33. Sochineniia, XII: 92–3. Bukharin: “Extraordinary measures is the repeal of NEP, although temporarily, of course. Extraordinary measures as a system exclude the NEP.” Orjonikidze interrupted: “You [try to] solve the difficulties this year with grain imports, and next year you do the same?” Bukharin, Problemy, 289. A brief mention of the April 29 plenum was published in Pravda, April 30, 1930. The plenum’s resolutions were first published in 1933: VKP (b) v rezoliutsiiakh (1933), II: 515–30.
34. Davies, Economic Transformation, 286.
35. Pravda, July 20, 1929. The official exchange rate for the ruble—which was not a convertible currency—was set at 1.9415 to the U.S. dollar. Therefore, one gold ruble in foreign trade equaled 51.7 U.S. cents (until early 1933, when the dollar left the gold standard, and the ruble exchange rate was set on the basis of a cross-exchange rate of the currency in question to the French franc, with one ruble equal to 13.1 francs). Gold or foreign trade rubles had no relation to domestic rubles. Dohan, “Soviet Foreign Trade,” 701–8. Kaganovich would cite “local demands” for new coercive measures; obviously, he instigated them. Rees, Iron Lazar, 94–5 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 3188, l. 95; op. 2, d. 417, l. 57–8, 291–3); Taniuchi, Village Gathering.
36. Mikhail Sholokhov wrote in letters to an acquaintance (E. G. Lebitskaya) in July 1929 of one peasant, “He told me with a bitter smile, ‘They [the Whites] at least took only grain and horses, but our own [Soviet] power takes down to the thread.’” Znamia, 1987, no. 10: 181, 183. “See also Chernopitskii, Na velikom perelome, 40–1 (citing PARO, f. 7, op. 1, d. 844, l. 202).
37. Mikoyan added, “Of course we would have inevitably come to grips with this task sometime, but it is a question of timing.” Mikoian, Problema snabzheniia strany, 60.
38. Pavlov, Anastas Mikoian, 52 (citing RGASPI, f. 84, op. 3, d. 62, l. 73: Aug. 1929). See also RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 73, l. 50; and Ivnitskii, Repressivnaia politika sovetskoi vlasti, 59–60. Between 1928 and 1935, Mikoyan would undertake more than twenty regional trips in connection with coercive grain collections. Pavlov, Anastas Mikoian, 49 (citing RGASPI, f. 84, op. 3, d. 167, l. 411–2).
39. VKP (b) v rezoliutsiiakh (1933), II: 531–73. The “plan” was actually in effect as of Oct. 1, 1928. Zaleski, Planning for Economic Growth, 70n205, 74; Zaleski, Stalinist Planning, 54; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, I/i: 248–52, I/ii: 890–7.
40. Brovkin, Russia after Lenin, 122–5 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 69, d. 126, l. 5, 107, 117; f. 1, op. 23, d. 821, l. 22). See also Fischer, Men and Politics, 187. Oral exams of university students in 1927 had returned answers that (the Russian anarchist) Bakunin was a French revolutionary who had led the (British) Chartist movement, and that imperialism was the best path to socialism. One student thought the Communist Youth League was “an international organization of the homeless.” Holmes, Kremlin and the Schoolhouse, 60–1. Such surveys revealed more than the anxieties of the ambitious revolutionary regime. Gorsuch, Youth.
41. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh (7th ed.), II: 450.
42. “People often forget,” Izvestiya explained (May 23, 1929), “that the Five-Year Plan defines our foreign policy,” making it necessary “to delay the war threat and make use of . . . world markets.”
43. Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, 3–5.
44. Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, 86–7.
