Assessing Gorbachev

In my opinion, Mikhail Gorbachev deserves enormous credit for both the peaceful ending of the dictatorship and cold war and the decline and collapse of the Soviet state because I cannot imagine one happening without the other. Moreover, the see the decline and collapse of the USSR as having been an overwhelmingly positive thing, even if events since then for Russia and the other constituent republics have often been difficult. Gorbachev sought to dismantle the system more cautiously and slowly, so the chaos and anarchy that erupted in some places cannot, in my opinion, be blamed on him.

Regarding Gorbachev's most positive accomplishment, I believe that it was ending the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. With literally no end in sight for the Soviet troops fighting there, growing discontent over the war among the Soviet public – particularly among the USSR's Muslim ethnicities – and the monumental cost of the intervention with little or no gain, it is frankly amazing to me that Brezhnev persisted in the war for as long as he did, although the U.S. record in its own intervention in Vietnam left at least as much to be desired.

Regarding Gorbachev's worst miscalculation, I think his failure to assess his opponents within the Soviet government was the chief issue. While it certainly could not have been easy to manage criticism from his left from the entrenched interests of the military and security apparatuses and, at the same time, more right-wing pressure from the likes of Boris Yeltsin, a more savvy politician might have been able to insulate himself sufficiently from the sorts of threats that these groups posed and prevented the August 1991 coup and the rapid deterioration of his power that followed. More importantly, better management of the political terrain might have allowed Gorbachev to control the final collapse of the USSR more competently, thus perhaps averting some of the tragedy that has since ensued.

Finally, on a personal note, I lived through the collapse of the final year of the Soviet Union and remember the events very well. I recall Gorbachev returning to power when the August coup was crushed and the disappearance of the Soviet Union four months. I remember thinking then that Mikhail Gorbachev might have been the greatest leader of the 20th century for what he accomplished. Certainly he was the most significant, in the same way that Hitler was (in my opinion) for the first half. If everything about Europe mid-century was more or less a direct result of the catastrophic policies that Hitler pursued, then Gorbachev was ultimately the person who was responsible for that landscape having changed so enormously by the century's end.

Stalinism Without Stalin

In the "Secret Speech" from the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev seems to want to both expose Stalinism for its worst excesses and maintain Stalinism, at least ideologically. In some ways, this complex stance exemplifies Khrushchev's own strengths and weaknesses. On the former point, the selection from the speech is replete with direct attacks on Stalin, so virtually any excerpt could be chosen at random to provide an example. In his own administration, Khrushchev sought to undo the greater censorship and emphasis on Socialist Realism that characterized Stalin's regime. An example relevant to this week's readings is the allowing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to be published in 1962 – an event that demonstrated both an easing of censorship and a deviation from the prescribed literary form.[1] 

On the latter point of continuing Stalinism without Stalin, Khrushchev says in the speech that Stalin "played a positive role" by eliminating the Left and Right Oppositions and opposing nationalism, writing, "This was a stubborn and a difficult fight but a necessary one, because the political line of both the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc and of the Bukharinites led actually toward the restoration of capitalism and capitulation to the world bourgeoisie."[2] On the point of nationalism, this is a false statement – Stalin encouraged nationalism, provided it was Russian nationalism. On the point of the opposition blocs led by Trotsky and Bukharin, the point is equally devious because Khrushchev was as ignorant of the role of the peasantry in the Soviet state as the leaders who preceded him, despite his peasant origins. Finally, Khrushchev was no more dedicated to "socialism in one state" than Stalin himself; like Stalin, Khrushchev pursued aggressive policies within the Soviet sphere of influence (e.g., intervention in East Germany and Hungary) and sought to export Soviet communism (his courting of Castro). Perhaps the key point here is that Khrushchev's expressions of support of Stalinist policy were as sincere as Stalin's own support – which is to say not very sincere. 

As already noted, the mere fact that Solzhenitsyn's work was published openly in the 1960s in the Soviet Union was emblematic of the liberalization and relaxation of censorship under Khrushchev. By 1974, under Brezhnev, the trend had reversed sufficiently that Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country. If the content of the "Letter to the Soviet Leaders" is an indication, his expulsion was due in part to his criticism of not only Stalin or Stalin's version of Marxism but of Marxism in general. For instance, he writes, "Marxism is not only not accurate, is not only not a science, has not only failed to predict a single event in terms of figures, quantities, time-scales or locations … it absolutely astounds one by the economic  and mechanistic  crudity of its attempts to explain that most subtle of creatures, the human being."[3] 

With regard to Andrei Sakharov's critique from the same period, he seems to limit himself largely to criticisms specifically of Stalin and of abuses that are not inherent to Marxism. He makes many direct comparisons between Stalin and Hitler, for instance, but only rarely mentions socialism. When he does, he accuses Stalin of using Hitler's demagogy on a basis of "progressive, scientific, and popular socialist ideology"[4] after already having established the "lofty moral ideals of socialism."[5] Unlike Solzhenitsyn, he does not attack the ideology lying at the core of the state. Therefore, it seems as if there was liberalization in matters of freedom of expression following the death of Stalin – with more freedom under Khrushchev than under Brezhnev, it should be noted – but that there were still "third rails" that had to be left alone, the communist system and ideology chief among them. 

==== 

     [1] M.K. Dzeiwanowski, Russia in the Twentieth Century, 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003), 323. 

     [2] Nikita Khrushchev, "Speech to the 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U.," Accessed May 15, 2016,https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24-abs.htm, para 8. 

     [3] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Letter to the Soviet Leaders," Accessed May 15, 2016, https://snhu-media.snhu.edu/files/course_repository/undergraduate/his/his235/aleksandr_solzhenitsyn_letter_to_the_soviet_leaders_1974.pdf, page 2, para 7. 

     [4] Andrei Sakharov, "Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," Accessed May 15, 2016, https://snhu-media.snhu.edu/files/course_repository/undergraduate/his/his235/andrei_sakharov_progress_coexistence_and_intellectual_freedom_1974.pdf, page 2, para 1. 

     [5] Ibid, page 1, para 2. 

Nazi Germany and the Great Purges

Among the aspects of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union under I.V. Stalin that have most confused scholars, the purge of the Red Army of some of its highest-ranking and most talented officers must surely rank among the most baffling. The vast majority of scholars agree that the USSR was poorly prepared for the Nazi invasion in 1941, and given the siege mentality of the Soviet leadership during the 1920s and 1930s, a conscious choice to eliminate the most component military leaders seems insane.  However, a closer examination of the geopolitical context of Europe in the 1930s and of the historical evidence reveals a more calculated series of events than might first appear to have occurred. Specifically, beginning in 1932 and through the negotiation of the Hitler-Stalin pact in the summer of 1939, Stalin's actions as leader of the USSR, including the 1937 purge of the army, reflected temporal concerns about the rise of Hitler, Nazi German diplomacy in the mid-1930s, and the Spanish Civil War.

            When the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) won pluralities in the parliamentary elections of July and November 1932, culminating in the appointment of Hitler as chancellor at the end of January 1933, the party was victorious in part based on its platform from 1932. This platform’s position on communism is clear: the NSDAP sought to "Eliminate the Marxist threat."[1] Moreover, in Mein Kampf, Hitler is brutally explicit about his intentions for the USSR: "Impossible as it is for the Russian by himself to shake off the yoke of the Jew by his own resources, it is equally impossible for the Jew to maintain the mighty empire forever […] And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state."[2] In the same chapter, Hitler, addressing the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum, writes, "If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states."[3]

            Even before the November election in Germany, however, the opposition to Stalin within the Communist Party had begun to express concern about Germany's direction. More importantly, the expression of this concern came in the context of a scandal believed to play a significant role in the decision to launch the Great Purges. Specifically, on September 23, 1932, M.N. Ryutin, an Old Bolshevik, former party member, and sympathizer of the former Right Opposition, was arrested for leading a group calling itself the Union of Marxist-Leninists and for authoring calls to oust Stalin from power.

            Two documents were written by Ryutin's group: a brief call to action circulated among oppositionists and a 200-page manifesto entitled "Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship," also known as the Ryutin Platform. While the manifesto was primarily concerned with the damage done to Soviet agriculture by the rapid collectivization of Soviet farms, it also criticized Stalin on matters of foreign policy. References to the economic and political situations in many countries, including China, the United Kingdom, and Poland, appear several times, and in three places, the contemporaneous situation in Germany is discussed.

            The first reference regards the combined efforts of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the NSDAP to dissolve the Reichstag in 1932; Ryutin states that Stalin's sophistry is evidenced by his having said that the KPD "comes 'close' to the Fascists,"[4] for cooperating thus. Near the end of the Platform, Ryutin also likens the Stalin dictatorship and its destruction of party democracy to the failure of "German Social Democracy,"[5] which in the fall of 1932 seemed all but certain. Finally, and most importantly, in analyzing Stalin's negative effects on the Communist International (Comintern), Ryutin refers to the German parliamentary elections, as well as the presidential election of March and April 1932, in which the KPD head Ernst Thälmann finished a distant third, behind Hitler and the re-elected President Paul von Hindenburg. Ryutin concedes that the KPD has grown in numbers, but its failure to win executive office, he argues, is evidence of Stalin having brought the Comintern to crisis.[6] In short, the failure of democracy in Germany and the imminent seizure of power by the NSDAP were hard evidence for Stalin's failed foreign policy.

            Several scholars[7] have noted the importance of the Ryutin Platform to the next purported major development in the planning for the Great Purges, i.e., the assassination in December 1934 of S.M. Kirov, head of the Leningrad wing of the Communist Party. As the story had it, Stalin had demanded the death penalty for Ryutin, but a group of "moderates," led by Kirov, had intervened and prevented the penalty from being passed. Ryutin was instead sentenced to a prison term. Among scholars believing that Stalin had engaged in long-term term planning for the Great Purges, several have suggested that Stalin had arranged Kirov's assassination to remove the presence of a significant moderate who would oppose severe repression.

            This story of Kirov's opposition to the death penalty for Ryutin originated from the "Letter of an Old Bolshevik," which originally purported to be a missive sent from within the USSR by a dissident party member. In fact, the author of the letter was B.I. Nicolaevsky, a Menshevik who fled the USSR for Germany after the Civil War, thus casting doubt on the letter's veracity. However, Nicolaevsky's subsequent claim was that he had met Right Opposition leader N.I. Bukharin in Paris and that Bukharin had told him the information in the letter. Since the fall of the USSR, Stalin biographer Robert Tucker has argued convincingly that Nicolaevsky's version of events is true.[8]

            The "Letter" is also useful for the information it provides about repression following the Ryutin Affair but before the Kirov murder, specifically with regard to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Nicolaevsky writes that the rise of Hitler in Germany was initially greeted as a "passing phase" that would last perhaps a few months. "Gradually, however," he writes, "we began to realize that the situation was far more serious than we had thought, that no preventive measures against Hitler by the Western Powers could be expected, and that preparations for a campaign against Russia were in full swing."[9] A major turning point was reached when a scandal erupted:

A big stir was produced by the investigations into and the disclosures regarding German propaganda in the Ukraine, and particularly with regard to the so-called "homosexual conspiracy." The particulars of that conspiracy, which was discovered at the end of 1933, were as follows: An assistant of the German military attache, a friend and follower of the notorious Captain Roehm, managed to enter the homosexual circles in Moscow, and, under cover of a homosexual "organization" (homosexuality was still legal in Russia at that time) started a whole network of National-Socialist propaganda. Its threads extended into the provinces to Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, etc. […] These connections were utilized by the Germans not only to procure military information, but also to sow disintegration in government and party circles. The aims of those directing this conspiracy were so far-reaching that the leaders of Soviet policy were compelled to intervene.[10]

Among the changes made by the Soviet leadership were accession to the League of Nations and agreement to allow the forming of popular fronts between socialist parties in Europe and Comintern-aligned communist parties.[11]

            Although Nicolaevsky specifically names Ernst Röhm, the head of the Sturmabteilung party militia, he remains coy regarding the identities of other people involved. Although only guesses can be made about who was involved in these scandals, Dan Healey of Oxford University has argued that repression of homosexuals in late 1933 and early 1934 was the direct result of the demonization of fascism as having a homosexual core.

In Russia, the decision to recriminalise muzhelozhestvo [sodomy] was preceded by a period of déstabilisation in German-Soviet relations. Military co-operation, based on the Rapallo Treaty, had abruptly ceased in June 1933. By autumn, rumours were circulating in Moscow that Soviet homosexual circles were being infiltrated to acquire military intelligence, by German agents under the command of the homosexual leader of the SA, Captain Ernst Röhm. Such rumours may have been of dubious veracity. Their flimsiness did not stop the crackdown on male homosexuals which was the consequence of the decree of 17 December 1933.[12]

Importantly, both Nicolaevsky, a few years after this anti-gay repression, and Healey both cite the military impact of this alleged homosexual infiltration. As we will see, this notion of German infiltration of the military would remain, although the idea that the infiltration was primarily homosexual in nature seems to have been swept aside.

            If the anti-gay repression of 1933 and 1934 was an early indication of Stalin's concerns about the Nazis, international events only served to increase this concern. After the abrogation of the Rapallo Treaty by Germany, as noted by Healey, the next serious diplomatic challenge to the USSR posed by Nazi Germany came in June 1934, with the conclusion of a German-Polish non-aggression treaty. Because of the loss by the Soviets of the Polish-Soviet war in 1922 and the rigid anti-communism of Polish leader Josef Pilsudski, Soviet leaders, including Stalin, had viewed the Polish Republic as a major security threat. James Harris of the University of Leeds, summarizing Soviet intelligence in the 1930s, notes that, in the summer of 1934, Stalin received intelligence indicating coordinated efforts for war against the USSR by Poland, Germany, and Japan, the last of which had invaded Manchuria in September 1931-- a point Ryutin used in his platform as another example of Stalin's failure of leadership in the Comintern.[13]

            Worry over Germany's pact with Poland was further compounded by intelligence reports of rapprochement between Germany and France.[14] This increased tension was followed the subsequent year not only by the public announcement by Germany that it was rearming, but also by the German-British naval treaty negotiated the following year. Hitler's seemingly systematic diplomatic overtures to capitalist powers in Europe increased concerns of the Soviet Union's encirclement. Harris writes, "There was little reason to assume that Germany (or Poland, or Japan) had given up their ambitions for territorial expansion at the expense of the Soviet Union."[15]

            In the end, however, diplomacy is only diplomacy, and Hitler had already begun to show that he was willing to violate treaties. When an actual shooting war broke out in Spain in the summer of 1936, the situation took on a decidedly different tone. By the time the Spanish Civil War began in July, planning for the first major trial of the Great Purges -- that of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" -- was already under way. Therefore, it is perhaps counterintuitive to see the war in Spain as a factor expediting the undertaking of the purges. However, this argument becomes more coherent if we consider the Great Purges less from the perspective of an overarching plan beginning with Stalin and extending to all levels of Society and more from that of a process begun at the upper levels of Soviet leadership that took on a life of its own once it began.[16]

            Oleg Khlevniuk, a senior researcher at the State Archive of the Russian Federation, has written that the Spanish Civil War likely affected Stalin and therefore the progression of the Great Purges in two manners: first, particularly with German intervention, the war convinced Stalin that the Western powers would not be able to contain Nazi Germany militarily; and second, the intrigues between the Moscow-aligned Communist Party of Spain (PCE), led by José Díaz, and the Trotskyist Workers'  Party of Marxist Unification, led by Andreu Nin, convinced Stalin that a reckoning with the Trotskyist movement was necessary.[17] Khlevniuk writes, "the increase in tension in Spain and in the USSR proceeded simultaneously and in parallel."[18] Moreover, once the Spanish war had begun, Stalin began to undertake actions more clearly linked to wider repression. For instance, as Khlevniuk notes, in September, N.I. Yezhov was appointed head of the USSR's security apparatus, replacing G.G. Yagoda. Yezhov would go on to head up the deadliest phase of the Great Purges.

            For Stalin, however, the international situation only worsened. On November 26, 1936, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, pledging mutual assistance in opposing communism and taking the first step in forming the Axis. With the threats to the USSR's east and west now unified militarily, the repression took on greater speed and magnitude. The second major trial (of K.B. Radek and G.L. Pyatakov, among others) was held in January 1937, and planning began almost immediately for the third major trial, of Bukharin, A.I. Rykov, and other so-called Rightists. Most importantly, on March 29, the purge of the military began in earnest with the dismissal of all officers who were not party members.

Beginning in March, several key military leaders were arrested, primary among them Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky, who had originally risen to prominence in the Civil War and had served as chief of staff. Stalin and the intelligence chiefs had been keeping a dossier on Tukhachevsky for years, but Peter Whitewood of York St. John University identifies as a key event Tukhachevsky's trip abroad in early 1936. Whitewood writes,

In December 1935, a supposed secret connection between German officers and the Red Army high command was reported by the head of Soviet military intelligence."[19] While abroad, among the people with whom Tukhachevsky was said to have met were German Reichsmarshall Herman Göring: "Göring said he had met with Tukhachevskii [sic] when the latter stopped in Berlin on his way back from George V’s funeral. Tukhachevskii had apparently raised the possibility of resuming the military collaboration between Germany and the Soviet Union."[20]

            It bears mention that there is no proof of these allegations. By all accounts, Tukhachevsky had personal disputes with some officers in the military but was otherwise loyal. That the charges of military subversion were packaged with allegations about Trotskyist or Rightist conspiracy only makes them less believable. Here, two points should be made. First, Khlevniuk notes that reports received by Stalin during the Spanish Civil War as early as December 1936 had indicated that German intelligence had infiltrated the PCE.[21] While the "knowledge" of Tukhachevsky's liaison with Göring had been learned a year earlier, learning that German intelligence agents were successful infiltrating a member of the Comintern might have led Stalin to decide to purge the military in an attempt to clear the decks of any possible traitors. The second point is ably made by Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov in their book The Road to Terror:

although the threat from the opposition seems negligible to us, the elite at the time obviously felt a continuing crisis in the wake of collectivization and with the rise of German fascism: a "new situation" in which economic and social stability was still a hope and in which the final success of the Stalinist line was by no means assured."[22]

            Presumably, with Tukhachevsky and other "pro-German" military men neutralized, Stalin believed the threat had been contained. Yezhov was purged and replaced with L.P. Beria and the repression slowed. The resolution of the Munich Crisis and Neville Chamberlain's declaration of "peace in our time" might have temporarily assuaged Soviet fears of German aggression, but Hitler's occupation of Prague in March 1939 would have reversed any optimism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, only a month later, the first feelers for a Soviet-Nazi non-aggression were put out.  That these negotiations were conducted and concluded while the USSR was fighting an extended border skirmish with Japan, Germany's Axis ally, likely added to what proved to be a false sense of security. Two days after Japan agreed to a ceasefire, the USSR occupied eastern Poland.

            In conclusion, the National Socialist seizure of power in Germany, that country’s rearmament and diplomatic overtures in the mid-1930s, and its intervention in the Spanish Civil War were all key factors that motivated and accelerated the Great Purges in the Soviet Union. While numerous other factors undoubtedly played essential roles, the move by Stalin against the Red Army in early 1937 seems closely related to security threats related to Germany and its ally Japan. The culmination of Soviet strategic thinking on Germany was the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and while the calculations that resulted in the purge of Tukhachevksy and his colleagues might now be more easily understood, the reasons for Stalin’s trust in assurances from Hitler evoke an entirely different series of questions. Those questions, however, lie outside the scope of this study.

---

[1] “Party Platforms,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed March 1, 2016, https://www.ushmm.org/educators/lesson-plans/why-did-germans-vote-for-the-nazi-party/resources/party-platforms

[2] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 655.

[3] Ibid, 654.

[4] Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, ed., The Ryutin Platform: Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship, trans. Pranab Ghosh and Susmita Bhattacharya (Kolkata, India: Seribaan Books, 2010), 13.

[5] Ibid, 133.

[6] Ibid, 91-92.

[7] This point of view typifies the more conventional interpretation of the Great Purges, as seen in Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford UP, 2007).

[8] Robert C. Tucker, “On the ‘Letter of an Old Bolshevik’ as an Historical Document,” Slavic Review 51, no. 4 (1992): 782-85.

[9] Y.Z. [B.I. Nicolaevsky], Letter of an Old Bolshevik: The Key to the Moscow Trials (New York: Rand School Press, 1937), 15.

[10] Ibid, 16.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Daniel Healey, “The Russian Revolution and the Decriminalisation of Homosexuality,” Revolutionary Russia 6, no. 1 (1993): 43.

[13] James Harris, “Encircled by Enemies: Stalin’s Perceptions of the Capitalist World, 1918-1941,” Journal of Strategic Studies 30, no. 3 (2007): 537-38; Gupta, ibid, 90.

[14] Harris, ibid, 538.

[15] Ibid, 541.

[16] This is the key “revisionist” argument about the Great Purges, strongly presented in J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2010).

[17] Oleg Khlevniuk, “The Reasons for the ‘Great Terror’: the Foreign-Political Aspect,” in Silvio Pons and Andrea Romano, eds., Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914-1945 (Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 2000), 163.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Peter Whitewood, The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Military (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 188-89.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Khlevniuk, ibid, 164.

[22] Getty and Naumov, ibid, 141.

Stalinist Intrigue in the Spanish Civil War

I chose this week to discuss the Soviet intervention in the Spanish Civil War under Stalin and the short- and long-term effects that it had on the USSR's diplomatic strength. The war began on July 17, 1936, with an uprising of anti-republican generals in the Spanish army. Although the Soviets signed an international nonintervention agreement, like Germany and Italy, they ignored the agreement almost immediately and offered military and monetary support for the Republicans, who themselves ran the gamut politically from the Moscow-aligned Spanish Communist Party (PCE), the Trotskyist Workers Party for Marxist Unification (POUM), the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), and anarchist and syndicalist workers movements on the left to a variety of centrist, liberal, democratic parties, as well as some conservatives.

In intervening in the Spanish Civil War, Stalin brought to the full culmination the disastrous policy of the Comintern that had already contributed to the Nazis taking over the government in Germany three-and-a-half years earlier. This policy was initially one in which Moscow-aligned communist parties were forbidden to cooperate politically with non-communist, left-wing political parties, whom Moscow labeled "social fascists." In part because Stalin forbade Ernst Thälmann, head of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), from forming a bloc with the Social-democratic Party of Germany (SPD) following the 1930 election, in which the SPD and KPD combined won a large plurality.

After Hitler became Chancellor, Stalin changed his tune on popular fronts, at least publicly. He allowed the formation of popular fronts in Spain and France, both of which won elections in 1936 election. However, Stalin's policies continued to negatively affect the domestic politics of both countries. In France, refusal to cooperate on core labor platform ideals resulted in the disintegration of the front. In Spain, although the front operated successfully until the generals coup in July 1936, the insistence by Stalin of the deployment of political commissars in Republican military units and, more importantly, of the NKVD to eliminate the opposition to the PCE on the left were ultimately very destructive factors.[1]

Among the people to have observed just how destructive Stalin's conduct via the NKVD was during the Spanish Civil War was George Orwell, who fought in Catalonia during the war with a POUM militia. On the fall of the government of PSOE leader Francisco Largo Caballero in May 1937, Orwell wrote, "With the fall of the Caballero Government the Communists had come definitely into power, the charge of internal order had been handed over to Communist ministers, and no one doubted that they would smash their political rivals as soon as they got a quarter of a chance."[2] Orwell subsequently reported on the arrest, torture, and murder of POUM head Andreu Nin. Also important to bear in mind is that, during the Spanish Civil War, the NKVD recruited Caridad Mercader and her son Ramon, who would go on to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.

In short, rather than contributing to the war in Spain to assure Republican victory, Stalin instead concentrating on continuing the Great Purges on foreign land, eliminating political opposition to the PCE but handing victory to Franco and the Nationalists. While it has been suggested that, under no circumstances, could the Republicans have won the war given German and Italian support of the Nationalists, Orwell was thoroughly of the opinion that the Soviets had lost the war for the Republicans through their political intrigues. I tend to agree.

=====

     [1] M.K. Dziewanowski, Russia in the Twentieth Century, 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003), 223-24.
     [2] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Mariner Books, 1980), 195.

Catalysts for the Great Purges

I am prepared to state that I think that two factors that caused the process of the Great Purges to expand significantly as they unfolded were: the appointment of N.I. Yezhov as head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the secret political police, to conduct the purges; and the increasing threat of Nazi Germany and the desire of the Soviet leadership to remove any possible fifth column from their midst in the event of a war with Germany.

The period of the purges during which Yezhov led the NKVD is referred to as Yezhovshchina. In reading J. Arch Getty's books on the Great Purges, I found that he tended to apply this term not just to Yezhov's leadership but specifically to the period in late 1937 during which the purge took on its most devastating character for the population in general. In part, the Purges spread most widely and affected the largest number of people in the second half of 1937 because of Yezhov's style in prosecuting the purge itself. In particular, Yezhov pursued every "lead" provided by prisoner interrogations, and prisoners tended to incriminate others readily -- particularly given the ready application of physical and psychological torture -- so it stands to reason that the circle would spread ever more widely.

As Getty writes, the Purges spread downward after having been ordered from above, and regional and local party leaders "tried to protect themselves by ordering mass expulsions and arrests of rank-and-file party members. In turn, the rank and file denounced their party bosses as enemies. It was a war of all against all, with intraparty class and status overtones."[180] What's notable here is the extent to which the process got out of the control of Yezhov, not to mention Stalin. While Stalin maintained the power and control to stop the process by removing Yezhov, while the process itself raged, it seemed to defy any sort of management. Because Stalin allowed Yezhov to continue the process, the Purges during Yezhovshchina began to take on a life of their own.

On the matter of Nazi Germany, while the beginning of the Great Purges is often identified as coinciding with the murder of Kirov, many of Stalin's considerations in the period between January 1933, when Hitler took office as Reichskanzler, and the end of the Great Purges were undertaken with an eye toward Germany's growing power, increasing rearmament, and budding strategic alliances. While I think that the Kirov assassination provided a convenient excuse to step up repression (if not directly ordered by Stalin himself), I find it difficult to ignore any number of international events during the period that posed a direct threat to Soviet power; three of the most important events took place in 1936, the same year of the first Moscow Trial: remilitarization of the Rhineland (March), eruption of the Spanish Civil War (July), and the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact (November). Moreover, the winding down of the Great Purges coincided more or less with the signing of the Munich Agreement and the seeming containment of Hitler.

Here, Stalin seems to have been of a mindset rather similar to most of the other key Soviet leaders. As Marxists, while they believed that fascism represented the final death throes of capitalism, they feared the openly violent rhetoric of the Nazi against communism. It was further known that, like themselves, foreign governments, including the Nazis, were engaging in espionage. Again, Getty makes a key point on this matter, here that even those people that Stalin eliminated as potential threats in the Purges were fearful of the international threat and would have handled it similarly if in power: "Bukharin had mentioned the necessity of clearing the political decks before a war."[141] Therefore, while Stalin was perhaps overly open to suggestion by Yezhov of conspiracies brewing among unlikely bedfellows like Trotskyists and Nazis, the threat of the latter was real, and Stalin's actions in this regard were perhaps not as unusual as we might think.
=====
     [1] J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2010), 180.
     [2] Ibid, 144.

Source Analysis: Justifying Stalin's Great Turn

 

The rule of Stalin over the Soviet Union was enormously costly in terms of lives lost, but with the exception of the war against Germany from 1941 to 1945, perhaps no period was as deadly for the Soviet people as the collectivization of agriculture and industrialization of the economy launched in 1928 with the first Five-Year Plan. Two texts from 1929, the end of the first year of the plan -- "A Year of Great Change," from the November 7 edition of Pravda[1] and "Problems of Agrarian Policy in the USSR,"[2] presented as a lecture to Marxist students on December 27 -- provide the opportunity to determine Stalin's justification for the swiftness and brutality of the program. In particular, Stalin had to thread a difficult needle, having previously opposed radical action represented by the Left Opposition and now having eliminated the Right Opposition that all along had opposed such measures, in addition to having to justify the new program as one of which Lenin would have approved.

Because the Right Opposition had only recently been eliminated, it was its arguments that required the most attention from Stalin in late 1929, particularly given the extent to which the warnings of the Right Opposition had proved true. One way of attacking the Right Opposition for Stalin is to lump them together with other enemies of the Communist Party. For instance, in the November 7 article, Stalin writes that the "great turn" was being achieved despite "the desperate retrograde forces of every kind, from kulaks and priests to philistines and Right opportunists."[3] Later in the same article, Bukharin is attacked by name, with Stalin stating that the "assertions of the Right opportunists" have "collapsed and crumbled to dust."[4] The December 27 speech is even more direct, with the first part of the excerpt dedicated to attacking the Right-affiliated notion of "equilibrium," which Stalin attributes to "Right deviators."[5] Stalin suggests that there is no middle ground between a full-blown return to capitalism and the route undertaken with the "great turn."

Despite its offering the most recent and vociferous voice against rapid collectivization and industrialization, the Right Opposition nevertheless had the least actual ability to mount a significant counteroffensive. Not only had Stalin already eliminated the Right Oppositionists from the Politburo, but they also recanted publicly in a statement published three weeks after Stalin's November 7 article.[6] More difficult to address than the arguments of the Right Opposition were those of the Left Opposition, the positions of which Stalin was now essentially adopting with the "great turn." Here, Stalin had not to justify his actions but to clarify for his audiences why it was he who should implement the "great turn" and why the Left Opposition remained enemies.

To accomplish this goal, rather than focusing on the key issues of abandoning the NEP or collectivization and industrialization, Stalin chooses the matter of peasant-worker cooperation. In the November 7 article, he accuses Trotsky of Menshevism and states that the "conception that the working class is incapable of securing the following of the main mass of the peasantry in the wok of socialist construction is collapsing and being smashed to smithereens."[7] Given that the Bolshevik-Menshevik split had been based mainly on the issue of the Leninist concept of a party vanguard, it seems an odd epithet for Stalin to use for the Trotskyists, although Trotsky had been a Menshevik before the spring of 1917. Moreover, Menshevism had traditionally been more conciliatory toward the peasantry, while the "great turn" targeted the peasantry perhaps more than any other sector of Soviet society.

Here, Stalin's attack seems to be primarily one of guilt by association. Because the Mensheviks (like all opposition political parties) had been banned, Stalin's attack on them via conflation with Trotskyists accomplished two goals. First, given that Trotsky, by November 1929, had already been expelled from the country, the key figure in the Left Opposition could evoke images for readers of the probable fate of those who opposed Stalin's policies. In addition, with the Mensheviks, Stalin suggests that the Trotskyists are a far greater enemy than Bukharin's group who, despite its opposition to the "great turn," still was among the party elites. The Mensheviks, in contrast, were banned outright. Left Oppositionism, by extension, was not only wrong but illegal to boot.

Last but not least, Stalin had to justify the "great turn" in the same way that he would justify most of his actions -- as the heir to Lenin. This task was perhaps the most difficult to accomplish because Lenin had championed the NEP that Stalin had now eliminated. In the December 22 speech, reference to Lenin is embedded within the attack on the Right Opposition, with Stalin stating, "It is not difficult to see that this theory has nothing in common with Leninism."[8] In the November 7 article, Stalin is better able to identify the "great turn" with Lenin by citing Lenin's writings liberally throughout the article. This evocation is particularly masterful when used to justify where the "great turn" has so far had its least success, i.e., in the development of heavy industry.[9] In addition, at the opening of the essay, Stalin reminds readers that Lenin saw the NEP as a strategic retreat and not a quasi-permanent policy.[10]

However, perhaps the most clever evocation of Lenin comes in the title of the November 7 article itself. Stalin biographer Robert C. Tucker writes, "The key Russian word in Stalin's manifesto is perelom, here translated as ‘turn.’ […] Figuratively it means a fundamental shirt of direction, a turning point. Lenin's writings of 1917 often used it in that sense."[11] In using a term readily identified by party members with Lenin, Stalin is able to promote an association of his policy with the deceased leader without even needing to state that leader’s name.

In conclusion, in his Pravda article of November 7, 1929, and his lecture of December 27 of the same year, Stalin defends his “great turn” from his political enemies and justifies it in the context of the Soviet Union’s key founder, Lenin. An easy target at the time, the Right Opposition of Bukharin provides an easy punching bag, but the Left Opposition and Trotskyists are more difficult to smear, so Stalin relies on insinuation and name-calling. Finally, Stalin quotes liberally from Lenin and uses the latter’s turns of phrases to sell the “great turn” to his audiences. Because Stalin felt compelled to pump the brakes on the program in the coming year, it is clear that his attempts were unsuccessful, but at the time, Stalin used the available ammunition and his traditional targets to justify his “great turn.”

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[1] I.V. Stalin, “A Year of Great Change: On the Occasion of the Twelfth Anniversary of the October Revolution,” Pravda, accessed May 1, 2016, https://snhu-media.snhu.edu/files/course_repository/undergraduate/
his/his235/extra_stalin_a_year_of_great_change.pdf

[2] I.V. Stalin, “Problems of Agrarian Policy in the USSR,” accessed May 1, 2016, https://snhu-media.snhu.edu/files/course_repository/undergraduate/his/his235/lecture8_stalin_problems_of_agrarian_policy.pdf

[3] Stalin, “Great Change,” page 3.

[4] Ibid, page 5.

[5] Stalin, “Problems,” Ibid, page 1.

[6] Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York: Vintage, 1975), 334-35.

[7] Stalin, “Great Change,” page 6.

[8] Stalin, “Problems,” page 1.

[9] Stalin, ”Great Change,” page 3.

[10] Ibid, page 1.

[11] Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above, 1928-1941 (New York: Norton, 1990), 92.

Succession to Lenin: Trotsky v. Stalin

There were several factors that contributed to Stalin's victory over Trotsky in the power struggle that followed Lenin's death. Among the factors that were central, and would continue to be central as Stalin consolidated his power and moved toward collectivization of agriculture and mass industrialization of the USSR was the New Economic Policy (NEP). Although Kamenev and Zinoviev would eventually side with Trotsky against the NEP in the Left Opposition, they initially sided with Stalin and the right wing within the Politburo in supporting it. With the support of a clear majority of the Politburo favoring the NEP, including the formation of a troika with Kamenev and Zinoviev, marginalizing Trotsky on the basis of his opposition to the NEP became easy. Once Kamenev and Zinoviev changed sides against the NEP, Trotsky was already critically wounded.

While the NEP, competing ideologies of permanent revolution vs. socialism in one country, and Lenin's testament all had roles to play in the power struggle, I ultimately believe that Stalin won the battle because of his superior strategic positioning of allies to form an effective power base. Before I began reading for the final project in this course, I believed that Stalin was a simpleton who accomplished his goals through thuggery and brute force. Now, I have a more nuanced view of him, and I can see how methodical his actions were and how informed by long-range planning. Trotsky, in comparison, while clearly of singular intelligence, was often too rash, particularly in his public criticisms of other party leaders.

Two passages from my reading inform my updated view of Stalin and his ability to out-maneuver Trotsky. The first comes from the prominent revisionist J. Arch Getty:

And he was an attractive leader for many reasons. Unlike the other top leaders, Stalin was not an intellectual or theoretician. He spoke a simple and unpretentious language appealing to a party increasingly made up of workers and peasants. His style contrasted sharply with that of his Politburo comrades, whose complicated theories and pompous demeanor won them few friends among the plebeian rank and file. He also had an uncanny way of projecting what appeared to be moderate solutions to complicated problems. Unlike his colleagues, who seemed shrill in their warnings of fatal crises, Stalin frequently put himself forward as the calm man of the golden mean with moderate, compromise solutions.[1]

The second, shorter quote is from the totalitarian Robert Conquest, a harsh critic of Stalin and the USSR: "Trotsky was a polished zircon; Stalin was a rough diamond."[2] In terms of organizational talent, Trotsky was all style and no substance; Stalin, in contrast, was unpolished but highly effective. Like a Soviet version of Lyndon Johnson, Stalin seemed like a rube but was a master of backroom deals.

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     [1] J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2010), 25.
     [2] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 414.