This had been under discussion in the Politburo for a year or two but no serious alteration of the Comintern’s practical instructions to Europe’s communist parties had followed. Wanting to do down Bukharin, Stalin had a personal interest in changing policy. But there was probably more to it. Stalin had had doubts about ‘European socialist revolution’ in 1917–18. Yet his scepticism was absolute and sometimes his Bolshevik instincts took him over. Aiming at the transformation of the USSR, he might have been reverting to radical type. From mid-1928, however, Stain’s group ordered communists throughout the continent to adopt the stance taken by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Extreme radicalism became dominant again and the Comintern, at the Politburo’s instigation, purged the doubters and vacillators — as well as the Trotskyists — from the ranks of its parties. World communism was being readied for the imminent revolutionary upheaval.
Stalin, while insisting that revolutions were about to break out in Europe, continued to stipulate that the Russian Communist Party should concentrate on building ‘socialism in one country’. His enemies took this as proof that Stalin was a hypocrite or a bungler. Trotski reminded everyone of Stalin’s cack-handed instructions to the Chinese Communist Party in 1927; Bukharin was baffled by the turn in policy. There was no fundamental paradox in Stalin’s change of policy. His controversial commitment to socialism in one country did not imply a basic disregard for the necessity of international revolution. Stalin had never ceased to accept that the USSR would face problems of security until such time as one or more of the globe’s great powers underwent a revolution of the Soviet kind. This did not mean, however, that he was willing to risk direct intervention in Europe; he still feared provoking a crusade against the USSR. But he no longer sought to restrain the communist parties in Germany, France and Italy which had made no secret of their frustration with the Comintern’s insistence that they should collaborate with social-democratic and labour parties in their countries.
He seldom did anything for one sole reason. When allied to Bukharin before 1928, Stalin left a lot of the handling of the Comintern to him. Bukharin had many supporters in leading positions in the foreign parties. By altering policy and expelling dissenters, Stalin could bring his own people to the top. Prone to moodiness, Bukharin contemplated resigning as a means of putting pressure on Stalin.28 Stalin had frequently offered his own resignation from posts since the October Revolution; but he would not have treated Bukharin with the indulgence which he himself had received. His only idea of victory involved crushing and humiliating the enemy.
Much ground had already been prepared for him. In moving forward to comprehensive state ownership and regulation, the ascendant party leadership was moving backwards towards the Soviet economic system of the period of the Civil War. The Supreme Council of the People’s Economy had been established to supervise all economic activity after the October Revolution.29 The banking and industrial sectors had been seized by the state in the Civil War and much had subsequently been retained. Gosplan had been created in February 1921. After starting the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin and his associates suggested that they were initiating a calculated strategy from this transformation. The word ‘plan’ implied that this was the case. No such strategy in any definitive form existed and there were many zigzags on the route to transformation. Policies were modified and sometimes abandoned. Once announced, targets for economic growth were frequently altered. Yet Stalin was not without a compass when he threw the NEP overboard. Although he lacked a calculated strategy, he always possessed a set of operational assumptions, and these assumptions were shared by many in the central and local party leaderships.
