Stalin полностью

Stalin, however, was not ready to surrender on winning over Nazi Germany. On July 1, 1934, following the conclusion of the Central Committee plenum, Dimitrov sent him a draft of his political report for a proposed 7th Comintern Congress (scheduled for the fall). Dimitrov could defy Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels, but he remained inordinately deferential toward the Soviet dictator. Stalin, in turn, asked that Dimitrov “consider” his suggestions, and his marginal comments indicate that he was far from letting go of his thesis on Social Democracy as the left wing of fascism. Dimitrov’s text asked “whether it is correct to refer to Social Democracy indiscriminately as social fascism,” and “Are Social Democrats always and everywhere the main social bulwark of the bourgeoisie?” Stalin wrote in the margins, “As to the leadership—yes, but not ‘indiscriminate.’” Beyond this tiny concession, where Dimitrov gently tried to rehabilitate some Social Democrats as a basis for cooperation in the struggle against fascism, Stalin pointedly inserted, “Against whom is this thesis?”³²² On July 5, the politburo was informed that Germany, still suffering the effects of the Depression, had raised the prospect of a 200-million-mark credit for the purchase of German machinery.³²³ Dimitrov, suffering from latent malaria, chronic gastritis, and other illnesses, departed for two months to Georgia on medical leave.

STRENGTHENING SOCIALIST LEGALITY

On July 10, 1934, after six months of internal back-and-forth, the regime announced the replacement of the OGPU by the NKVD (the people’s commissariat of internal affairs).³²⁴ Mężyński had appealed to Stalin yet again in early 1934 to be allowed to resign. (“No activities. Only lying down 24 hours a day,” he had written in his notebook in Kislovodsk. “This is death. You lie all day in the hammock, and death sits across from you.”)³²⁵ Stalin proposed that Kaganovich confer with him and possibly accept his request. Then, on May 10, Mężyński’s heart had stopped. Four days later, his ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall, with an artillery salute.³²⁶ Rumors had Stalin set to appoint Mikoyan, which frightened Yagoda’s gang and brightened other Chekists who appreciated Mikoyan’s sly humor and lectures at their club.³²⁷ But Stalin named Yagoda commissar and Yankel Sorenson, known as Yakov Agranov, his first deputy.³²⁸ The regime had just expanded Article 58 of the RSFSR criminal code (regarding counterrevolutionary activities) with new subarticles (2–13) to cover attempts to seize power, espionage, anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation, and Trotskyism.³²⁹ As Stalin had proposed, military desertion was now punished as treason, with sentences of execution or, in extenuating circumstances, ten years in confinement.³³⁰ Nonetheless, the formation of the NKVD was conceived as a genuine legal reform.³³¹ The politburo would soon decree a parallel expansion in the number of judges and procuracy personnel, with pay raises.³³² Kaganovich explained that “the reorganization of the OGPU means that, as we are in more normal times, we can punish through the court and not resort to extrajudicial repression, as we have until now.”³³³

This new mandate had to be explained to police operatives.³³⁴ “In capitalist countries, instead of the ‘celebrated’ bourgeois order, there is chaos, a sea of blood, extrajudicial executions, gas, machine guns and armored cars on the streets,” Yagoda told them in a speech at the NKVD’s founding. “If now, in the village, we do not have expansive kulak formations that we had previously, if in the city the counterrevolution does not have the character it had before, the question arises: What guises, what forms are possible for the activities of counterrevolutionary agents?” He answered that former parties (SRs, Mensheviks, bourgeois nationalists) could reanimate and link up with Communist oppositionist elements (Trotskyites, rightists) for espionage and sabotage, requiring the NKVD to abjure mass arrests in favor of “subtle, painstaking, and probing investigations.”³³⁵ Investigations had to be conducted with greater observance of procedural rules.³³⁶ Ultimately, the reform was aimed at better coherence of the state, under the slogan “strengthening revolutionary legality.”³³⁷ But none of this meant imposing limits on Stalin’s power, whose extralegal operation caused many of the very problems of arbitrariness about which he complained.³³⁸

ARTISTS AND THE STATE