His close associates were equally determined to consolidate the authority of their gang. But almost always in the course of the First Five-Year Plan it was Stalin who took the initiative in persecuting or suppressing the group’s enemies. No one was more suspicious and aggressive. Yet his maladjusted personality was not the only factor at work. Although he exaggerated the scale of immediate menace to the leading group, he and his associates had cause for anxiety. Trotski was active abroad. Bukharin became editor of the government’s newspaper
Furthermore, expressions of disgust about ‘peasant questions’ were commonplace in the Red Army. Since the armed forces were imposing official agrarian policy, this had to be a cause for concern. Soldiers widely hated the collective farms. Rumours were rife. In 1930 a story flew around the Moscow Military District that Voroshilov had killed Stalin.33 The implication was obvious: a yearning existed for a change in policy. Having identified himself as the protagonist of radical change, Stalin had made himself the target of unpopularity.
At every level of authority in the USSR there was discontent. The regional party officials felt a growing concern about Stalin’s unpredictable and violent inclinations; they did not warm to the possibility that he might go on putting pressure on them for increased rates of economic growth — and the First Five-Year Plan had made such officials more powerful than under the NEP. The party had been the vanguard institution of the Five-Year Plan. As the state took private economic sectors into its ownership and as the whole economy expanded, so each regional party official acquired enormous authority. With this authority, though, there came massive responsibility. Many officials, harassed by the Kremlin’s imposition of production quotas and acquainted with the enormous disorder and discontent across their regions, yearned for a period of retrenchment rather than continued rapid transformation. The leadership of several People’s Commissariats in Moscow and the provinces felt similar unease about Stalin and the Politburo. The Soviet state, while gaining much from the policies of the First Five-Year Plan, was far from being reconciled to unthinking acceptance of whatever policies were handed down from on high.
Below the stratosphere of party and governmental officialdom there were millions of malcontents. Oppositionists in their thousands were waiting for Stalin’s fall. Outside the ranks of Bolshevism there were still more irreconcilables. Most Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Kadets had ceased political activity; but they were willing to start operating again if the opportunity arose. The same was true of Borotbists, Dashnaks, Musavatists and the many other national parties which had been suppressed in the Civil War. Then there were the priests, mullahs and rabbis who had suffered persecution by the Bolsheviks, and, although up to three million people had emigrated after the October Revolution, there remained plenty of former aristocrats, bankers, industrialists, landowners and shopkeepers who continued to long for the Soviet state’s collapse.
Years of state violence and popular hardship had deepened the reservoir of anger with the regime. Kulaks and their supporters had been killed and deported. Industrial managers and other experts had been persecuted. ‘Bourgeois nationalists’, including Russian ones, had been imprisoned. Remaining religious leaders had been persecuted. Show trials had been organised in Moscow and the provinces. The labour-camp system held a million convicts. Whole zones in north Russia, Siberia and Kazakhstan were inhabited by involuntary colonists who lived and worked in conditions scarcely better than prison. Hostility to the regime was not confined to those who had suffered arrest or deportation. Peasants on the collective farms, especially in the famine areas, hated the agricultural system imposed on the villages. Workers were annoyed by the failure of the authorities to fulfil their promise to raise the popular standard of living. Even the newly promoted administrators in politics and the economy contained many who disliked the harsh practices of the regime. The display of obedience did not tell the whole truth. A multitude of individuals suffered from the punitive, arbitrary workings of the Soviet order and might be counted on to support almost any movement against Stalin and his policies.
