The XXth Century Political History of Russia: lecture materials. Gennady Bordyugov

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СКАЧАТЬ limits in which the dictatorship of the proletariat had placed capitalist elements, although in actual fact it was the market that resisted the grain procurements. All the evidence suggests that the Party leadership did not initially intend to apply the extraordinary measures over a long period. Exiled in Alma Ata, Lev Trotskii saw these measures generally as «a crutch for Rykov’s policies.» Probably, this was the view of all the members of the Politburo, who unanimously supported the extraordinary measures at a meeting on 6 January 1928. At that moment, the Party leaders simply failed to see any other solution. All other alternatives for overcoming the problem were rejected.

      The extraordinary measures undertaken in the winter of 1928 proved completely ineffective. In the summer of that year, the government was forced to spend its mobilization reserves and purchase grain abroad. Six months earlier such measures would have been sufficient to put out the crisis and buy time for a serious review of policy. But the resort to extraordinary measures set in motion the machine of chrezvychaishchina and for the first time since the end of the Civil War the system of forcible purchasing of grain was reinstated. That section of society whose existence depended on the NEP, and who regarded it as the only possible normal form of economic and political life, was hit particularly hard by this policy.

      These people were distinguished by their inner orientation, their political and sociopsychological outlook. Some of them were ossified, bureaucratized chinovniki, resistant to change of any kind; others were principled supporters of the NEP, while yet others favored organic economic growth rather than the various zigzags of the left. In the eyes of the leadership they constituted a force for historic inertia, and as such became the butt of the extraordinary measures. Their active or passive resistance forced the Party leaders from time to time to demand ideological controls and a purge of the Party organization. However, millions of non-Party people had spontaneously formed their own ideology, one remote from complex Party doctrine. It was expressed in the question: who is responsible for the fact that a year ago everything was more or less all right, while now everything is deplorable and unbearable? The Communists, the Komsomol, the Jews – such was one answer given by these despairing and embittered people. Others blamed the «would-be bourgeoisie», or the kulaks. The search for «enemies», the attempt to personify the guilty, became a kind of safety-valve through which mass dissatisfaction, both among city workers and among the rural poor, could be expressed.

      The Shakhtii case, dubbed by Stalin «the economic counter-revolution», became the mechanism through which this question, matured in the minds of millions, took form. The «case» arose in March 1928, and the trial took place in May that year, that is to say, during the period when mass discontent and bitterness at the extraordinary measures had swollen into open indignation. The «Shakhtii case» was quite obviously fabricated, but its significance lay in the fact that it gave rise to the theory of «wrecking». This theory allowed the Party to point the finger at «concrete wrongdoers» and deflect mass dissatisfaction away from the Party leaders. The reaction to the «Shakhtii case» in the consciousness of the masses was quite simple. Statements of the following kind, made by peasants and workers in relation to the Shakhtii specialists, can be found in numerous political summaries and research surveys issued by the OGPU: «The bullet was too good for them, they should have been sent to the crematorium alive».

      Support for the Shakhtii trial and the inferences drawn about the «wreckers» remained a stable socio-psychological phenomenon over a period of several months. Against the background of growing economic problems, extraordinary measures, queues and strikes, practically no one expressed any doubt or skepticism concerning the judicial correctness of the trial in the «Shakhtii case». On the contrary, among the lower strata of the proletariat the conclusions of the trial were taken to savage extremes:

      What should be done? That’s for the Party Central Committee, our guide, to answer. Probably we should take up our knives and bullets again and get rid of all these famous doctors and generals, those that are still alive.

      Thus in the spring of 1928 this growing social aggression was offered a personal target: the «wreckers». But the first target had already been named in January, when blame was laid on the kulaks who had organized the «grain strike». In this way a specific ideological and socio-psychological mood was created, which to some extent filtered into the Party’s ranks as well. Attempts were made to overcome the reluctance among many Communists to «activate», in carrying out the extraordinary measures, Party «radicals», who at the slightest difficulty would pose the question: «Isn’t there a Shakhtii plot here?» – a reluctance that was put down to degeneration and demoralization among the Party ranks. But if facts of this kind were occasionally made known to the whole country, the political struggle which occurred among the Party leadership in March 1928 was carefully concealed from the rest of society.

      Bukharin, in particular, characterized the external and internal situation of the country as «very grave». The program of the XV Congress of the Communist Party was effectively torn apart by the crisis. Bukharin did not admit this directly, but his view was made evident in his demand for a new «overall plan» and the admission that the Party leadership had behaved worse than «superempiricists of the crudest kind». The failure, or at any rate partial failure, of the program of the XV Congress— instead of the smooth «reconstruction» of the NEP, the country had been dragged into crisis – was also obvious to Stalin. But he did not share the forebodings that the extraordinary measures would inevitably lead to civil war. By contrast, Bukharin considered his main task to be that of proving the real danger of civil war and the need for urgent and public repeal of the extraordinary measures. The anti-crisis programme of the «right faction», set out at a key moment in the plenum of the Central Committee in July 1928, was quite simple: the repeal of the extraordinary measures, an increase in the purchase price of grain, the abolition of the ration system, differentiated taxes, and so on.

      In the key speech to the plenum, delivered on the Politburo’s orders by Anastas Mikoyan, it was emphasized that the Party had no intention of transforming the temporary extraordinary measures into a permanent policy, since this would threaten the alliance of peasants and workers, the stability of the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist construction. With regard to the extraordinary measures even Lazar Kaganovich declared: «They must not be brought into the system… It is all the more necessary to declare a decisive struggle against an ideology that wants to legitimize distortions».

      Nevertheless Aleksei Rykov observed, first, that Kaganovich, in his speech, had identified administrative with economic measures, proof of which could be found in the restriction of the law of value in Soviet society and in the fact that bourgeois economy was perceived as the opposite of the Soviet economic system, and, second, that he had called for effort to be put into denouncing «distortions», rather than into considering the further application of the extraordinary measures themselves, or into analyzing the actual results of the grain procurement campaign. In a word, the plenum left a wide margin for very different interpretations of official policy. It is not accidental that members of the Central Committee repeatedly ask ed for clarification: to be precise, «what was the strike about?» The extreme left faction found the answer in the situation of the collective farms, the extreme «right» in the thesis «look to the market», still others in the development of individual peasant ownership. Under these conditions it was extremely difficult to imagine precisely how, and under what slogans, the next grain procurement campaign of 1928/9 would be conducted.

      It was all the more difficult to predict the further course of events because the July plenum had seen the emergence of a faction that was far to the left of Stalin. The position of this faction was expressed, in particular, by several secretaries from regional committees: «Our task is not to stamp out the hatred of the poor towards the kulak, but to organize it.»

      Vyacheslav Molotov also attempted to give a theoretical foundation to the events of the winter and spring of 1928. He accused those who forgot about the real class basis of the crisis of committing a sin against Marxism. Thus there formed within the Central Committee a group that was orientated towards the use of very harsh anti-NEP measures. And although Stalin himself took a more moderate position, he made a number of theoretical СКАЧАТЬ