GEOPOLITICAL DILEMMA
Upon the close of the plenum, the regime convened the 16th party conference (April 23–29, 1929), which once more ratified the “optimal” (maximalist) variant of the Five-Year Plan.39 This wild-eyed scheme, which had officially commenced in October 1928, reversed the NEP-era loss of revolutionary élan and envisioned a nearly fourfold increase in investment in the state sector of the economy, to achieve a GDP leap of around 20 percent per annum.40 The phantasmagorical document also foresaw an absolute increase in household consumption. Still, the emphasis fell upon machine building, or, in Marxist terms, expansion of the means of production, in order to emancipate the USSR from dependence on foreign capitalists.41 That age-old dream, which predated the Bolshevik regime, always went unrealized, because the West possessed critical advanced technology that Russia needed in order to compete against the West. Stalin’s gamble on collectivization and socialist industrialization to emancipate Russia depended on eliciting foreign capitalist cooperation as well.42 But the Soviets broadcast an intention to overthrow capitalism globally.43
The young Soviet state had been unable to reclaim tsarist Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania, which had become independent states; Bessarabia, which had been seized by Romania; or Kars and Ardahan, which were claimed by Turkey. Communist revolutions in Hungary and parts of Iran had been overturned or aborted; Communist coups had failed abjectly in Germany, Bulgaria, and Estonia. Attempts to forge a loyal ally out of Nationalist-governed China had blown up in Stalin’s face. Traditional Russian influence had emerged enhanced in Mongolia, a Soviet satellite, but diminished in Korea and Manchuria (Japan had annexed the first and coveted the second). And so, even as the Soviets laid claim to being the antidote to the existing world order of imperialism, they found themselves pursuing a policy of coexistence, meaning trying to win recognition and trade from the capitalists.44 Lenin had once boasted that the capitalists would sell the rope that the Communists would use to hang them, but because of his repudiation of tsarist and Provisional Government debts, the Soviets had not been able to secure long-term credits for foreign purchases.45 Stalin’s extreme violence and accompanying desecration of churches added to the reputational costs for capitalists if they sold to the Communists. It remained a mystery how Stalin was going to obtain blueprints, machines, and know-how from the advanced capitalist countries.
POPULISM
Soviet industry, construction, and transport employed, at most, 6 million workers in 1929—of whom 4.5 million performed manual labor—out of a working population of well more than 60 million.46 Alongside familiar output norms, piece rates, and labor discipline, Soviet factories were supposed to be crucibles for new forms of socialist labor. “Shock work,” connoting overfulfillment of work norms via all-out exertion and rationalization, spread during the Five-Year Plan in conjunction with so-called socialist competitions among brigades for honors and better rations.47 In early 1929, Pravda had published “How to Organize Competition?” This previously unpublished article by Lenin, about unleashing workers’ creative energies, was part of a campaign in which workers took vows, often in writing, not to slack off or show up drunk or go AWOL, and to fulfill the plan. Some work collectives were afforded Union-wide publicity.48 Stalin had never really been a worker himself, had clashed bitterly with the one genuine worker in the politburo (Tomsky), and rarely visited factories. But he nurtured a deep populist streak.
A journalist for the newspaper Female Peasant, Yelena Mikulina (b. 1906), was having difficulty publishing her pamphlet, “Socialist Competition of the Masses,” on textile workers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. In early May 1929, she boldly dropped the manuscript off for Stalin at the party secretariat, imploring his aides for an audience. Stalin, surprising his functionaries, had his top aide, Ivan Tovstukha, summon her to Old Square on May 10. “You wanted to tell me something?” he was said to have asked Mikulina, who recalled answering, “‘I have nothing to say, because I am frightfully afraid, and completely stunned.’ . . . ‘Ha, ha ha,’ Stalin laughed. And in his laugh he showed his teeth. And his entire face, sown with large pockmarks, also laughed.” They talked about where else Mikulina might venture to write firsthand about socialist construction—perhaps Kazakhstan, where the Turkestan–Siberian Railway was being built.49 She asked Stalin to write a preface to her essays, which he did the next day, sending it by courier to her dormitory. The preface, which touted how “the powerful production rise of the toiling masses has begun,” was published in Pravda (May 22, 1929). The state publishing house immediately issued Mikulina’s pamphlet in a print run of 100,000. She sent Stalin an autographed copy, with the dedication “I cannot tell you how powerfully I love you.”50
Stalin, in his preface, warned anyone who dared to impede “the creative initiative of the masses.”51 Then the reviews arrived. One, from a newspaper editor in Yaroslavl, told Stalin that “workers greet the pamphlet with mocking laughter,” but nonetheless inquired whether his own censorious draft review (which he enclosed) merited publication.52 Another, forwarded to Stalin by the party boss of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, provoked a response. “It is not so easy to take in comrade Stalin,” the dictator wrote. “I am decisively against writing prefaces only for pamphlets and books of literary ‘big-shots,’ literary ‘names.’ . . . We have hundreds and thousands of young capable people, who are striving with all their might to rise up from below.”53
“SOCIAL FASCISTS”
Bolshevism, like Italian fascism, was an insurrection against both a liberal constitutional order and European Social Democracy. In Stalin’s formulation, codified at the Sixth Comintern Congress (1928), a bourgeoisie desperate to retain its hold on power sought to establish extreme fascist regimes by co-opting Social Democrats. Therefore, Social Democracy—which reconciled workers to capitalism, and thus lured them away from their supposed true home in the Communist party—constituted a handmaiden of fascism (“social fascism”).54 Social Democrats returned and often instigated the enmity, expelling Communists from trade unions and agitating against the Soviet regime. During clashes on May Day 1929, the German Social Democrat Party supported the police against banned worker street rallies encouraged by German Communists; 30 people were killed, nearly 200 injured, and more than 1,000 arrested.55 The Comintern condemned the Berlin events as Social Democratic “terror.” A German Communist party congress the next month resolved that “Social Democracy is preparing . . . the establishment of the fascist dictatorship.”56