Dimitrov cautioned that “Soviet power and only Soviet power can bring salvation!” but exhorted the delegates to learn “the parliamentary game.”121 A photograph of Stalin with the Comintern delegates was published in Pravda, but he did not deign to deliver a speech.122 Yezhov was soliciting reports on hidden spies among resident foreign Communists and other political émigrés. (There were 4,600 Germanophone expatriates alone, thanks to Nazism.)123 While the congress continued, on July 27, the USSR military collegium passed sentences in the Kremlin Affair on thirty people: two got the death penalty, and the rest between two and eight years in camps. The NKVD special board had sentenced eighty others in the case. Lev Kamenev, already serving a five-year term for the Kirov case, got another ten.124
Beria delivered a sensation. He had sacked Toroshelidze as head of his Stalin project, in favor of Yermolai “Erik” Bedia, Georgia’s enlightenment commissar, who set to work on “The Rise and Development of Bolshevik Organizations in the South Caucasus.” Documents of the conspiratorial underground years were few, so people were invited to reminisce, sometimes writing their own texts, often allowing Beria’s apparatchiks to write or type them up. Those who participated were usually given envelopes of cash (“Comrade Stalin remembers you and asked me to convey this”). Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s top aide, shaped the final text, and on July 21–22, 1935, in a special meeting of the South Caucasus party active, with some 2,000 attendees, Beria read it aloud. The audience spent much of the five hours standing and applauding each mention of “the Great Stalin.” Dawn of the East published the full text, under Beria’s byline, in two issues (July 24–25).125 Pravda reprinted it over the course of eight days, making Beria famous in the party outside the Caucasus.126 The text was also issued as a stand-alone pamphlet in a print run that would reach 35 million.127 The central apparatus instructed all party organizations to organize study groups on Beria’s report, which “offered the richest material on the role of Stalin as a Supreme Leader and theorist of our party.”128
Also during the Comintern Congress, on July 30, following a five-day conference of 400 railroad industry personnel, Stalin hosted a banquet in the St. George’s Hall. He rose to speak “under the thunder of applause, and an ovation that long did not let up,” according to the account he edited for Pravda. “He said that the existence and development of our state, which exceeds in its size any other state in the world, including England and its colonies (excluding its dominions), is unthinkable without well-laid-down rail transport connecting the gigantic provinces of our country into a single state whole. . . . England, as a state, would be unthinkable without its first-class sea transport, which connects its myriad territories into a single whole. Exactly the same way the USSR, as a state, would be unthinkable without first-class rail transport, connecting its myriad provinces and territories into a single whole.”129 Left unsaid was that precisely the underdeveloped rail network posed the gravest impediment to Soviet war planning. In the western theater, the most glaring rail vulnerability lay at one of the most strategic points, south of the Pripet Marshes, along the Kiev military district frontier, while in the Far Eastern theater, throughput deficiency was still worse: a mere twelve pairs of trains per day, a level not much improved since the Russo-Japanese War defeat in 1904–5.130
Stalin inserted a remarkable political paragraph when editing the transcript. “In capitalist countries there are several parties—for example, England: Liberals, Conservatives, Labourites,” he wrote. “There’s not much difference between them—all of them stand for the continuation of exploitation—but one party criticizes the other. When the party in power missteps and the masses begin to get disaffected, that party is replaced by another. . . . We do not need such a lightning rod. We have a one-party system, but this system has its darker side—there’s no one to criticize us, even gently—so we have to criticize ourselves, check, not be afraid of our shortcomings, difficulties, confront them. We all should teach the masses, but also learn from the ‘little people,’ listen to them. . . . Self-criticism, that’s the key to our successes. The bourgeoisie put forward their smartest and most skillful people to govern the state: Roosevelt, Baldwin, Hitler—he’s a talented person—Mussolini, Laval, but nothing comes of it. We have victories, and these victories come not from the genius of someone; that’s stupidity. We do not have geniuses. We had one genius: Lenin. We are all people of middling capabilities, but we Bolsheviks take correct stances and implement them—that’s why we gain victories.”131
The Comintern Congress rolled on, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Engels’s death at the session on August 5.132 Four days later, Ivan Tovstukha, deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, died from tuberculosis, at age forty-six. His obituary provided what might have been the first public information on Stalin’s group of top aides who actually ran the country.133 Internally, Tovstukha had sabotaged the efforts of Yaroslavsky to write a comprehensive Stalin biography. Now Yaroslavsky appealed directly to the dictator, but Stalin wrote across his letter: “I am against the idea of a biography about me. Maxim Gorky had a plan like yours, and he asked me, too, but I have backed away from this matter. I don’t think the time has come for a Stalin biography.”134
That very summer, a foreign author struck again: Boris Lifshitz, who had been born in Kiev (1895), moved with his family to Paris at age two, helped found the French Communist party, went by the name Souvarine, and had been expelled from the Comintern for voicing his and his comrades’ anger at the persecution of Trotsky (with whom Souvarine eventually fell out). Souvarine exacted revenge by publishing Stalin: A Critical Study of Bolshevism in French, which portrayed Stalin as both devoted to the cause and painstaking in intrigue, a doer rather than a thinker like Lenin or Trotsky, a man who struggled long and hard for recognition amid supposed insignificance in the revolutionary movement and overcame seemingly insuperable obstacles, such as Lenin’s Testament calling for his removal. Souvarine demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of Stalin’s successful political ruthlessness.135
The Comintern Congress ratified the new line of Communist–Social Democrat cooperation in Europe. In Asia, Stalin had long been forcing Communist-“bourgeois” cooperation against Japanese imperialists in a “united front.” But Chiang Kai-shek had launched the fifth in a series of encirclement campaigns against the Chinese Communists, most of whom had found refuge at a mountain redoubt far southwest of Shanghai, adapting the precepts of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (“The enemy attacks, we retreat; the enemy halts, we harass; the enemy retreats, we pursue”). With Nationalist troops pressing the final annihilation, about 130,000 rank-and-file Communist troops and civilians had managed to break out, fleeing on a horrendous “Long March” into the deep interior. (Survivors of the rout-retreats would straggle first into Sichuan province, then Yan’an, in Shaanxi province, covering 3,700 miles over 370 days.) With the Long March still under way, a Chinese Communist delegation had set out for the Comintern Congress, but would arrive only after it had concluded. Meanwhile, the congress ordered the Chinese Communists to link up with “cooperative” Nationalists, whom they were to somehow cleave off from Chiang.136