The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and Tomsky. Contrary to the prophecies of the recently defeated opposition, the influence of the Bukharin group did not overshadow that of Stalin. The fifteenth Congress elected a new Politburo of nine and in the new line-up Stalin had a majority of votes, among them Kaganovich and Mikoyan. The flaring up of conflicting forces inside the Politburo did not come until 1928, when in view of the grain famine ‘emergency measures’ were instituted by the Politburo, resulting in Stalin’s call for ‘the elimination of the kulaks as a class’. Although in the councils of the Politburo these measures were opposed by Bukharin and his group, it was not until April, 1929, that Stalin openly denounced Bukharin as the leader of the ‘right’ opposition to his policy in the countryside. Soon after, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were excluded from the Politburo and other significant posts. Stalin’s ascendancy in the Politburo was now complete, and from this moment he was recognized as the virtual ruler of the Soviet Union – a position consecrated by the unusual demonstrations with which his fiftieth birthday was celebrated in December, 1929. At the very moment of Trotsky’s expulsion Stalin was preparing a powerful swing-over towards industrialization. The first Five-year Plan was launched by him in 1928. Its inevitable concomitant, the collectivization of agriculture, though not seriously taken in hand till 1931, had been on the party agenda since the end of 1927. Throughout this period, though mistakes were made (notably in the estimate of the pace at which collectivization could be carried out), Stalin’s sense of timing was on the whole superb. Few, if any, of the policies which he applied were original to himself; but he was unique in his sense of when to act and when to wait.

      In the middle thirties, with industrialization well on the way and collectivization a fait accompli, the Soviet Union may well have seemed to be sailing out into smoother waters. The second Five-year Plan promised an increased output of consumer goods. Stalin’s public pronouncements assumed a more optimistic tone, and he may well have originally conceived the ‘Stalin constitution’, promulgated in 1936, as the crown of his work. Socialism had been achieved; the road to Communism, however distant the goal, lay open; increased material prosperity and broader constitutional liberties were a vision of the immediate future. These expectations, if they were entertained, were not fulfilled. In the middle thirties the Soviet Union entered a new period of storm and stress. The murder of Kirov at the end of 1934 was the symptom or starting-point of a grave internal crisis; and in international affairs Germany regained her power in a form particularly menacing to the Soviet Union. The internal crisis was obscure, the evidence relating to it contentious, and it was dealt with by methods which left a lasting cloud on Stalin’s name. The growing-pains of collective farming, the liquidation of the kulaks, the need – in face of the Nazi menace – to increase the pace of industrialization had all imposed severe strains on the population and bred discontent, sometimes in high places. Stalin decided to strike hard. In the panic which followed old scores were paid off and new grudges indulged, and things probably went a good deal farther than Stalin or anyone else intended at the start.

      Treason Trials

      In 1935 and 1936 successive trials were held in which all those prominent Bolsheviks who had at one time or another been implicated in ‘Trotskyism’ or other forms of opposition to the regime – Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin among them – were condemned and shot for self-confessed treason. In 1937 a number of the leading generals were shot on similar charges without public trial. Of the leading Bolsheviks of the first generation hardly any survived except Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov. In 1938 the purge was at last stayed. Yagoda, long the head of the gpu and its successor the nkvd, who had been removed from office at the end of 1936, was now himself executed; and Yezhov, his successor, formerly an influential party leader, disappeared from the scene about the same time. Judgment on the purge will depend partly on the amount of credence given to reports and confessions of active treason on the part of the accused; and it has to be admitted that the Soviet polity afterwards survived the almost intolerable strains of war with fewer breaks and fissures than most observers had been prepared to predict. Nevertheless it is certain that the damage done by the purges to Soviet prestige in the west was a fatal handicap to the foreign policy of a common defensive front with the western Powers to which Soviet diplomacy was at that time committed. This was probably the gravest and most disastrous miscalculation of that period.

      Munich and After

      Treaty with the Nazis

      Soviet foreign policy in the thirties, as much as Soviet domestic policy, was clearly Stalin’s creation. He had long been by inclination a Soviet nationalist rather than an internationalist; and now that he was firmly established in the seat of power he was unlikely to shrink from any of the implications of ‘Socialism in one country’. Faced by the German menace, he executed without embarrassment the ideological change of front necessary to bring the Soviet Union into the League of Nations and to conclude treaties of alliance with France and Czechoslovakia. In the end it was not lack of Soviet good will that defeated this project, but the weakness of France and what appeared to Soviet eyes as a dual policy on the part of Great Britain. So long as Great Britain could be suspected of hesitating between a deal with Germany and a common front against her, Stalin on his side would equally keep both doors open. Munich, though a severe shock to prospects of cooperation, was partly offset by British rearmament, and the riddle of British policy was unsolved throughout the winter. On March 10, 1939, at the eighteenth party congress Stalin gave what was doubtless intended as a note of warning that Soviet policy was ‘not to allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by war-mongers’. But his speech was overtaken by the march of events.

      It was Hitler’s seizure of Prague in the middle of March which fired the train. Great Britain now prepared feverishly for war and sought for allies in the east. Two alternatives were still open to her. She could have an alliance with the Soviet Union at the price of accepting Soviet policy in Eastern Europe – in Poland, in Rumania, in the Baltic States; or she could have alliances with the anti-Soviet Governments of these countries at the price of driving the Soviet Union into the hostile camp. British diplomacy was too simple-minded, and too ignorant of eastern Europe, to understand the hard choice before it. It plunged impetuously into the pacts of guarantee with Poland and Rumania; and within a few days, on May 3, 1939, the resignation of Litvinov and his replacement by Molotov signalled a vital change in Soviet foreign policy. The British mission which had been sent to Moscow found itself unable to make any progress. Negotiations continued; but unless Great Britain was prepared to abandon the Polish alliance, or put severe pressure on her new ally, their eventual break-down was certain. When Hitler decided to wait no longer, Stalin for his part did not hesitate. Ribbentrop came to Moscow and the German-Soviet treaty was signed. It is fair to infer that Stalin regarded it as a pis aller. He would have preferred alliance with the western Powers, but could not have it on any terms which he would have found tolerable.

      Uneasy Neutrality

      Twenty-two months of most uneasy neutrality followed. The German advance in Poland was answered by a corresponding Soviet move to reoccupy the White Russian territories ceded to Poland by the treaty of Riga in 1921. Thus, by the autumn of 1939, Soviet and German power already confronted each other in Poland, on the Danube, and on the Baltic. The war against Finland in the winter of 1939-40 was designed to strengthen the defences of Leningrad by pushing forward the frontier in a westerly direction. It eventually achieved this object, but at the cost of much discredit to Soviet prestige and the formal expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations.

      After the fall of France, Soviet fears of German victory and German predominance grew apace; and military and industrial preparations were pressed forward. Stalin now probably foresaw the inevitability of conflict, but was determined not to provoke or hasten it. In November, 1940, he sent Molotov on a visit to Berlin without being able to mitigate the palpable clash of interests. On the other hand, Japanese neutrality was assured when Matsuoka was effusively received in Moscow in April, 1941. In the following month Stalin, hitherto only Secretary-General of the party and without official rank, became President of the Council of People’s Commissars – the Soviet Prime Minister. The appointment sounded a note of alarm at home and of warning abroad.

      Russia СКАЧАТЬ