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.”
[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
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.
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