What Bukharin had not bargained for was the reaction of several powerful leaders. He had expected Voroshilov and Kalinin to criticise what had happened in the Urals and Siberia.21 Even Ordzhonikidze was sometimes disloyal to Stalin behind the scenes.22 Bukharin remained hopeful that he could win over individuals such as OGPU leader Yagoda as well as the rest of the party. The reversion to War Communism had to be exposed for what it was.23 Yet Stalin won all of them to his side. (It was said that Kalinin’s weakness for ballerinas allowed Stalin to put pressure on him.) By summer 1928 Bukharin was becoming frantic. He even started to worry that Stalin would bring Kamenev and Zinoviev back into public politics as useful allies. Bukharin made overtures to Kamenev to prevent this. ‘The disagreements between us and Stalin,’ he told him, ‘are many times more serious than all the ones we had with you. The Rightists… wanted Kamenev and Zinoviev restored to the Politburo.’24 Bukharin’s overtures were a sign of panic. He could not assemble sufficient support at the highest party levels. His sole prominent allies against the General Secretary were Rykov, Tomski and Uglanov.
Yet Bukharin believed that the ‘Urals-Siberian method’ would be disowned and that the market mechanisms of Lenin’s NEP restored. Initially his optimism seemed justified. The ‘excesses’ reported in the expropriation campaign were officially castigated and denials were issued that the ‘extraordinary measures’ implied an abandonment of the NEP. Although Stalin successfully insisted that a stronger commitment to early collectivisation also be inserted into public statements, the feeling was widespread that he had damaged himself politically.
Bukharin did not give up. Having written inscrutable prose for most of his adult life, he came down to earth and published ‘Notes of an Economist’. Bukharin castigated ideas of ‘super-industrialisation’. According to him, these were Trotskyist and anti-Leninist. He claimed that only a balanced, steady relationship between the interests of industry and agriculture would secure healthy economic development.25 There was nothing in the ‘Notes’ that jarred against anything Stalin had said up to 1928; and since Stalin still avoided disowning the NEP, Bukharin did not need special permission to publish what he wanted in the hope of neutralising a politician whom he had come to regard as the USSR’s Genghis Khan.26 But he also misjudged Stalin by assuming that all that interested him was to keep power.27 What had started as a crisis over food supplies had acquired other dimensions. Stalin’s group in the Politburo and Central Committee were not going to be satisfied by changes to agricultural measures. They wanted fast industrial progress and military security. They wished to crush nationalism and religiosity. They aimed to eradicate hostility to the Soviet regime, and the remnants of the old propertied classes were to be got rid of. Cities, schools and cinemas had to be established. Socialism was to be spread as an idea and a practical reality.
Stalin and Bukharin clashed every time they met. In his condition of heightened expectancy, Stalin applied his programme to international relations. He now denied that ‘capitalist stabilisation’ prevailed, and he declared that the world economy was facing yet another fundamental emergency. He resolved that this should be reflected in the world communist movement. Before the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in July 1928, Stalin declared that anti-communist socialists in Europe — members of labour and social-democratic parties — were the deadliest enemies of socialism. He called them ‘social-fascists’. Bukharin was horrified: he understood the dangers posed by the European far right. Appreciating the qualitative difference between conservatism and fascism, he wanted Hitler’s Nazis to be the main object of the German Communist Party’s political attack. But Stalin amassed the support required in the Politburo for a change of policy in the Comintern. The internal breach with the NEP obtained an external aspect. Until then it had been the official line that world capitalism had stabilised itself after the Great War. Now Stalin insisted that a ‘third period’ had commenced as capitalism entered its terminal crisis and that revolutionary opportunities were about to present themselves in Europe.
