While still in the Soviet Union, Trotsky had lost any public voice, but abroad he not only wrote for periodicals in several European languages but also established a Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition (Leninist-Bolsheviks). His inaugural publisher’s note set out the party opposition’s right to exist and promised facts and documents; in that vein, he wrote an open letter to the workers of the USSR denying that he had left the Soviet Union voluntarily.20 The OGPU spread a rumor that Trotsky had been deported to enliven the revolutionary movement in the West, an invitation for émigré White Guards to assassinate him.21 The Bulletin, printed in Paris in small print runs, was not legally available inside the USSR, though for a time some Soviet officials who traveled abroad would smuggle the exotic broadsheets home and pass them around.22 It carried an astonishingly well-informed account of the party sessions behind closed doors in Moscow involving Bukharin, who complained that “in the twelfth year of the revolution [there is] not a single elected provincial party chief; the party does not participate in decision making. Everything is done from above.” Bukharin was shouted down: “Where did you pick that up—from whom? From Trotsky!”23
Trotsky, in fact, refused common cause with Bukharin and those he deemed expressions of petit bourgeois class interests. “The rightists think that if one affords greater space to individual peasant economy, then the current difficulties can be overcome,” he wrote in a March 1929 essay, also in the Bulletin’s inaugural issue. “A wager on the capitalist farmer (the European or Americanized kulak) would doubtless yield fruits, but they would be capitalist fruits that at some near-term stage would lead to the political downfall of Soviet power. . . . The course toward the capitalist farmer is absolutely incompatible with the dictatorship of the proletariat.”24 For Stalin, however, the “right deviation,” which wanted to continue the existing party policy of the NEP, was in cahoots with the smashed left opposition, which had wanted to overturn the NEP. Both, in criticizing the party line, exposed disunity and therefore weakness, an invitation for the capitalist powers to intervene and overthrow socialism. And because Stalin incarnated party unity and the resolve to build socialism, he was, logically, their prime target of assassination. Thus did opposition to Stalin’s policies become equated with terrorism, thanks also to a big hand from Wiaczesław Mężyński, chairman of the OGPU.25
All the while, Stalin’s inner circle craved his favor. On March 10, 1929, Pravda had published a report by Klim Voroshilov to a Leningrad provincial party conference analyzing the international situation, socialist construction, and the party opposition to collectivization, and four days later Voroshilov wrote to the dictator asking whether he had “screwed up 100 percent or just 75 percent.” Stalin responded by praising his account as “a good, principled report,” and, in reference to the U.S. president and the British foreign secretary, added, “All the Hoovers and Chamberlains and Bukharins got it in the ass.”26
Bukharin had grimly foreseen that Stalin would twist his words and label him a schismatic to extract political advantage, but Stalin’s cruelty was something his friend would puzzle over for a long time. And no matter how underhandedly the dictator undercut Bukharin, Stalin was the victim. “Don’t try to compel me to be quiet, or hide my opinion by your shouts that I ‘want to teach everyone,’” Stalin wrote to Bukharin on April 16, 1929, the day of a politburo confrontation. “Will you at some point desist from the attacks against me?”27
NO PITY
Following the politburo session, on that same day, Stalin convened a punitive joint Central Committee–Central Control Commission plenum, lasting a week, at which his loyalists spewed venom at Bukharin.28 On April 18, amid intense heckling, Bukharin launched a counterattack against Stalin’s peasant policy for coercing poor and middle peasants, too, insisting that “the number of kulak households is few,” and that “we can allow individual farming to develop without fear of rich peasants.” Stalin did not formally respond until the evening session on April 22. “Friendship is friendship, but state service is service,” he noted. “We all serve the interests of the working class, and if the interests of the working class diverge from the interests of personal friendship, then down with personal friendship.”29
Stalin wielded a compelling strategic vision—accelerated, noncapitalist modernity—but he was at pains to deny that he was abrogating Lenin’s NEP. (Otherwise, he would be the deviationist.) The NEP, he explained, had always had two sides—a retreat, to be followed by a renewed offensive—and “Bukharin’s mistake is that he does not see the two-sided nature of NEP; he sees only the first side.”30 Stalin cited Lenin to the Manichaean effect that everything came down to “‘who defeats whom,’ us or the capitalists. . . . Every advance of capitalist elements is a loss for us,” and that the peasantry was “the last capitalist class.” He reminded attendees that Rykov and Bukharin had been the first to repudiate his offer to resign (back in December 1927), and he threw Lenin’s Testament back in Bukharin’s face, reading aloud the parts about Bukharin and commenting, “A theoretician without dialectics. A theoretician of our party about whom it can scarcely be said—with great doubts can it be said—that his outlook is fully Marxist.” After all that, Stalin posed as conciliator, coming out “against the expulsion of Bukharin and Tomsky from the politburo.”31
Stalin might not have had the votes for expulsion. All the same, Bukharin was sacked as editor of Pravda, and Tomsky quit as head of trade unions. Rykov remained head of the government, which coordinated the economy.32 Stalin managed to have the plenum repudiate Rykov and Bukharin’s policy alternatives, such as importing grain (“It is better to squeeze the kulak and extract from him surplus grain, which he has in no small quantity”), but plenum resolutions summarizing the right’s position (even in condemnation) were not published.33
Developments in the countryside supported Stalin’s critics. The 1928–29 harvest had come in at only 62–63 million tons (well below the official figure of 70–71 million), and total state grain collections amounted to only around 8 million tons—2 million less than the previous year.34 Leningrad had already introduced food rationing in November 1928. Moscow soon followed, as did other industrial cities, going beyond bread to sugar and tea, then meat, dairy, and potatoes. But Stalin argued that the problems caused by his antimarket coercion required more coercion. In spring 1929, he dispatched Kaganovich as a plenipotentiary to the Urals and Western Siberia, some of the same districts the dictator himself had visited the year before. By summer 1929, however, food shortages loomed. The regime would need to spend scarce hard currency (the equivalent of 30 million convertible or gold rubles, or almost $15 million) to import a quarter million tons of grain.35 Those were just facts. Stalin anticipated that the ramped-up coercion would serve as a device of political recruitment, cleaving off the poor and middle peasant from the kulak. This was a complement to his invention of a schismatic “right deviation,” which forced his faction to redeclare its loyalty and held the party mass in check.36
Stalin’s political opportunism was at the service of implanting socialism (noncapitalism) in the countryside and collecting grain to feed and finance noncapitalist industrialization in the cities. He had seized the gift of Bukharin’s political amateurism, but in a larger way he had created his own moment, taking advantage of a crisis that his emergency measures had helped create to force through permanent emergency-ism. Mikoyan would admit, in June 1929, that “had it not been for the grain difficulties, the question of strong collective farms and of machine-tractor stations would not have been posed precisely at this moment with such vigor, scope, and breadth.”37 He had been appointed by Stalin a candidate member of the politburo already in 1926, at age thirty, as well as head of trade, making him the youngest people’s commissar. In that capacity he worked directly under Rykov and, for a time, was close to Bukharin (like Stalin), but now Mikoyan emerged as one of Stalin’s key minions who enacted the new hard line. And yet, Mikoyan remained the recipient of Stalin’s relentless pressure. “No concessions in grain procurements,” Stalin would soon write to him. “Hold the line and be maximally unyielding! If you now pity them and vacillate even one iota from our plan, . . . no one will pity either the Central Committee or the trade commissariat.”38