soviets offered the first public demonstrations of the Red Army’s mechanization—not only in Moscow, but in Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, Tiflis, and Khabarovsk.209 That same day, the first stage of the Dneprostroi hydroelectric dam supplied power, and this launch would prove durable. (“We are talking to you from the roof of an immense Bolshevik triumph!” gushed Soviet radio.)210 Still, workers could not eat or clothe themselves with tanks and electricity.211 On May 4, Stalin led a politburo discussion that culminated in reduced procurement targets and acceptance of a commission’s recommendation to purchase hundreds of thousands of livestock from Mongolia, western China, Iran, and Turkey.212 On May 6 and 10, the regime issued decrees announcing the grain procurement reductions for collective farmers and the remaining individual household farmers, from 22.4 million to 18.1 million tons. The targets for state farms were raised, from 1.7 to 2.5 million, for a new overall target of 20.6 million. This was just 81 percent of actual 1931 procurements. The decrees even forbade further liquidation of individual household farms, ordered the return of confiscated livestock and an end to lawlessness, and stipulated that, after peasants had met procurement quotas for the harvest (deadline: January 15, 1933), they could freely trade in any surplus directly with consumers at “collective farm markets.”213
Could it be? As recently as the October 1931 party plenum, Mikoyan, speaking for Stalin, had flatly rejected suggestions to permit rural trade at market prices after fulfillment of state obligations.214 But now peasants were permitted to maintain their own cows (though not horses), cultivate household plots, and sell a significant portion of the fruits of their labor at market prices.215 To be sure, private property in the means of production remained outlawed (household plots could not be sold or inherited). Still, it turned out that peasants had to be incentivized with private livestock holdings and market sales of even some of their collective farm output. Workers, too, had to be provided incentives through wage differentiation.216 State-owned and state-managed factories were not permitted to engage in direct marketlike relations with one another, but they did so illegally. “The necessity of avoiding a break in production,” one official at Magnitogorsk explained, “will compel the receiving factory to seek the necessary materials from other sources by every possible means.”217
The surprises kept coming. Stalin returned Shaposhnikov to a high-profile post in the capital, as director of the Frunze Military Academy, and on May 7, 1932, he even sent a written apology to Tukhachevsky for having denounced his January 1930 super-rearmament memorandum as Red militarism. “Two years later,” Stalin wrote, with a copy to Voroshilov, “when some unclear matters have become clearer for me, I must confess that my judgment was too severe, and that the conclusions of my letter were not correct in all respects.” Stalin noted that Tukhachevsky had been suggesting a peacetime army not of 11 million (per Shaposhnikov’s accusations) but of “8 million souls” and suggested that 6 million well-supplied, well-organized troops were “more or less within our capabilities.” (Soviet forces still numbered fewer than 1 million.) Stalin added: “Do not curse me for the fact that I corrected these shortcomings outlined in my [1930] letter with a certain tardiness.”218