Stalin: A Biography полностью

It was against this background that the destabilising economic measures had been introduced from the mid-1920s. Stalin had long had a penchant for economic autarky. Unless state policy produced indigenous industrial growth, he assumed, it was inappropriate. He had written to Molotov in June 1925:¹⁰

Whereas Bukharin advocated industrialisation at a slowish pace and tried to discourage demands for acceleration, Stalin displayed increasing frustration. The partnership of Stalin and Bukharin was disintegrating without either of them yet anticipating that a decisive rupture was about to occur. They still got on well in the Politburo. They also saw each other socially. But Stalin’s ideas were hardening. In December 1926 he denied that the USSR would take fifty or more years to match the volume of the economics of foreign capitalist powers. Indeed he declared that ‘giant steps’ forward could and should be taken.¹¹

Stalin’s contribution to discussions of economic policy until January 1928 had been of a measured nature and — apart from his licensed attacks on the internal party oppositions — his outward behaviour had been calm since Lenin’s death. His rivals had some excuse for misreading the situation; but it was not a mistake they were going to be able to repeat without pain. Stalin was acting craftily. He breathed not a word to Bukharin about the war on the countryside he was about to start. Closeted for two days on the Trans-Siberian Railway with his aide Alexander Poskrëbyshev and others, though, he was in a pugnacious frame of mind. (Poskrëbyshev was the latest of Stalin’s personal assistants and was to remain in post until 1953.) Anybody who got in Stalin’s way on his trip was going to receive ferocious treatment. On arrival in Novosibirsk, he ordered arrests of ‘anti-Soviet’ kulaks. Grain procurement quotas were to be fulfilled. The campaign started to ‘expand the establishment’ of collective farms.¹² Squads were assembled in west Siberia and the Urals to collect the quotas set for grain collection. They travelled out to the farms armed to the teeth and grabbed whatever produce they discovered. As in 1918–20, Bolsheviks entered villages, summoned peasant gatherings and demanded immediate compliance at gunpoint.

Stalin returned to Moscow on 6 February 1928 with wagons of grain seized from ‘hoarders’. Pravda celebrated the achievement.¹³ It seemed that Stalin’s line had triumphed without resistance in the central party leadership. He and the other leaders insisted that the ‘middle peasants’ as well as the kulaks needed to be coerced into releasing their harvests.¹⁴ Bukharin was outraged. The change in policy had been undertaken in the provinces without prior sanction by the Politburo or the Central Committee. There was no precedent in the party’s history. Stalin had arrived in Moscow like a thief with his loot; instead of acknowledging his crime, he expected to have his virtue commended. The Politburo was in uproar. Its members stopped speaking to each other outside official meetings. When challenged about his policies, Stalin grew angry and imperious. Bukharin complained to him about his demeanour on 16 April. Stalin wrote back: ‘You won’t force me to stay quiet or hide my opinion by your shrieks about “my wanting to teach everybody”. Is an end ever going to be put to the attacks on me?’¹⁵ These words combined self-righteousness and over-sensitivity in a pugnacious mixture.