Charges were brought not only against Ryutin but also against Uglanov, formerly first secretary of the Moscow committee, and against Tolmachev and Eismont, formerly people's commissars and Central Committee members. All were accused of trying to form a "counterrevolutionary bourgeois- kulak organization" whose purpose was to "restore capitalism in the USSR." Ryutin had once been an editor of the military newspaper Red Star. Now he was charged with attempting to organize a terrorist group among student officers at the Military School of the Ail-Union Central Executive Committee, with the aim of assassinating Stalin. For the first time party members were accused of plotting terrorist acts when all they had done was express oppositional views. For the first time Stalin demanded the death penalty for the "plotters." However, the Politburo refused to authorize the execution of Ryutin. According to Krivitsky, Kirov opposed the death penalty in this case and rallied the majority of the Politburo behind him.75 Stalin would recall the Ryutin platform with a vengeance four years later, and within a year and a half he made Kirov pay for his conduct.
Ryutin circulated his program at the height of the famine, in the midst of collectivization and the mad rush to complete "five in four." Meanwhile the Left Opposition, i.e., Trotsky, supported Stalin.
The Trotskyists welcomed the decision to collectivize agriculture, although Trotsky did reproach Stalin for his theoretical illiteracy, for not even considering the second volume of Capital in his policy of collectivization.76 (Trotsky wrote this in his Bulletin of the Opposition, which he began to publish after being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929.) Sometimes it is possible to find in Trotsky's Bulletin letters from the Soviet Union criticizing collectivization for not being radical enough. "In place of the dispossessed and deported kulaks," a certain A. T. complains in a letter dated June 12, 1930, "in the soil fertilized by centrist illusions, we see the sprouting of new capitalist shoots."77 In a 1931 pamphlet, Problems of the Development of the USSR, Trotsky called collectivization "a new epoch in the development of humanity, the beginning of the liquidation of the 'idiocy of rural life.'" Ante Ciliga, who in 1930 was in Stalin's prisons and camps, told of the unenviable position of the imprisoned Trotskyists when they received instructions from their leader to defend the view that the Soviet Union was a "workers' state." It is true that Trotsky wrote, 'The Soviet Union has not entered into socialism, as the ruling Stalinist faction teaches." Instead, Trotsky argued, it had entered "only into the first stage of development in the direction of socialism." In a letter to his son in October 1932 he wrote that it would be wrong to raise the slogan "Down with Stalin" as a war cry at that moment because "at present Milyukov, the Mensheviks, and Thermidorians of all sorts... will willingly echo the cry. ... It may happen within a few months," this great strategist of the revolution continued, "that Stalin may have to defend himself against Thermidorian pressure, and that we temporarily may have to support him."78 With enemies like these, Stalin didn't need friends.
The years of the First Five-Year Plan were the years of Stalin's inexorable rise. He concentrated all power, material and spiritual, in his hands. He was praised and glorified without restraint. A single word from him could stop or start the entire country. He would utter brief slogans and entire policies would change: 'Technology decides everything," 'Tempos decide everything," "Cadres decide everything." He devastated the countryside and killed millions of peasants, then blamed his subordinates. He imposed a regime of virtual slavery on the workers, then declared: "Of all the greatest treasures in the world, human beings, cadres, are the most precious and the most decisive." He announced that "life has become more joyous," and the country, bathed in blood and tears, was compelled to rejoice.
Hundreds of books have been written about Stalin in an attempt to penetrate the mystery of his success, the cult that surrounded him, his seemingly inexorable rise to greater and greater heights and unlimited power. He himself revealed the secret of his success in a simple formula: "If you are backward, if you are weak, that means you are wrong and can be beaten and enslaved. If you are mighty, that means you are right, and people have to beware of you. "79 Stalin was referring to the might and power of the state, to the idea that might makes right in both foreign and domestic policy, but his formula also applied to the individual in a political power struggle.
For decades Trotsky's views decisively influenced most biographers of Stalin, "the irreplaceable general secretary," as Souvarine called him. Stalin was portrayed as a mediocrity, "a gray blur," borrowing the expression first used by Sukhanov. He was a liar, a scoundrel, and a good-for-nothing who had accidentally usurped the position that rightfully belonged to Trotsky, the brilliant organizer, writer, theoretician, and practical leader. After Stalin's death many biographers seemed inclined to depict him as a devil who had been plotting virtually since childhood to seize total power. The personality traits of the mature Stalin, whose monstrous power unbalanced his mind, were projected back to an earlier period onto the Stalin who was fighting for power and who won because he understood the true nature of the Bolshevik party better than his opponents and who best understood the weaknesses of his rivals.
We can safely assume that his plans for the kind of state and society he wanted did not crystalize in his mind until the late 1920s, when his victory over his rivals, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, was no longer in doubt. We can obtain a fairly clear picture of Stalin's plans, ideas, and aspirations from Dmitrievsky's books, although most biographers of Stalin disregard him completely.
Dmitrievsky was unquestionably a follower of Ustryalov, and he carried the changing landmarks ideology a step further, portraying Stalin as the embodiment of Russian national communism. Dmitrievsky's book on Stalin (1931) and his Soviet Portraits (1932) were aimed at winning the emigr6 community over to Stalin's side. What he wrote then seemed strange and unbelievable, but today it deserves special attention, because Stalin soon embarked on the road Dmitrievsky predicted.
A certain process had been underway in Russia, Dmitrievsky argued: "People who with full sincerity considered themselves at first to be nothing but Communists have now become National Communists, and many of them are already standing on the threshold of pure Russian nationalism."80 The future of Russia was to be a national, or people's, empire, and the general secretary was the man leading the country to that state. "Could it be that only a thick-headed battering ram like Stalin can break through the door to Russia's future?" Dmitrievsky asked rhetorically.81 To him, Stalin's dictatorship was in many respects already a national, people's dictatorship. At any rate, it was "far more closely linked with the masses than any so- called democracy."82 The strength of the Stalinist system lay "not only in its bayonets" but in these links with the nation.83
Stalin's program consisted of several points, according to Dmitrievsky. First, to follow a "policy of applying maximum pressure, both in the party and the state apparatus, until everything and everyone is about to burst." Then would come the time when the idea of a "Red, proletarian, Russo- Asiatic imperialism" could be put into effect. The world had been divided into two camps—imperialism and its opponents. At the head of those fed up with imperialism and willing to fight to the death against it would stand the Soviet Union, That was how Stalin summed up his views, according to Dmitrievsky.84 But the struggle against imperialism meant a struggle against the West. "It is necessary to catch up with and surpass the hated West, to bring it down, to break its arrogant power. For the sake of this objective, he is ready to sacrifice not only the small nation to which he was born but every generation now alive."85