Stalin полностью

STALIN WAS NOT FINISHED with the Short Course. On October 11–12, 1938, he convened a two-day expanded session of the politburo (an ersatz Central Committee plenum), tasking Zhdanov with delivering the main report. For the first time since 1935, a stenographic record was kept of a politburo session, indicating an intention to circulate the discussion to party members not present. In attendance was the new crop of regional bosses, most of whose predecessors had been put to death. “Did everyone read it, we need to ask, and what are the remarks?” Stalin inquired of the textbook. Molotov chimed in: “Are there comrades who did not read the draft?” Voices: “No, everyone read it.” Troshin, from the Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) province party committee, spoke up: “Many propagandists and district secretaries at the courses say that they understand chapter 4 [“dialectical materialism”] . . . only with the greatest difficulty.” Stalin angrily interjected: “That means they have read nothing—not Marx, not Engels.” Molotov chided the Gorky comrades for not being able to find a few agitators capable of delivering explanatory lectures. But Oleksandr Khomenko, the head of the propaganda department in the Kiev province party, also said the text was not easy, citing a colleague. Molotov: “If the comrade had earlier read and really knew the history of the party, why are insurmountable difficulties arising for him now?” Khomenko: “He knew the history of the party, comrade Molotov, in terms of those textbooks which we had, and those textbooks were manifestly unsatisfactory.” Stalin erupted again: “So it happens like this: some study the history of the party but do not consider themselves obliged to study Marx; others study dialectical materialism and do not consider themselves obliged to study the history of the party.”

The party officials whom Stalin had promoted to replace those he had murdered were telling him the truth: they could not manage the Short Course intended especially for them.

Stalin asked for the floor. He stressed how, back before 1929, small individual household farms had become predominant, how the establishment of large-scale collectivized farms had been a matter of national survival, and how only Marxism-Leninism allowed one to understand all this. “If cadres determine everything, and that means cadres who work with their intellect, cadres who administer the country, and if these cadres turn out to be politically weakly grounded, that means the state is threatened with danger,” he warned, giving as an example the Bukharinites, calling “their top layer” irredeemable foreign agents. “But besides the heads, Bukharin and others, there were masses of them, and not all of them were spies and foreign intelligence operatives.” Stalin continued: “One may assume that 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, and more were people of Bukharin. One may assume that just as many, and maybe more, were people of Trotskyism. What do you think, were all of them spies? Of course not.”

Here was a startling admission two years into a mass terror that had seen some 1.6 million arrests. “What had happened to them?” Stalin continued. “These were cadres who could not swallow the big changeover to the collective farm system, could not comprehend this big changeover, because they were not politically well grounded; they did not know the laws of development of society, the laws of economic development, the laws of political development.” He allowed that “we lost many, but we acquired new cadres who won over the people to collectivization and won over the peasant. Only this explains why we were able so easily to replace yesterday’s party elite.”¹³⁵

He returned, in conclusion, to collectivization: “The key is the chapter about why we went for collective farms. What was this? Was it the caprice of the leaders, the [ideological] itch of the leaders, who (so we are told) read through Marx, drew conclusions, and then, if you please, restructured the whole country according to those conclusions? Was collectivization just something invented—or was it necessity? Those who didn’t understand a damn thing about economics—all those rightists, who didn’t have the slightest understanding of our society either theoretically or economically, nor the slightest understanding of the laws of historical development, nor the essence of Marxism—they could say such things as suggesting that we turn away from the collective farms and take the capitalist path of development in agriculture.”¹³⁶ The Short Course reconfirmed that the terror emanated from Stalin’s mind, not as a response to crisis but as a theory of Soviet history and his rule: party opposition to collectivization, a new generation of functionaries, pedagogy.

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