One of the important factors in the development of Soviet—capitalist relations was the activity of certain individual foreigners. First in line is Armand Hammer, son of Dr. Julius Hammer, one of the founders of the American Communist party. Young Armand Hammer arrived in Moscow in 1921 with a recommendation from Martens, the unofficial Soviet trade representative in the United States. He had brought with him a freightcar full of drugs and medicines as a gift to the Soviet government. He met with Lenin, who was drawn to the enterprising young American. Lenin advised him to assume management of the Alapaevsky asbestos mines on a concessionary basis, and he personally organized the immediate formation of this concession, which ordinarily would have taken months. Hammer did not limit himself to the first million he earned from the asbestos concession. Until 1930 he lived with several members of his family (his wife, mother, brothers, and uncle) in Moscow. Hundreds of pages, the best of which are by Mikhail Bulgakov, have been written about the housing crisis in Moscow. Hammer rented a twenty-four-room house in Moscow and converted it into the unofficial embassy of the United States. He took out a concession on the production of pencils and pens. In 1926 his factory produced 100 million pencils and made enormous profits, which he used to buy Russian works of art. Unlike all the other concessionaires, Hammer was able to convert his revenues to dollars. His example was infectious. He served as an intermediary in the conclusion of an agreement between the Soviet government and Henry Ford, an ardent enemy of the Communists. The American Consolidated Company (50 percent of the capital was Hammer's; the other 50 percent was the Soviet government's) conducted the affairs of "three dozen American firms" trading with the Soviet Union.43 The phenomenal successes of Armand Hammer, who made millions in the Soviet Union, could not fail to entice other capitalists.
The most convincing proof of the nonexistence of "aggressive capitalist plans" was the fact that the Red Army, which in 1929 numbered 1.2 million men, was equipped with prewar Russian and foreign armaments. Soviet industry was still in no condition to produce the necessary weaponry, so it was supplied by the Germans, English, Americans, and French: for example, heavy machine guns, like the Maxim and Colt; light machine guns, like the Browning and Lewis; artillery on a par with the American 76-inch howitzer; and Renault tanks, built in Fili with the help of the Germans.
The first five-year plan was not implemented until after the contracts on plant construction and technical aid were signed with the Western firms.
Soviet foreign policy successes on the third, economic level, however much they were concealed and disclaimed, did not impede the "pursuit of conflict" on the first two levels. The crisis in Anglo—Soviet relations, brought on by the meddling of Soviet trade unions ("independent from the state") in English affairs during the general strike of 1926, led, after a raid by London police on Soviet trade offices, to a break in diplomatic relations which lasted from 1927 to 1929. Also in 1927, France demanded the recall of Soviet Ambassador Rakovsky, a Trotskyist who had declared in a letter to the Central Committee that in the event of war with the imperialists he would urge the soldiers of the imperialist armies to desert. The French considered such promises incompatible with diplomatic status. Meanwhile, a Russian emigre assassinated the Soviet ambassador to Warsaw, Voikov, who had taken part in the murder of the tsar's family in 1918, and in December the putsch in Canton, conceived by Stalin, ended in defeat.
The Soviet government presented all these separate events as elements in a single plot that was sure to end in an inevitable—and imminent— war: an attack by imperialist forces. This episode in history comes under the heading, "The 1927 War Scare." Historians still debate whether or not the Soviet leaders, primarily Stalin, actually believed in the inevitability of an attack on the Soviet Union. After all, 1927 was the calmest year in the world since the end of World War I. Economic relations with the West were developing. But the "war scare" gave Stalin an additional argument to use in favor of the rapid liquidation of the Opposition, which was undermining unity in the face of imperialist intervention. In 1929, Chicherin, who was nominally still deputy commissar of foreign affairs but who in fact had been removed from things for a long time, made a frank disclosure to the American journalist Louis Fischer, whom he met in Wiesbaden while receiving treatment: "In June 1927 I returned from Western Europe. Everyone in Moscow was talking about war. I did my best to dissuade them: 'No one is planning to attack us,' I insisted. Then I was enlightened by a colleague. He told me: 'Hush, we know that. But we need this for the struggle against Trotsky.'"44
The Sixth Congress of the Comintern, which gathered in Moscow in July 1928, decided on a new policy line for the second level of Soviet foreign policy. (This turned out to be the Comintern's next-to-last congress. The last would meet in 1934, and in 1943 Stalin would dissolve the Third International by a stroke of the pen.) The sessions of the Sixth Congress were not held in the Kremlin, as before, but in the House of Trade Unions. The Congress stressed the need to strengthen discipline within the Communist parties, to subordinate local interests to the interests of the international Communist movement—that is, to Moscow—and to comply unconditionally with all Comintern decisions. According to the old Bolshevik tradition, the new line provided an opponent: the "rightist" Bukharin, who was opposing the extremely left-wing Trotskyist line, then being supported by Stalin. The Communist parties received a directive to regard the socialist parties, labeled "social fascists," as the principal enemy. Marxist scientific analysis enabled Stalin to conclude that the West had entered a period of world stabilization; therefore the task of the Communists was to tear the working class away from the influence of the "social fascists." Then, when the epoch of crises and wars arrived, which was inevitable in view of the growing contradictions among the principal capitalist countries, particularly between England and the United States, the Communists would be able to try to seize power.
In January 1928 Trotsky and his comrades addressed a letter to the Comintern complaining of the repression they were under. They admitted that repression can play an extremely positive role if it supports a just line and contributes to the liquidation of reactionary groups. The Trotskyists stressed that, as Bolsheviks, they were quite familiar with the use of repression and had repeatedly used repressive measures themselves against the bourgeoisie, the Mensheviks, and so on. They declared that even in the future they had no intention at all of renouncing repression against the enemies of the proletariat. They believed only that the use of repression against them was unjust and that repression against Bolsheviks had always been ineffective. For he who supports a political line that is just will be victorious.