Stalin had read the national mood correctly. His campaign against gradualists and bourgeois specialists was replicated in practically every administrative and professional institution in the country as impatient radicals attacked their more cautious colleagues and those who remained from the tsarist period. The state taxed the private economic sector out of existence, ended the market experiment, and dispossessed even small-scale entrepreneurs. Workers and peasants received preferential treatment in spheres such as education, and NEP’s permissive social and artistic experiments came under full-scale attack. The succession to Lenin was over, NEP was abandoned, and a cultural revolution had begun.
But consolidating the revolution entailed more than seizing the commanding heights of politics. Better than any other high-ranking Bolshevik, Stalin had understood the significance of the changing size and character of the party in the 1920s. From 23,600 in January 1917 it had expanded to 750,000 at the beginning of NEP. This number contracted to fewer than 500,000 at the time the Lenin Enrolment began in 1924, but by the end of the decade total membership had climbed to 1.5 million (including candidate members). In general, the new recruits were young, urban, male, and poorly educated.
Numbers alone, however, do not tell the full story. The All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)—the party’s official name until 1952—differed significantly from pre-revolutionary Bolshevism. Whereas participation in an illegal, underground cadre required a special revolutionary dedication, the new circumstances demanded other things of those who joined after 1921. Whereas the pre-revolutionary party put a premium on loyalty and proficiency in ideological matters (with sophistication in Marxist theory a prerequisite for a leading position), NEP required different criteria, not always appreciated by the old guard. An ability to carry out assignments, even a certain ruthlessness, proved more important once the party was in power. Indeed, Stalin’s dubious credentials as a theorist, which had first caused experienced Bolsheviks to underestimate him, were not nearly as important to the new recruits. Moreover, Stalin appealed to the idealism that appeared, especially among the young, in the last years of NEP. Appointment powers and the ferocity of Soviet politics notwithstanding, Stalin could not have triumphed had he been supported only by ideologues, cynics, and opportunists. His supporters also included many idealists who believed that measures like the Five-Year Plan, collectivization of agriculture, and cultural revolution held the key to the transition to genuine socialism. For the young radicals attracted by Stalin’s opposition to NEP, the policy had never been a pragmatic retreat, but a betrayal of the basic ideals and goals of the revolution.
Harnessing such idealism was important. While it is true that party members now held key positions in most institutions and enterprises, this alone did not ensure total control or total obedience. Throughout the decade local officials continued to ignore central directives, formulate policy on their own, behave dishonestly and immorally, and in general to comport themselves in ways that reflected badly on Soviet power. And as late as 1929, the Soviet administrative apparatus barely existed in the countryside. In sum, by 1929 the politics of consolidating Red October and Stalin’s emergence as leader had led to a redefinition of leadership and, by extension, of the party itself. All this provided the immediate background for the different kind of revolution that would commence with the ‘Great Turn’ of 1929–30.
Foreign Policy of an Internationalist State
International politics presented a special challenge for the Soviet state. In the Marxist schema, the Russian Revolution was but the first of a forthcoming wave of proletarian uprisings that the communists would lead and support. In the conditions of 1921– 9, however, the Bolsheviks could furnish little more than encouragement and example; Soviet Russia during NEP needed not the rapid exportation of revolution, but above all time to heal its wounds and strengthen itself militarily. Thus, while by no means abandoning the Marxist vision of the future, the immediate focus of Soviet foreign policy was survival and state interest. Not surprisingly, Bolshevik international behaviour was also entwined with Soviet domestic politics.
