This enemy of democracy and of the West, this implacable despot "who has no doubts about anything, who feels no pity for anyone," was building a national, people's empire. Russia was "gradually and ever more thoroughly ridding itself of the buzzing fly of Marxism, and advancing farther and farther along the road to a national system. Stalin's victory was the first step on this road, because it broke the back of the main force fighting Marxism in this country."86
In 1932, when Dmitrievsky wrote those lines, Trotsky still believed that Stalin was a Marxist, insufficiently grounded in theory and inclined to violate the letter and the spirit of the doctrine, but a Marxist nevertheless. To Dmitrievsky Stalin was already a fighter against Marxism. Both observers were right, each in a certain sense. Stalin was a Marxist as long as he found it helpful and an anti-Marxist whenever its dogmas became a constraint upon him. This was also true of nationalism, which also contained too much dogma for Stalin. He would regard Russia as the motherland only so long as the power in Russia was "ours, the workers' power, Stalinist power," as Dmitrievsky rightly observed.87
Nationalism, Marxism, whatever—anything was used as building material to consolidate the power Stalin had inherited from Lenin. Dmitrievsky saw Stalin as the predecessor of a future Russian Caesar, the builder of a future nationalist-led Russia. In fact, Stalin was a Caesar serving his own ends and building his own, purely Stalinist state.
Stalin's triumph was celebrated at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934. This was his apotheosis. The achievements of industrialization were visible, collectivization had been completed, the spiritual life of Soviet society had been firmly taken in hand, and new laws had been passed that chained the citizenry down in all possible ways. In five years the country had changed beyond recognition. No one would dare any longer to challenge Stalin's autocratic rule.
Kirov, who had less than a year to live, called it the Congress of Victors. In September 1934, Hitler told his National Socialists, gathered at Nurem- burg, that they were the real congress of victors.
In his speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress Stalin promised peace and tranquility:
At the Fifteenth Congress it was still necessary to prove that the party line was correct and to wage a struggle against certain anti-Leninist groups; and at the Sixteenth Party Congress we had to deal the final blow to the last adherents of these groups. At this congress, however, there is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight. Everyone now sees that the line of the party has triumphed.88
The stenographic record at this point records "thunderous applause." Of the applauding delegates, who numbered 1,966, only 59 were to take part in the next congress, the Eighteenth, in 1939. Nearly two-thirds of the delegates to the Congress of Victors were arrested in the intervening five years. Of those, only a very few survived.
The first official biography of Stalin was published in 1935 in a great many languages. Stalin had always hoped Gorky would write it, but the father of proletarian literature never got around to it, and "the social demand" had to be met by Henri Barbusse. It was rumored that the biography was actually written by Alfred Kurella, a German Communist writer, and that Barbusse merely put his name to it. Be that as it may, Barbusse's book, Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man, was soon banned in the Soviet Union, for nearly all the Leader's friends and comrades-in-arms mentioned in the book had become enemies of the people. Nevertheless this "biography" provided the promoters of Stalin's cult with a splendid model to follow. Consider this paean to Stalin, for example: "Although you do not know him, he knows you and is thinking of you. Whoever you may be, you have need of this benefactor. Whoever you may be, the finest part of your destiny is in the hands of that other man, who also watches you, and who works for you."89
Of course there was also Dmitrievsky's portrait:
Calm, immovable, Stalin sits there, with the stony face of an antediluvian lizard, in which only the eyes are alive. All thoughts, desires, plans converge upon him. He listens, reads, considers, thinking intently. Confidently, without any haste, he issues his orders. He weaves his web of intrigue. Elevates his own people and crushes the others. Buys and sells bodies and souls.90
Barbusse is more flattering about the Benefactor's outer appearance. He is a "man with a scholar's mind, a workman's face, and the dress of a simple soldier."91
The ultimate assessment was given by Kirov at the Seventeenth Congress. He called Stalin "the greatest man of all ages and nations." Stalin had reached the heights of power. The next stage would begin with Kirov's murder.
ALL QUIET ON EVERY FRONT
Tranquility on the Soviet Union's borders was an essential condition for the success of Stalin's "revolution from above." Soviet diplomacy—the "ground floor" of Soviet foreign policy—sought to ensure such tranquility during the First Five-Year Plan.
Only one incident seriously disrupted the calm, but it gave the Red Army the opportunity to show itself in battle for the first time since the civil war. There had been no diplomatic relations between China and Moscow since 1928. In the summer of 1929, Chiang Kai-shek's government provoked the Soviet Union: the consulate staffs in Manchuria and northern China were arrested. (The consulates in Harbin and Mukden had continued to function despite the break in diplomatic relations.) The civilian employees of the Soviet-owned Chinese Eastern Railway were also arrested. Then the railroad was seized. When China refused to release the Soviet citizens and return the railroad, Soviet forces intervened and defeated the Chinese army after several battles. The Special Red Army of the Far East was commanded by Vasily Blyukher, who in 1924—1927 had been a military adviser to the Kuomintang. In December 1929 the status quo was restored on the Soviet—Chinese border. Chiang Kai-shek had miscalculated, underestimating the strength and determination of the Soviet government. Although the Stalin regime feared serious international complications, it would try to use to its own advantage any situation that arose.
At the end of the 1920s, Moscow intervened in a civil war in Afghanistan in support of King Amanullah, who was threatened by a major rebellion. Agabekov, in his account of this episode, stated that the decision was made to support Amanullah because he based himself on the southern Afghan tribes, the "natural enemies" of the British, rather than Bacho Sakao, who based himself on the population of northern Afghanistan and therefore might try to "extend his influence into Soviet Turkestan." A "strike force" under the command of Primakov, former Soviet military аПасЬё in Kabul and a hero of the civil war, was sent to Afghanistan to support Amanullah. After a series of successful engagements with Bacho Sakao's troops, the Soviet military unit was recalled, for Amanullah had given up the struggle against the insurgents.92
Relations with Germany were at the center of Soviet foreign policy interests during the First Five-Year Plan. Only at the end of this period was a longstanding aim of Soviet diplomacy achieved, that is, the signing of nonaggression pacts with France (in 1931) and, over Germany's objections, with Poland (in 1932). In 1926 and 1931, Germany and the Soviet Union renewed and amplified the terms of the Treaty of Rapallo. The privileged relations between the two countries, as opponents of the Versailles system, included not only diplomatic and economic but especially military cooperation. The German foreign policy line had developed out of the struggle between German "Westernizers" and "Easternizers," between supporters of close ties with the Soviet Union and advocates of a Western orientation. Among those favoring the Eastern orientation were the Reichswehr, conservative politicians, and some industrialists; the Westernizers were primarily Social Democrats.