Stalin, Volume 1 by Stephen Kotkin

Author:Stephen Kotkin [Kotkin, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

Persistent war rumors incited runs on shops, hoarding, and boasts of refusals to fight or sabotage in the event of conflict that were fixed in the OGPU political mood reports, echoes of the regime’s deepest fears.206 Chicherin returned to Moscow from his extended medical holiday in Europe around June 15. “Everybody in Moscow was talking war,” he would tell the American foreign correspondent and Soviet sympathizer Louis Fischer. “I tried to dissuade them. ‘Nobody is planning to attack us,’ I insisted. Then a colleague enlightened me. He said, ‘Shh. We know that. But we need this against Trotsky.’”207 Chicherin’s efforts to defuse international tensions are understandable, but the war scare emerged directly out of the inbuilt structural paranoia of the revolution (capitalist encirclement) combined with the regime’s defiant foreign policy.208 Relations with the enemy (the capitalist powers) could never amount to more than expediency; internal critics, whatever their professed intentions, broadcast disunity, weakened an encircled USSR, and incited external enemies. And party officials, not all sufficiently schooled in Marxism-Leninism, were susceptible to siren songs.

When Stalin wrote to Molotov from Sochi (June 17) that “in order to strengthen the rear, we must restrain the opposition immediately,” he was not merely self-serving and not cynical.209 The struggle with Trotsky was now even more a matter of state security for him, even as it continued to be obsessively personal. After reviewing the transcript of a punitive Central Control Commission session, Stalin angrily wrote to Molotov (June 23) that “Zinoviev and Trotsky, not the commission members, did the interrogating and the accusing. It is odd that some of the commission members did not show. Where’s Sergo? Where has he gone and why is he hiding? Shame on him. . . . Will Trotsky and Zinoviev really be handed this ‘transcript’ to distribute! That’s all we need.”210

Orjonikidze, in fact, had been present: Trotsky had directed a long soliloquy partly at him. “I say that you are set on a course for the bureaucrat, for the functionary, but not for the masses,” he stated, through repeated interruptions. “The organization operates as a vast internal mutual support structure, mutual protection.”211 Orjonikidze nonetheless hesitated to bring down the hammer. He remarked of Zinoviev and Kamenev, “they have brought a good deal of benefit to our party.”212 The votes for and against expulsion were more or less evenly divided. Orjonikidze, Kalinin, and even Voroshilov argued that the matter of expulsion of opposition members from the Central Committee should be deferred to the upcoming Party Congress. Stalin insisted that his vote be counted in absentia, while Molotov got Kalinin to switch sides, providing the margin for expulsion.213 Orjonikidze, however, would substitute a reprimand instead. Trotsky told him all the same that “the extirpation of the opposition was only a matter of time.”214

Stalin found time to exchange letters from Sochi with a young schoolteacher, Serafim Pokrovsky (b. 1905), who had entered into a written argument with the dictator over whether party policy in 1917 had favored an alliance with the whole peasantry or just the poor peasantry.

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