The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 15: The USSR: From NEP to the Five Year Plans

By 1926, although things appeared to be going very well for the Bolshevik Regime in the USSR in many ways, (and in China for the Communists too), the world’s capitalist classes began to become very uneasy about apparent Bolshevik success in achieving social justice for the masses of previously downtrodden people. Those big ruling capitalist families in Europe saw Bolshevik success as being responsible for their increasing difficulties with their own working people. Now their own workers were demanding such things as national health care and unemployment insurance. If the Russians could do it, given all they had suffered in the World War and Revolution and Civil War, then the rulers of Britain, France, Italy and Germany certainly should be able to concede partial social welfare as well. We Bolsheviks got the credit from the masses and the blame from the capitalists. Of course, the bourgeoisie were right as far as us Reds went, but what they could not admit was that capitalism itself had brought them to this.

The international big capitalist class, especially in Europe, concluded the USSR had to be destroyed, renewing their aggression, which they had temporarily let slip into a condition of stasis. The prime example was our number one enemy in Europe the United Kingdom. Britain would remain our primary problem in Europe even after Hitler took over in Germany. (At least until he attacked the USSR on June 22, 1941.)

Our Ambassador to England from September 1923 until June of 1926 was the “magician of Rapallo”, (i.e., the Rapallo Pact, April 1922), Christian Rakovsky. Rakovsky published a telling theoretical paper about then (1926) contemporary British capitalism entitled The Decline of the World’s Shop (In Communist International) on his way out the door of our London embassy. His main points were that:

(1) The ongoing economic crises in Great Britain were structural and irreversible.    

(2) He found this to be true across the board in British manufacturing industries and particularly acute in the mining and textile industries. The ruling Brit oligarchy and the class behind them could

(3) find no way out of the coming class struggles and were desperate to stop communist news and influence from reaching British workers. He predicted they would

(4) Do everything to break formal relations with the Soviet Union and

(5) Work in every conceivable way to subvert the Communist government in Russia including organizing subversion and war.

In the Event we will have Fifteen Years until the Capitalists Attack Us

Shortly after the publication of Decline the Brits did exactly these things and began their determined campaign under Baldwin and Chamberlain to create a London-Berlin-Rome axis where Germany would take the lead in a Holy War against Bolshevism.

(1)   British banks pulled their loans to Russia, even though the Bolsheviks had the best credit rating in the world next to that of the USA.

(2)   The Japanese capitalists made a secret deal with Chiang Kai-shek who was the nominal and he hoped soon actual, commander of the KMT Party’s National Revolutionary Army. What kind of deal? A continuation on a national scale of what the Green Gang had been doing for them in Shanghai (e.g., providing cheap labor for Japanese maquiladoras, and safe packaging of opium destined for Western Hemisphere ports on Japanese ships) with bright prospects for a prosperous tomorrow. This secret illegal trade relationship included a quid pro quo; in exchange the Japanese promised secret military support in the upcoming ambush of the communists; one Chiang and Du were planning for Shanghai for 1927. The Japanese capitalists were often craftier than their European counterparts, who were openly hostile to the Soviet government, (although they viciously suppressed Japanese communism) playing down at this point “state to state hostility.”

(3)   In China the capitalist half of the alliance with the Reds, which was predominant in many ways inside the KMT, although the communists operated as full members, openly, began their planning for a post-Massacre governmental structure, with a variety of “war-lords”.

(4)   The way in which Borodin operationalized Lenin’s idea of a joint cross-class alliance to establish true bourgeois capitalism in China, depended for its success on sincere bourgeois leadership, such as Sun Yatsen had seemed to offer. Of course, Sun was now dead and his leadership mantle had been usurped by that group of bourgeoisie least likely to be amenable to Lenin’s ideas for a bourgeois democracy for China. But Borodin didn’t know that. Nor did the Russian Politburo. What I mean is that what Lenin wanted for China was first and foremost a US type of bourgeois democracy, at least as independent of foreign domination as the US had been after military victory over British colonialism in 1781. This, in short, is what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been shooting for, for China. When the deal was made with Sun, it seemed as if this was quite feasible. – And, to repeat what I have already reported it was China’s extreme backwardness which made all this logically necessary in the first place if one were to gain a safe and secure buffer for Soviet socialism in the Far East.

In other words, in the Russian Bolshevik Politburo’s view, China was in far too primitive a condition both technologically and socially to jump into socialism and would be far more likely to succeed along a bourgeois democratic path – meaning the security of world socialism – i.e., the USSR – would be far better served with a stable and healthy and friendly capitalist regime in Peking, than in any dice shoot for proletarian dictatorship which at best could end up as it had in Russia, with a tiny working class and its Party sitting on a nation of ignorant peasants. With only the bare minimal capitalist preparation.

(5)   In 1927, the Bolsheviks in Russia began to remember that war with the capitalist countries was inevitable and that the way things were going they would be unprepared. NEP was doing well as far as relative prosperity was concerned but the rate of industrialization was pitifully slow. Without capitalist bank credits for foreign entrepreneurs willing and able to build factories in Russia and the other Republics, industrialization would be even slower!

(6)   Furthermore, the Cheka’s Economic Directorate had been so successful at lifting foreign technology that factories and machines were piling up everywhere because the infrastructure into which they were to be inserted lagged far behind need.

(7)   Furthermore, without a secure eastern frontier, given the failure of the China policy in April 1927, the military danger of encirclement by the advanced capitalist countries would be twice as great. Stalin had a solution in mind. He began putting it into effect in the second half of 1927 and speeded it up in the early months of 1928, so that by August of that year he was ready to go for broke.

Our Own Crisis Was Also at Hand if Hidden

As far the outside world was concerned the Soviet success was a matter of fact and in these capitalist countries it was assumed that much the same reconstruction was happening in Russia as had happened in their own countries after the First World War. As far as the big capitalist families of Western Europe were concerned the only difference was that the caps would have appropriated the surplus value as profit in a capitalist system and, as far as they were concerned, the Russian communists were buying the support of their workers and farmers by their injudicious use of government funds.

As far as industrial progress was concerned our enemies could not have been more wrong. We had serious problems at every level within the national economy. Fortunately for us the capitalists had no idea. We had destroyed their intelligence networks they had originally put into place with the MOCR Roach Motel.

The Economic Crisis flows from the anti-socialist fact

Of inheriting an insufficient capitalist mode of production

Scarcity – not the Plenty Marx and Engels had required – underlay everything

1923– 1928: Sorting Things Out, What Must Be Done

All Bolsheviks were convinced by the end of the Civil War that the USSR’s modernized industrialization had to be achieved if the Party had any hope of staying in power and leading humanity into the world communist stage. It is elementary Marxist theory that one cannot build socialism, let alone communism, without the advanced industrial base of capitalism. Achieving full mechanized industrialization is the rationale in our Theory for the entire sociocultural evolutionary capitalist stage to begin with. It is precisely for this reason that Marxist historians have always pointed out that Capitalism was progressive in its time. (No longer, as it has entered the phase of Imperialism.) It is this preparation which makes the slogan “from each according to her ability to each according to her needs” a practical political possibility. In other words, Marxists and Leninists knew that no amount of moral or ideological incentives could make up for the servitude epoch reality of selfishness and sadism imposed on the masses, with a primitive economy of scarcity such as we had in the mid-1920’s. The question was never whether to build the necessary infrastructure. For us, from the beginning and continuing to this very day the question that must be posed in backward countries is how do we build what we ideally should have inherited and how long will it take?

Note: Having a “base area” in a backward country (e.g., Colombia), where we establish social justice, is not the same thing as building the Stage of Socialism and the Stage of Communism in a country.

Applicability of this experience to the USA and Canada

The Soviets had no choice in 1928 but to follow the Stalinist total planning solution. On the other hand the Chinese communists did have a choice because of the radical shift in world balance of class forces and military power in 1975. They opted for a mixed economy similar to the one advocated by the so-called “right” group* in the USSR (1926-1932). Either way, it was this question that had to be answered.  We have exactly that question today each time a backward country takes a “socialist” course. We have a much more advantageous situation today.

We have had some three decades of bullshit from the US ultra-left because of their failure to understand that there is no mandatory formula for a purely coercive approach to the construction of the mode of production we should have inherited, just because Stalin and later Mao had no choice but to do what they did. (What they should be doing is studying what has happened as in this book and then doing something concrete to seize power in the USA.) At any rate, the choice must always be measured by how long will each road take and what will be the cost to our own class support. (In other words what will it cost working people in the USA? Since almost everyone works in North America, so we should say working people (broadest definition from trash collecting to subatomic physics and brain surgery) plus the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and so forth, can be included in whole or part as the main constituency of the class alliance undertaking the transition to Communism. (In the case of the military we will get only part in the pre-coming Civil War period.)

The 3000 or so billionaire and centi-millionaire families in this country who currently own the Government will be dispossessed of everything and probably shot. That will be the end of the national debt problem, and provide in ownership a permanent source of income for our new People’s Government.

We have a choice. In the cities we can go immediately to full public ownership of the entire major infrastructure and all the major corporations – i.e., Socialism - and still leave room for the individual entrepreneur. On our great far western and mid-western, (and eastern farmlands as well), we can go immediately to Socialism with both public owned “Agribusiness” farms (we will have seized) existing side by side with individual capitalist farming families, co-ops and religious minorities.

In other words, the Socialist transition in the USA should be of the Classical Marxist type with a mass social movement by working people to directly establish real Communism having become the most important part of the inherent nature of a clearly transitional socialist “phase”. (In other words, in the USA and Canada “socialism” will be a stage passed through so quickly that its real nature (function) is to be an introductory phase to the stage of Communism – it will not be – as it has had to be in backward countries - a distinct long-term sociocultural “stage”). It should be short and sweet and essentially we will be building the Communist Stage once we seize state power.

(1)   The first “given” we got from our sole possession of historical science. (The capitalists first fatal Achilles Heel was their political (class) inability to grasp the science of history discovered by Karl Marx and his “general” Frederick Engels. By analogy think of modern medicine versus witch-doctoring.) Namely, that worldwide class war would continue as it had for six thousand years. It was only a matter of time until the biggest capitalist families attacked us in a Second World War. We had as Lenin pointed out “a little time but not too much” to get ready for this global assault against the USSR (which is to say against the World Socialist Staged in the process of birth). This was a necessary matter of fact and not a theoretical possibility – it was a theoretical certainty. The only hypotheticals were those surrounding this inevitable conflict such as: how many if not all of the major cap countries will attack simultaneously? Can we avoid a two front war in Eurasia? How much time do we have? How can we get the minimum industrial mode of production we should have inherited on our own and how long will this minimum industrial preparation take to put into place?

(2)   Every time we turned around we found ourselves stymied by lack of capital. This fact of needed constant and financial capital (machinery, factories, money) being in critically short supply resulted in a long series of production nightmares. The best recent summary and exposition of the consequences of this scarcity, you can also read in Hammer and Rifle, by David R. Stone, 2000, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 287 pp.

(3)   As the post-Civil War period began to unfold in 1923 the Party began to create a series of Government bureaus (e.g., Gosplan – the State Planning Commission) to undertake the Planning a Socialist Economy should feature. In these years 1923-1928 the central antagonistic contradictions within the primitive inherited capitalist economy became acute and demanded resolution.

(4)   One of the first of these Government institutions was the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). Another, NEC, the Supreme National Economic Council (NEC; Vesenkha), another, the Federal Council of Labor and Defense (STO) and its HQ Executive Body (RZ). – And, the Worker’s and Peasant’s Inspectorate (Rabkrin)

(5)   Also the State (Army, Navy and Police) had its institutions planning bodies to insure that military needs were adequately taken into planning consideration; such as: the War Planning and Mobilization Directorate (MPU) of the foregoing STO; and the Revvoensovet (Revolutionary Supreme Command Council, 1918-1934) which was the military’s main planning input authority.

However, there were emerging central irreconcilable contradictions within the primitive Socialist economy. Among the most important for you to understand in an introductory course are the following problems which I will illustrate by taking just two examples of the hundreds of monumental undertakings envisioned in the First Five Year Plan: the first at the Automobile-Truck factory in the old city of Nizhniy Novgorod and the second the newly created city at Magnitogorsk (Magnetic Mountain.)

Scarcity and the Problem of the Bourgeois Specialists

A: Cheating:  Scarcity underlay everything making funding and supply of needed and essential machinery and parts an ongoing problematic matter. Managers often hid excess production capability, whether in the form of labor-power or raw materials and machinery, as a buffer against failure due to lack of materiel.

B: Limited Employment opportunities: There were only so many jobs to go around within the Government, (and for that matter in the Party and the State.) If bourgeois specialists were seen as essential to the construction of Soviet industry then they would take too many of the jobs that should have gone to Party members who had fought and died for the present system and their children. This was a structural antagonism and could only be resolved by creating more jobs (and replacing the bourgeois specialists as time passed and as soon as possible.) A struggle between Old Bolshevik would-be managers and the new bourgeois specialists unfolded, beginning at the very beginning of Government planning. In other words, exactly the same kind of split occurred in the new managerial class that had occurred earlier in the officer class of the Red Army.

Scarcity and the Problem of Wrecking

C:  Wrecking. Failure to meet quotas, make production deadlines, and the like was taken by upper management and the higher authorities very badly. In the atmosphere of personal dislike and hatred existing among Old Bolsheviks and bourgeois specialists it was a simple enough thing to jump to the conclusion that these failures were purposeful rather than what they mainly were: inherent bureaucratic problems in such a primitive productive economy.

D:  Shock Labor - Proletarian Enthusiasm: On the other hand throwing shock labor at problems could break production bottle necks and went a long way toward proving that the slackers (in fulfilling quotas, making deadlines, and innovation failures) were “wrecking”: socialist construction on purpose. Our concern, and Stalin’s and fellow theoreticians, was not with those who actually were wrecking but with the broader overall social contradiction between these two key classes (bourgeois specialists vs. Old Bolsheviks) in production.

But, because of this factor of morally spiritually decisive working class shock labor, a decisive breakthrough in production had been accomplished. The Party used the one thing it had which our enemies did not, and that was the spiritual superiority of a mass of producers working for the social good, for which any and every  possible and impossible mission was accomplished.

It was for this idea of workers engaging in self-sacrifice of material comforts today, for the achievement tomorrow, of a true proletarian society where each person lives in equality, justice and material well-being of all in a world of plenty where all the necessities of life for everyone are easily produced and which they would receive “according to their needs” and nothing more.

Stalin vs. Trotsky V

The struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin requires additional comment at this moment. Trotsky began losing the fight the minute Lenin died in January of 1924. Stalin had gathered the reins of state and governmental power in his hands and he knew how to use them. Trotsky had alienated the Bolshevik Old Guard and without Lenin’s protection… well, it was only a matter of time. The man leading the Old Guard was Joseph Stalin, but if it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else of the Old Guard type who disliked and confronted Trotsky, and the end result would probably have been exactly the same.

The truth is Trotsky and his arguments had become a Legend, mainly in his own mind, irrelevant compared to the great real world crisis the Party confronted at home and abroad. His idea of whipping up international revolution was already Party policy and being carried out on a daily basis through the Party’s “Secret Department” and through the Comintern and its legal as well as secret departments. What could be done was being done and that was that. Lenin had said in his Last Testament that the Party would have to choose between Trotsky and Stalin and it had chosen. – And that was the end of the story. As for background,

As we have seen Trotsky and Stalin hated each other, and had for many years. Mainly, this was a personality clash that arose because of the polar opposite class backgrounds of these two men. Stalin came from a dirt poor, abusive family. He had had to fight for an education which meant the Seminary. Trotsky came from a very wealthy family that would have been part of the major nobility if they had not been Jewish. Trotsky had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had had every advantage that money could buy. Stalin hated the bourgeoisie, especially those in his Party!

Trotsky and Stalin had been the principals in the 1907 debate about bank robbing as the source of Party funds. Stalin’s hatred of Trotsky was more than political – he found himself up against the exact type of person he hated the most. That is, the kind of person who had had all the advantages that money could buy and was still claiming to be in the Party of Labor. A very obtuse person (Trotsky) who failed in Stalin’s eyes to understand his (Stalin’s) sacrifice and dedication.

Trotsky’s every public utterance on Stalin drips with contempt. The worst part is everyone can see clearly Trotsky’s contempt for Stalin is the contempt of the new rich bourgeois for the poor self-educated worker, or god-forbid, the farming serf, that is getting a little too uppity! Everyone but Trotsky can see this “master class” attitude on his part. Since most of the Party members are self-educated workers, soldiers, sailors and farmers, Trotsky’s public disdain for Stalin’s mannerisms (singing funeral dirges at weddings and vice versa) and hobbies (hunting, fishing and mountain climbing) were projections onto them of the same kind of disdain and they resented it. It was bad enough for the bourgeois intellectuals to act that way without having to put up with it in their Party and Army.

I think Stalin encouraged this misreading on the part of Trotsky and his allies. Why? (A) Because, precisely because, he knew their childish and derogatory commentary were alienating men and women who they would have to have at every level within the Party if they had any chance at all of outvoting the Boss. – And, (B) because he knew they were letting their class background prejudices mislead them as to his intellectual acumen.

The childish commentary on Stalin’s hobbies speaks for itself. As the years progressed we have learned so much more about Stalin and the clear Marxist content of his written works, than perhaps he had been willing to let the world know at the time, we have to revisit our entire socialist history.

As for Stalin’s Marxist acumen, I know the Trotskyists were unaware of Stalin’s propensity to read one new book every day because none of us knew this until after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the limited availability of Stalin’s records. We all did know however, Stalin conducted studies of specialized topics on a regular basis.

The former certainly made him the equivalent of any other Politburo leader past, present or future, in terms of Ph.D. level intellectual preparation. Multiple Ph.D.’s, ranging from (petroleum) geology to, eventually, nuclear physics (under Beria’s informed tutelage.) Along these lines we see Stalin intervening intelligently in many technical scientific disputes ranging from genetics to anthropological linguistics. (Lysenko vs. Vavilov and N. Y. Marr vs. Stalin himself, respectively.)

Given all this complimentary talk about the Boss how about the case of genetics, where we know Stalin was wrong? As has been reported by the late Harvard historian of science Stephen Jay Gould (Natural History) Stalin was wrong for good reasons, or at least quite understandable and legitimate scientific reasons.

The point being Stalin did not brag about intellectual accomplishments, or even refer to them often in his public discussions. Although, an intelligent perceptive observer would have noticed that when Stalin did speak on such matters he was completely informed.

In the case of language, culture, and personality, anthropological linguistics in other words, Stalin was right and set things straight in rather short order (e.g., the debate between Stalin and N. Y. Marr).

Stalin had lived and worked inside the Empire of the Russias his entire life, except for a few trips abroad to see Lenin and participate in Party meetings. He had gone to prison seven times and survived. Not to mention having escaped each time. If nothing else it shows that Stalin knew the real world and was capable. He always did (excepting their autumn 1920 Polish campaign differences) what Lenin wanted him to do, until 1923, when the two men split over the way Stalin handled a bunch of assholes in Georgia.

About this incident Stalin was exactly correct in my opinion, as you may have surmised, but however that may have been, it was this incident that decidedly marked the end of his long and special relationship with Lenin; the man Lenin had initially termed “that wonderful Georgian.” The man Lenin had relied upon, perhaps more than any other, to do all those things that he knew had to be done, and for so many years. Stalin was emotionally attached to Lenin and never, even to himself, apparently, allowed the thought that anything other than Lenin’s ill health had been responsible for their untimely rupture. For my commentary on the matter see Lenin and Georgia below.

- And, Lenin was out of touch with reality by this time. He had had several strokes; it was just a matter of time until he died. - And, he had always been quite naive about the underlying template of human behavior. In January, 1924, Lenin did die.

Then, in 1925, one year and one day after Lenin’s January 1924 death, Trotsky was removed as War Commissar (allowed to resign), where he had been outvoted four to one anyway since 1918. The removal had been predictable after new Army leadership was formalized at this Congress but the fact was Trotsky had lost out as the sole decision maker in March 1921. At any rate in 1921 the victorious Leninists had brought Frunze in as the de facto new Army chief of staff under Voroshilov. Now, under Stalin’s 1924 leadership, Frunze and Voroshilov’s roles were official and Trotsky was out as War Commissar

Trotsky’s Exit

After his 1925 demotion Trotsky refused all other assignments and sulked. Accordingly, under the no nonsense Stalinist regime, Stalin, Trotsky’s most important nemesis), took advantage and demanded Trotsky’s ouster from the Politburo on “disciplinary” grounds. (There would be no Lenin for protection now). Thus, later in 1925, Trotsky lost his position in the leadership (the political bureau) of the Party, when he was removed from the Politburo, where he had alienated almost all of its members.

In 1926, Trotsky was removed from the Central Committee for factionalism. In 1927, he was expelled from the Party altogether. In January, 1928, Trotsky was exiled to Soviet Turkestan; then expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, when he landed on an island near Istanbul.

After several years at Principe Island, Trotsky lived and traveled through Europe and finally took refuge in Mexico City as the guest of Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas and former Mexican communist, the muralist (now Trotskyist) Diego Rivera, at the latter’s home. In the home of his host, he had an affair with Frida Kahlo (Rivera’s wife) and subsequently was forced by his own misbehavior into a far less secure Coyoacan (Mexico City) home where he was eventually assassinated by one of Stalin’s finest (Ramon Mercader). This business with Ms. Fahlo is pursued in more depth below in Chapter 16.}

However, we are getting far ahead of ourselves.

*****

As I mentioned in the Preface to the 2006 edition, the Party never liked Trotsky and didn’t want him (in the summer of 1917 anyway.) Lenin wanted him then, despite their many years of mutual antipathy, and in a leadership position, for his own reasons, which we reviewed in Chapters 13 and 14 (above.)

In early 1918, Lenin moved Trotsky from the foreign office to the war ministry because he appreciated Trotsky’s no nonsense, absolute discipline, take charge and get it done, attitude. As always I defer to Lenin’s judgment in this matter but it is also true that Trotsky, in the opinion of many of his contemporaries, did not do well at all in the Civil War. There was constant conflict between Trotsky and Stalin over every aspect of military operations and this continued throughout 1918. In April 1919, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky were able to replace Trotsky’s Chief of Staff (with Frunze who took Vatsetis place) and three of the remaining four seats went to “Stalinists” (in the five-man Party War Committee – leaving Trotsky as War Commissar and four Stalinists!) Trotsky’s advocacy of using former Czarist officers in huge numbers (Trotsky recruited well over 75,000 of them – this would be a five and one-half million man army, and Trotsky felt he had no choice) was one of the major reasons for his being disliked by the Old Bolsheviks, and the new working class officers, during the Civil War. Also, the Stalinists did not believe the political officer equivalents for each Czarist officer was sufficient and Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka, began the wholesale introduction of Chekists as political officers.

Another, more justifiable criticism was about Trotsky’s arrogant “ruling class” personal behavior, especially toward the working class officers of the Red Army. Something Trotsky tends to admit in his autobiography My Life.

When Lenin’s protection was withdrawn by death it was only a matter of time until Trotsky disappeared from the scene. As I say, if it hadn’t been Stalin who confronted him it would have been someone else, and I am rather sure the result would have been the same for the reasons we have discussed in this book.

“War Communism”

Who or Whom? The question had been posed specifically, and that way, by V.I. Lenin. The subject? Whether socialist or bourgeois power would prevail within the Soviet Republic in the long run. The worker or the capitalist? Everyone knew eventually the Party would have to confront and resolve the agricultural situation in its way or give way to a bourgeoisiefied semi-feudal agrarian regime antithetical to its socialist goals. If that were to happen Russia and its confederated Republics might look something like an H. G. Wells futuristic welfare state. This was not what the Bolshevik leaders wanted, even if some were willing to live with it indefinitely. It was certainly not what Stalin and his closest comrades wanted.

The 1917 redistribution of land had been largely spontaneous as farmers rose up and seized the landed estates of the feudal Lords and the privately owned capitalist farms of the City Magnates. Although the Bolsheviks had advocated “Land to the Farmers” unconditionally, what that meant in practice depended upon who you were talking to. Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party members who were by far the largest of the farmer parties knew what they thought that meant. According to them there would be a return to the village collective with everyone assured of equal access to good land and a large portion set aside for the collective good. SR’s Left and Right divided along the lines of who was the most egalitarian so that Left SR’s tended to side with Bolsheviks more often than their own Party members. The Bolsheviks wanted collective farms and co-op’s with all the land the property of the nation, leased to these new entities. The Mensheviks would have been happy with a simple free market economy in the countryside leading wherever it was to lead. The Cadets wanted compensation for the seized landowners and perhaps restoration wherever possible.

The debate ended as the Bolsheviks suppressed internal counter-revolution simultaneously with the 1918-1919 defeat of the main White forces and foreign invaders. What were left were the farming masses with whatever land in their hands they had been able to grab for themselves and a central Government in Moscow willing to accept that as long as the farming families surrendered grain, meat, poultry and other goods and services as demanded by the Government. A Government embattled at home and surrounded by enemies, which had to feed the working class, the cities and most especially the Army. This policy combined with the issuing of specie (IOU’s) was what the Bolsheviks had come to call War Communism.

The New Economic Policy (NEP)

Lenin’s spring 1921 repeal of War Communism and the re-introduction once again of capitalist market economics in the countryside had worked out alright. At least it had not empowered the enemies of Socialism in any dramatic way. That was because as yet there was no new wealthy dominating rich farmer class. It would take several years for well-to-do strata farmers to separate from middle and lower strata farmers and, of course, from landless agricultural workers. The latter being those who had lost out altogether in the free-for-all, grab-bag affair that had been redistribution in 1917.

The Government, for all of its desire to help, had been pitifully unable to do so. The countryside had rebuilt according to its own history and traditions and at-hand possibilities. Of course, human and animal-pulled wooden-plough prepared fields did not require great technological input anyway.

Inside Snapshot

Sorge Read In At the Highest Level: August 1926

The Mechanization of Agriculture

“Richard, I want to show you something.”

“Thank you Comrade Stalin.”

“We are stepping up production of our own tractors from our own tractor factories.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“Yes it is. You see here, we are getting, an entire Ford Tractor Assembly line as well as the subcontracting sources, again building our own factories, to support it.”

“Yes sir.”

With this one plant alone we will be able to produce about 600 tractors a month to begin with and more as time proceeds. That will double our tractor production per month by the time it is fully on-line.”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you know how many we need?”

“I have no idea sir.”

“We need to support on the American scale our needs, keep in mind we have the working people to put into these factories because the American System allows a multitude of jobs to be created along a broad spectrum of tasks to be performed in production, a minimum of 20,000 tractors a year for five years. Really we will need twice that to supply the entire countryside when it is collectivized. This would just barely keep us up to where we need to be in agriculture. That’s not enough. The truth is I need one hundred times that much.”

“I see. But, the countryside is barely collectivized.”

“Well, that is about to change. Anyway, do you know what this particular factory costs us?”

“No sir. Again I have no idea.”

“I paid ten million one hundred thousand dollars for this first factory plus an ongoing contract for that much every year ad infinitum and probably more. Paid in cash. The capitalist banks won’t advance sufficient credit to buy more.”

“So to produce one hundred thousand tractors we would have to import or build twenty big factories like this one and pay in cash.”

“Exactly. You’re quick Richard. That’s why I spend so much time with you. Of course it’s enjoyable for me to socialize with a person more of my type in terms of life experience. Especially someone of your real world experience who understands what I am talking about first time around.

“Do you know what our foreign reserves look like?”

“No sir”

“Good, you shouldn’t know. The truth is we have less than one hundred million US dollars in our banks today. All of it is committed. Where am I going to get two hundred million dollars for Ford?”

“Jesus Christ! I don’t know.”

“Exactly. It’s all I can do to pay for this one factory right now. We cannot industrialize without money. We don’t have the money and furthermore we won’t be getting it from the bloodsucking international bankers. As you may have read the British banks have just notified us that they are canceling our line of credit. – And, they are calling in their existing loans meaning I have to pay them off now in cash. This despite the fact that I have maintained our payments exactly as required and have the best credit rating in the world among capitalist bankers excepting only the USA government’s credit rating.

“So what do we do?”

“Exactly. What is to be done?”

“Thank you for informing me sir, but what is it that I may be able to do to help?”

“I know what has to be done, don’t worry about that. What I want from you is simply your understanding of our current crisis and the importance of you doing exactly as I tell you to do. In other words, that my instructions are performed exactly as I say, in the coming years. You do your part and I’ll do mine.”

“You can count on me sir. I am your man; unto death do us part.”

“Thank you. That’s all for today Richard.”

Assignment Europe: December, 1926

The Boss was speaking to the graduating interns from the Comintern’s Intelligence Division at year’s end 1926. He was winding up what had been a fairly lengthy question and answer period.

“It’s time for each of you to gain some essential international field experience with our parties. Yes, Our parties. As you have surmised the difficulties we have had in the Soviet Union are reflected directly in the thinking of our foreign comrades. This is not a good thing. They should be worrying about developing strategies for seizing state power in their own countries not worrying about what we are doing here to combat our terrible economic backwardness. They have the industry we need and the best contribution they can make is to get that industry into our collective hands via revolution at home. For a variety of reasons this logic is not going to be universally accepted in our Parties.

“Another and not the least reason the foreigners are again looking to us is to provide them with the model of what they are supposed to do. But in practice, all our high-falutin pronouncements of October over the radio aside, our model has developed in stages and continues to do so. They will always be playing catch-up if they insist on duplicating what we did step by step. The idea is to duplicate socialism as a system at the level comfortable for the nation involved. That will be far different in Berlin than in Ulan Bator.

“At any rate, as I say for a variety of reasons, these factional disputes will continue to arise in these parties and we have to be prepared to surgically excise the trouble-makers. It is after all the primary justification for our Organizational Division to exist – that is, to see that the policy of the International Party is laid down and adhered to in the Leninist spirit of democratic centralism. To that end the Organizational Division is now going to need help from the Intelligence Division.

“Accordingly, each of you will spend the next two critical years, in the field, in Europe west of our frontiers, ostensibly as Organizational Division cadre. Some of you have already begun.

“This is more than a training exercise. I am going to have to ask you young men and women to grow up a little early. You see our country and our class are under attack. Of course we have always been under attack since October 1917. All we have had are periods of respite when we can catch our breath and get ready for the next round. Right now the capitalists of all the advanced capitalist countries – Germany, France, Italy, Britain, the USA and Japan not to mention their empires and allies – are trying to reach an accord to go to World War once again – against us – united amongst themselves. This we must prevent at all costs. It was Comrade Lenin’s doctrine of keeping the capitalist encirclement divided, formalized at Rapallo in the spring of 1922, which has kept us safe so far, and is the foundation for our current policies. Although you should be aware the shape of those policies may shift radically. What do I mean by that?

“We have to prevent by any means necessary any block between Germany and the rest of Europe. Such a block would inevitably be directed against us as I am sure you know. We also have to keep the US and Japan from allying against us in the Far East as they began to do during the Civil War. At all costs, in other words, we have to prevent capitalist unity against us and encourage world-wide anti-capitalist unity of workers and farmers.”

“Thus, from time to time you may be called upon to perform dangerous missions.

“Finally, as agents of the Organizational Division, you will be checking the background on each member of these foreign parties – particularly leading members – remember, always provide a summary of that person’s political involvement, if any, with the current arguments in the international communist press about ongoing developments in the Soviet Union. You will each be instructed in the day to day activities of Organizational Division agents and we expect to see you on your first assignments in Western Europe in January of next year – which is about two weeks away. So we will not be seeing each other again until each of you returns – at which time I want to meet with each of you for a personal debriefing.

“Thank you for your ideas and your time.”

Comrade Stalin left the podium and the students stood at attention. The graduation was over.

The Five Year Plan

Throughout 1928 Stalin adjusted “the pace” of events in agriculture apparently trying to decide how to maximize the speed of the collectivization once the First Five Year Plan officially got under way in August. He found that rapidly expanding its scope (geographical broadness) as well as its depth (the actual collection of tools, animals and other farm equipment and livestock) had overall given the best results. In other words, seizing everything, everywhere, worked best.

What also became apparent was the inability of the agricultural capitalists and their sympathizers to keep pace with the Government’s increasing demands and the Party’s use of (1) agitators to whip up the poor and middle farmers and then the employment of (2) bureaucratic armed troops (Chekists) to see these decisions carried out with maximum speed and thoroughness. The kulaks lost out altogether, immediately, and were largely deported to virgin lands in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia, to begin again as common farmers.

The industrial half of the Stalinist solution moved along much more smoothly than did the situation in the countryside. The reason for this was the Bolshevik’s complete control of the labor movement in the cities and their decade of experience in organizing the national economy and securing it international partners in development – willing and unknowing (as a huge amount of industrial espionage had been underway for many years. All of it under the direct supervision of the Boss.) The agricultural half of this resolution was more difficult but it was accomplished.

The Great Struggle for Collectivization and Industrialization

The idea of collectivizing agriculture in these small-holding farmer kinds of countries goes back to Karl Marx. Lenin had also written about it from a theoretical standpoint. The idea of massive industrialization was feasible. If one had the money. End of Story? Not really.

As we have seen, Stalin had been forced into a corner by history.  Now he had finally decided what to do. Namely, to both collectivize agriculture and industrialize the nation simultaneously. But he was not the sole leader yet. He had to work carefully to maintain his plurality in the political bureau, the central committee and in the Party Congresses and Conferences. He proved to be an excellent politician and he kept his markers out. The First Five Year Plan was his answer for industrialization.

To pay the cost of industrialization Stalin needed a lot of money. He got much of it internally from the turnover tax (a kind of sales tax) that eventually took about 90% or more of the average industrial worker’s income in the form of the prices workers had to pay for their daily bread. He got much of the rest of it, also internally, from the collective farms. The farmers in the USSR would play the role assigned to the colonies of the Capitalist world in its industrialization.

August 20, 1927 - NEP Will Not Suffice

Stalin Informs the Central Committee that the time is at hand

By 1927 the economic crisis was deepening. – And, not just because of the Kulaks, nor the inherent problems we have just reviewed. By mid-1927 the crisis was deepening because of success: i.e., the Cheka’s economic directorate priority, to which so much funding had been allocated, had paid off and all the targeted equipment was on hand. But the necessary infrastructure to support all the new incoming factories and equipment simply was not being finished on time. As a consequence machinery was piling up everywhere in the Soviet Union waiting for the completion of the infrastructural basics.

As the summer concluded and the news from China had time to sink in to the minds of the Politburo, Stalin called an emergency full meeting (plenary session) of the entire Central Committee to hear what he had to say about the crisis in industrialization. Stalin spoke from a stage at his Kremlin Theater to a large body of the most loyal and dedicated members of the Communist Party with a series of charts enlarged and lighted behind him. Much as Ross Perot would do with his US infomercials many years later Stalin explained to his colleagues the details of the current crisis and what he intended to do about it. Stalin handled the entire meeting personally and, something rare for him, never stopped talking, cajoling, persuading, brow-beating, until he got everyone into line, exactly as Lenin had done in the most important Party Congresses. (e.g., The 1907 Party 5th Congress in London. Stalin had been there as you may recall and had learned well from his mentor.)

“Comrades, far worse for us at the moment than anything happening in China is the fact that we have hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of brand new machinery sitting under tarpaulins in the rain, and soon it will be snow and ice. If we don’t get that equipment installed now, quickly, we may lose a great deal of it. The only way to make this stuff impregnable to weathering is to get it working.

“I am going to have to replace the shock teams I have been using so far to meet each of these bottle necks with a mass movement of the Soviet population into preparation of the infrastructure. We have to have the basics now.

“By which I mean the foundations of these steel plants behind the Urals will have to be implanted with the blast furnaces and steel pouring equipment even before the walls and roofs are finished. We have to get the dams finished that supply the power we need at MagneticMountain (Magnitogorsk.) Also, we must have this hydroelectric power if we are to get our aluminum manufacturing equipment installed before it too goes to rust. Those infrastructural basics have to be ready to receive that power even if they have no foundations, walls or roofs. Regardless of sacrifice our aluminum plants will be ready to receive power.

“At Gorky (Nizhniy-Novgorod) we need steel assembly roofing plants constructed now if we hope to get our truck industry producing with all the new American components and manufacturing equipment right now, and if we hope to have the Main Plant completed before next year. Even then, none of those automotive plant buildings will have walls in their first nine months.

“The list goes on and on but what it means is we need millions of workers sent to new infrastructural tasks. There can be no fucking around here comrades. Either we industrialize regardless of the cost or we are defeated. We have perhaps ten years to get ready. Either we do it or they crush us.

“Our plan to solve this crisis is in what we are calling, as many of you know, our First Five Year Plan. Under its auspices we can work with a draft of all able bodied unemployed men and women to go to the production fronts, such as those just mentioned, and they can be paid as we can afford to pay them.

Meaning, specifically, in terms of wages, we can feed them and their families, and as we can, we will distribute cash to them as well. In terms of hours and working conditions it will be up to the Party cadre to convince workers of the importance to their own well-being, and their own government and state, to make New Agriculture work and to make the industrial implantation work.

“These steps and the coming First Plan will mean the end of unemployment in the Soviet Union. But that will still not be enough labor-power. We need ten million industrial shock workers today! We will get them within a year but they will have to come from agriculture. We will need thirty million of these infrastructural workers by the third year of the Plan. Once collectivization gets underway we will have them.”

“Comrade Stalin to get ten million workers from agriculture will require a complete restructuring of agriculture, will it not?

“Yes, next year. I need you to authorize these steps now.”

More questions, more answers for the better part of the day.

The Politburo and the entire Central Committee listened to what the chief had to say. They had read all the briefing papers and appendices prior to the meeting as provided by Stalin’s top bureaucrat, and fellow Politburo member, Vyacheslav Molotov. Finally, they voted unanimous approval. What else could one do? What choice did Bolshevism have in the real world of hostile capitalist encirclement?

The “Fist” Again

By 1926 a new class of rich farmers had clearly emerged. In only five years a new agrarian ruling class had arisen. These were called Kulaks, after the rich farmers of the Czarist period, who acted as the gendarmes of the Czar’s dictatorship in the countryside and thus were referred to as the “fists” of the Regime. The new rich farmers were assigned their old name once again. Kulak being the Russian word for “fist”.

Below them in wealth were the middle farmers which were a very large percentage of the farming population and finally the poor farmers and then the agricultural laborers. However, the commanding heights of village and countryside production were dominated once again by these new rich farmers who could and did determine Black Market prices by storing, withholding, and selling as market conditions dictated, the largest and most significant percentage of total village or area grain and meat output.

Now, in 1926 the kulaks began to flex their newly created muscles and were indicating a readiness to challenge the central government in Moscow over prices and delivery. They wanted better prices than the Government was offering or they would not sell. The Government continued to opt as it always would, indeed had to, choosing guns over butter.

The Fist Meets the Cheka

Furthermore, they, as well as all of the other farmers, wanted things to buy. Goods from the cities were simply not getting to the villages, or were coming in such small drips and drabs that nothing other than the idiosyncratic private market could be created for them. They wanted the foreign market opened up for selling and buying whatever they wished to sell and for buying whatever they wished to import. Putting the international law of value of the capitalist world order back to work in the Soviet Union would have destroyed the Government’s rationing and price control system. It probably would undo the socialist accomplishments everywhere including in industrial production. What little capital the government had for industrial investment had to go to heavy and medium industry to support the fledgling agricultural machinery market and the overwhelming needs of the military. This meant little or no official consumer industrial production occurred and even less of what was produced got beyond the urban market.

This inability to provide home grown industrial products to the countryside was the Achilles Heel in the Bolshevik agricultural NEP. The kulaks were taking advantage and would continue to exploit this terrible weakness in order to gain their objective. Their overriding objective was not to get a Coleman Lantern primus (stove or burner) from Leningrad. Rather they wanted to set the market price for their goods wherever they liked, and then to get that price paid by whomever including and especially the Government.

In short, the kulak dominated agricultural economy gave the kulaks the ability to strangle the Bolsheviks eventually, if not immediately, and these rich farmers were not responsive at all to the Party’s call for patriotic support of the effort to industrialize the nation. By which the Party leadership meant larger voluntary contributions from the farmer’s stores of grain so the Government could continue to be able to buy all the factories and equipment it needed to carry out its industrialization program.

The Second Proletarian Revolution: Now in the Soviet Union Itself

In 1926 the handwriting was on the wall and something would have to be done quickly or the crisis would be upon them. This uncomfortable position of being cut-up by both the inability to produce consumer goods as one blade (having chosen in favor of long-term industrialization) and the demand of the kulak led farmers for higher prices for their grain, meat and poultry as the other blade, was referred to by economists of the time as being in “the scissors crisis.”

In 1926, Stalin was fairly firmly in the leadership saddle and had been for at least five years. He had decided that to industrialize Russia and mechanize and modernize its agriculture an entirely new approach would be required. It wasn’t too hard to see what had to be done but the task was monumental in scope; the intensity that would be required to achieve success was unclear to all except Stalin.

The Boss intended on “melting the scissors” by liquidating the tailors. He gave them one last chance as the harvest for 1928 began to stand impressively in the fields, with a special trip where he hoped to convince his opponents of the importance of conforming to the Government’s agricultural program. They refused, often insulting Bolshevism in the process. Anticipating an unreconstructed capitalist led peasantry, Stalin had begun his counter moves in the latter half of 1927 and these had been speeded up in 1928 until his tour of the countryside in August. Then it became apparent he was ready to drop all pretenses and go for broke in forced collectivization of the entire farming population of the Soviet Union! The Party would mobilize volunteers to go to the countryside but the main instrument of social policy would be the Cheka. Lenin’s wisdom proved itself in the event for without this “sword and shield of the proletarian revolution” we would have failed in our agricultural policy.

Up and until this time the Soviet experience with forced collection of agricultural and animal husbandry products had been extensive but of mixed quality and results. Most of it acquired during the Civil War. Since then there had been only occasional need to resort to force to collect what the Government was due. That is until the winter of 1927-1928 when Stalin backed emergency collection measures to counter-act the kulak withholding of grain reserves.

Then in the spring of 1928 the Government was able to relax these forceful collections and allow the planting to proceed apace and the market economy to work unimpeded. The beginning of the great change would come after this fall’s harvest.

1928: Stalin Takes Over Agriculture

Again: the struggle began in August, 1928. This time the Party would take the farmers in hand the way it had wanted to ever since the farmers had taken the Party in hand and forced the restoration of a market economy in 1921. This time the Party was prepared internally to pursue the task to the bitter end. – And it had just the man at its head (Joseph Stalin) to see the mission would be accomplished - no matter what the cost. This struggle to force the farmers into cooperatives and collectives was the greatest war the Bolsheviks ever had to fight until World War II.

The Middle Peasants Will Snap to Attention

The agricultural half of the Stalinist solution moved along on time or beat the schedule established in the end by the Boss himself who constantly pushed his planners to set higher production goals. The Party began the wholesale use of volunteers along with Chekists to remove the rich farmers – kulaks – from the equation. As Molotov put it, the removal wholesale of the Kulaks physically from the countryside forever will make the middle peasantry snap to attention!

Kulaks were specifically not allowed to participate in coops or collective farms because of their class backgrounds. As Stalin said, to paraphrase: “…these persons as individuals were perhaps guilty of little themselves but they are from a class guilty of every crime against humanity imaginable and will accordingly be required to pay the price.” (Stalin on the question of Kulaks) The price was often deportation. Trainloads after trainload of Kulak families were deported to virgin areas of Siberia to begin again, this time as common farmers.

 However, while he was liquidating the power of the kulaks as a class, it was also true within the Party; Stalin lost support over the years of the First Plan among his bureaucrats. Why? Because the societal contradictions created by “the pace” of the Stalinist solution were often enormous. As you may have surmised, these problems often required a heavy hand. All of which interfered with these regional bosses’ opportunities to meet their production schedules.

Furthermore, the production targets themselves were so high they often made compliance impossible for either workers or managers. Yet the Boss would not listen to his underlings pleas and increasingly found their protests to be indications of subversive counter-revolutionary sentiments and accordingly they shut up.

In the end the Stalinist solution worked because it gave the Russians something they absolutely had to have: a modern industrial infrastructure. – And, it worked because Soviet workers were willing to make the great sacrifices necessary to make the socialist dream a reality.

Inside Snapshot

The War Danger and Foreign Investment

Sitting at his Staraya Street office desk Stalin was working on a mountain of papers when Poksrebyshev announced the presence of two top Chekists. Stalin motioned for them to be seated in front of him as he continued working.

“Koba, I have some bad news I’m afraid.” Speaking was Comrade Menzhinsky who had stepped in to fill the hole left by Felix Dzershinsk’s untimely passing.

“What is it?”

“The MOCRists have escaped.”

“How did that happen?”

“In short, the top guys figured it out and put out the warning. At the moment, on the other hand, all of the organized White subversives have either fled the country or are in our hands.”

“Exactly, don’t worry about it.”

Cheka boss Menzhinsky was shocked. He had expected Stalin to have a fit. Instead he seemed almost happy about it.

“You’re not mad.” Menzhinsky commented rather than asked.

Stalin stopped working, looking up to address his guests.

“Not at all, I think this is best. After all the Party and the country are well aware of  the danger posed by foreign capitalists on the march against us once again. The Shakty case proved it to them. The Fifteenth Congress confirmed this fact as part of the General Line. Now, we need to give foreign capital the opposite impression. As a matter of fact I think I mentioned something like that to you and Beria just a week ago did I not?”

“Yes, actually, I thought you were joking, when you said ‘I wish they would just get smart and get lost so we can move on…’ but I guess we got lucky…”

“Of course, we did. After all, we are the ones who have been saying we are weak, surrounded, in danger of being overthrown. That doesn’t do much for instilling confidence in foreign investors does it? Right now, Ford declines to build our automobile complex because frankly they have no confidence we will last long enough to produce a profit for them. I will get their equipment but I am going to have to buy it in cash up front so they get their profit now. Anyway, you guys have a lot more important things going on right now, especially in the Economic Directorate, than a bunch of pathetic Czarist conspirators, and you are doing great work. You keep that up and play down the foreign danger, as far as anything we let out to the capitalist world, alright? In other words, they should think we are beyond all internal danger, quite strong, absolutely credit worthy having the best credit rating of any European nation, and determined to industrialize – at fair prices – no matter what the cost. ‘– And, to prove it we are not even looking for the MOCRists! We wish them well in skulking around European fleshpots and acting as doormen at the George the Fifth (Hotel) in Paris, ha.’ That is what the foreign capitalists and their banks need to have as their new view of the new Soviet Union. Their new view of us in the Soviet leadership and our absolute self-confidence.”

“Yes, Koba. I agree. – And, as you say, the monarchists would have been a waste of a lot of our agents time had we arrested them. They are nothing. I need our agents in other areas. As usual you have seen straight to the heart of the matter Koba.”

“Anything else?”

“No Koba and thank you for your time.”

“Anytime comrade. Especially for you and your assistant here. Comrade Yagoda is it not?”

“Yes sir. Thank you for remembering.”

“I am well aware of the good work you have done Comrade, never doubt that.”

Stalin ushered his guests to the door of his Secretariat office.

A rather sharp turn was underway. Only four months after the Party had gone on record as seeing foreign invasion and accompanying subversion as its number one concern, it’s recently confirmed high leader was saying they were to eliminate that line altogether, at least as far as foreign consumption was concerned.

1929 – 1930: Stalin Takes Over Industrial and Military Planning

In 1918, the Red Army officers divided into Bolshevik officers and former Czarist officers. Exactly the same thing happened among civilians in industry. This divide deepened in the years from 1923 until 1928. This factor along with other bureaucratic disputes meant that despite five major agencies working on “planning” there had been by 1928, in effect, five years of No Plan. The situation did not improve during the first year of the First Plan. By 1930 it became apparent to Stalin and his closest associates that they would have to directly take over the national planning themselves. Central to this takeover was the idea of having a series of Five Year Plans with specific goals to be accomplished in 5, 10, 15 and 20 years.

In 1928 Stalin stepped in as the Boss of his Second Revolution (the Revolution from Above) by taking command of the agricultural front – the forced mass collectivization. In 1929 he began taking complete Party control of the industrial front (including supportive infrastructure). In 1930, Rykov was finally replaced as prime minister by Molotov which also entailed the top spot as Chair of the Defense Commission.

  Across the board, for his new Cabinet of Commissars and Agency Chiefs, Stalin brought-in trusted and experienced Old Bolsheviks. Some continued their previous responsibilities to which were added new ones (e.g., Sergo Ordzhonikidze , continuing to be the Chair of NEC was the new Commissar for Heavy Industry; Leonid Krassin took over international finance, Maxim Litvinov came in to take over foreign affairs and eventually would be the USSR’s ambassador to the League of Nations; Nikolai Kuibyshev was the new chief of Hq (RZ) STO; Valerian Kuibyshev continued as GosPlan boss;  Kliment Voroshilov continued as War Commissar).

By 1930 Stalin found himself as the Boss of what turned out to be the greatest and fastest industrialization of any country in the history of the world. The Boss had realized that no matter how you cut it up, the pie available to the Soviet Government was simply too small. You had to bake a much larger pie – in fact, many much larger pies. In economic terms this meant you had double and quadruple the output of basic industries like electrical power, steel, coal, machine tool construction, factory construction of heavy and light machinery, etc. This solved the problem of insufficient bureaucratic jobs to go around. It also would solve the problem of industrial inferiority vis a vis the capitalist countries who had our Soviet Union encircled.

A Taste of the Problem

Furthermore, by 1929 it became apparent that the bureaucratic warfare and byzantine politics of the existing system of managerial control had proven totally unfit for the demands now being placed upon it. No matter how much intervention had occurred from the center since say 1926 the bureaucrats continued to hide equipment, raw materials, suborn subcontractors and even marshal private sources of labor-power. Experience had proven that only the closest, hands-on, diligent supervision of the commanding heights of new industrial projects (e.g., the foregoing mentioned Nizhniy Novgorod Auto-Truck Plant and the undertaking mentioned below at Magnetic Mountain) could insure that the goals and specifications of the Five Year Plan were met.

This meant that the Boss himself and his best men had to take command. But first some of these bottlenecks need to be described.

Nizhniy Novgorod (Gorky)

How did one go about the actual construction of a tractor or automobile plant in a planned economy? We will look at one example of how the nightmare of learning how to do it turned out, at the Nizhniy Novgorod (Gorky) automobile and truck plant. The first stage of Plant construction cost the USSR $30,000,000 US paid to Henry Ford’s Company and calling for two phases of construction to build an assembly plant in Russia with components now purchased from the US to be operating in 1929. – And, a second phase where the Soviets would receive an entire manufacturing plant for A to Z building 130,000 automobiles and trucks by 1930, constructed under one overall authority, the All-Union Automobile and Tractor Manufacturing Association (VATO). Initially it was to be implemented by two other agencies (Metallostroi and Avotstroi) overseen by the two main planning agencies (NEC and STO) and the resulting mess having to go to the Party’s highest authorities for resolution.

Real Freedom of the Press

We Bolsheviks believe, and believed then, in suppressing the capitalist press, now and forever. However, criticism from the Party press over Government activities (except during the war years) was always ongoing and intense. An excellent example can be seen by the way the Press exposed the chaotic disgrace going on at the NN Auto-Truck Plant by the Soviet journal For Industrialization (Za Industrializatsiuu). Many of these articles were written over a two year period by its correspondent in NN, Boris Agapov.

The Crisis

For Industrialization reported in mid-January of 1930 that all was not well at NN. VATO chiefs had been receiving glowing reports from NN since the project was announced a year earlier. In practice the chiefs of Metallostroi and Avotstroi spent the first day of the meeting screaming epithets at each other and it became apparent that little actual progress had been made at all. Only ten percent of the needed amount of equipment and supplies was being received on a daily basis. Avostroi had balked at paying the prices demanded by Metallostroi which retaliated by putting its overload of demand from other concerns ahead of Avostroi’s orders. This mess was corrected right away but the VATO bosses had to send special agents to handle the situation.

Even then the in-fighting simply shifted to other theaters of the industrial front while the main lesson learned by local managers turned out to be “improvisation”. Confronting the planning failure of a 48 million brick shortfall in March, managers learned to get it some other way (in this case buying out the supply of a silicate factory nearby) or face the consequences (which by now could include mandatory death sentences for failure to meet quotas.) Avostroi complained by April it had insufficient locomotive and truck transport to move supplies from the delivery yard to the construction sites. Again the center had to send Adustors to get things squared away.

Agapov did not hesitate to give his opinion which was to get Metallostroi out of the picture and set up Avotstroi as the principal subcontractor for VATO at NN. Which is what happened at the end of the summer (end of August, 1930) when NEC reorganized everything under its new Politburo assigned trouble shooters Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Lazar Kaganovich. These two long time Bolshevik leaders were sent to NN armed with the authority of the CC-Politburo (and as the new Chair and Vice-Chair of the National Economic Council on September 10, 1930.) Ordzhonikidze was simultaneously told to prepare to take over the now to be created Commissariat of Heavy Industry.

These two finally got the mess under control at NN but it would not be until November of the following year (1931) that the first batch of Ford Model A automobiles and Ford Model AA trucks began to roll off the production lines. In the meantime there had been a host of serious problems not accounted for in the Plan. For example, For Industrialization reported in October (1930) that the bureaucrats had failed to plan for the right amount of the right kind of alloyed steel. Neither Avotstroi nor Stal (the steel supplier) had made plans to supply these needs as they had hoped to import the steel they needed – Stal had thus failed to even prepare the productive capacity for the right kind of steel. This implied, obviously, that unplanned expenses and time and resources had to be made and appropriated to a special steel industry just to keep NN going on time.

In retrospect, we can see clearly that the CC-Politburo intervention via Ordzhonikidze and Kaganovich that saved the situation. They brought with them in their September 10, 1930, takeover at NN a large staff of trusted and able cadre that mobilized the spirituality of the cause among workers as well as tackling the specific mechanical bottlenecks. By the beginning of 1933 Ordzhonikidze could report to Stalin that annual production had been over-fulfilled by 30% with auto and truck units rolling off the lines at about 130,000 vehicles per year. This lesson was not lost on the CC-Politburo and its chiefs in the new Stalin Government headed by Vyacheslav Molotov.

Magnetic Mountain (Magnitogorsk)

NN was a well-established Czarist town and Bolshevik City. The Party had a large and important apparatus on hand when the First Plan announced its choice of NN to be the center of the Auto/Truck industry. On the other hand the Party Planners had also decided to build another “show city” in the wilderness, out of nothing on hand whatsoever.

Everything for Magnetic Mountain and it’s A to Z steel manufacturing complex at the center of a satellite of cities devoted to large-scale industrial manufacturing plants, had to be imported to the chosen site and planted into the virgin land. During the years of its construction (the 1930’s) every attempt was made to jump ahead in social organization along lines which would serve as a “model” for new socialist humanity. For a wonderful exposition of what Stalinist Socialism could and did achieve I recommend the book Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Stephen Korkin, 1995, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Great advances were made in the development of education from kindergarten through tertiary levels of university and technical institutes. Great advances were made in training working people to discuss daily events from the class struggle perspective to determine what a ”socialist” course and or perspective should look like on each of the many issues arising in Soviet life. At the same time old ideas, some then contemporary Bolshevik ideas, were set aside in favor of publicly discussed and agreed upon modifications (as in the areas of marriage, divorce and abortion.)

No area of cultural life was ignored as the buildings comprising Magnetic Mountain were constructed to house every area of social as well as technological life.

Ten Years Is All We Have

Suffice it to say we Bolsheviks prevailed once again. Collectivization gave Stalin the agricultural produce he needed to sell at home, and abroad, to come up with some of the cash to buy all the factories and machinery that the Soviet Union needed if his program to bring the USSR to modern capitalist levels within ten years were to succeed. {“We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in 10 years. Either we do it or they crush us.” Stalin’s speech to the industrial manager’s conference on 4 February, 1931.} Almost as importantly Stalin had eliminated the class enemy on the land. These kulaks and their hangers-on had been the backbone of Russian capitalism and now they were gone. The countryside was socialist, unified and in political lock-step conformity with the Red government in Moscow.

Even though overall agricultural production was drastically reduced because of the sabotage of the kulaks, the portion the government received went way up! {Kulaks were rich farmers - kulak is the Russian word for “fist” - originally these were the local bosses the Czar and the aristocrats used to keep the common farmers in line - thus the term “fist.” After the revolution this class was reborn among the winners in the grab-bag redistribution of 1917.} If the Soviet government got 10% of the previous overall private farm output that was a lot less than 90% of the collective farm output, the Soviet Government now received.

For Stalin collectivization was a tremendous success. He had eliminated the class enemy on the land inside the USSR and gotten a permanent source of plan-able income in the form of agricultural goods. The capitalist farmers had been brought to heel.

1929 - Evolution of the Red Army Industrial Complex

Getting the Red Army Modernized

Arming and equipping the Red Army had been the Bolshevik’s primary task from the earliest days of the Revolution as you have seen. This military build-up evolves through several distinct stages.

(1) Initially, the Bolsheviks inherited what was left of the Czarist Army which by January of 1918 was about 300,000 men. They had been equipped with small arms (rifles, pistols) produced in Russia in the arm’s factories of Kazan and Petrograd. We have traced the origin of large scale rifle production in the early pages of Chapter 13 (Robert Nobel in the Caucuses). Suffice to say ongoing military factory construction had provided what the Czar’s Army had come to rely upon.

However, these factories never produced enough arms for all the Czarist soldiers. This was a function of the low level of produce ability inherent in these early factory installations and the huge numbers of farmer conscripts who were expected to pick up the rifle of dead comrades and use them as their own. Russian capitalists had been slow to invest in new and improved machinery in the arms factories because of the cost and because they had an already guaranteed Czarist Government contract for what they did produce.

(2) In the second stage the Bolsheviks had to recapture lost arms factories and get them into production. Then they had to “beef up” rifle and pistol manufactures everywhere, so that each soldier in this multi-million man Red army would have one. During the Civil War (1918-1920), the War Commissar, Leon Trotsky convinced the Germans to build more factories for him. He did this with large quantities of money spread liberally among the Wermacht General Staff and the German Government everywhere appropriate, while the war against Germany was still going on. With the coming of peace in the autumn of 1918 this German war factory construction, in the Soviet Republic, for everything from small arms to tanks and planes really got underway. All this construction was fueled by cash purchases financed from the wealth seized from the Czarist ruling oligarchy and its Church, or cash paid to Lenin from the German’s themselves.

(3) With the end of the Civil War and the coming of NEP, the Economic Directorate of the Cheka was given the primary task of securing what was needed from the surrounding hostile capitalist world, in order to build even more factories and to further “beef up” the standing TO and E of the Red Army.

(4) What slowed things down all along was the inadequacy of the Soviet industrial complex. It was not until 1931 that an industrial complex sufficient for the job imagined by Stalin and the Politburo was in existence. Some of the first examples of what could be done were military as well as agricultural (We have reviewed Stalin’s emphasis on tractors above in his conversation with Richard Sorge and illustrated some problems with the automotive truck and other massive civil engineering installations.) The T-34.

(5) The T-28 tank is another early and important proof of Soviet industrial progress with a military orientation under Stalin’s Plan. From the time Stalin took over the tank industry personally – that is to say January, 1930 - until that industry could turn out the best battle tanks in the world, was only three years (1933.) Let’s see how that aspect of industrialization progressed, albeit after a rough start, from the standpoint of its number one customer: the Red Army.

Our Free Press Again

Stalin Takes Over the Tank Industry

 One year after the First Plan began, in September 1929, there was a flurry of expose reports in the pages of several military and industrial journals. The same muckraking campaign we have discussed with regards to failures at Nizhniy Novgorod had overtaken the Red Army itself; this time over the manufacture of Tanks. The Politburo demanded an explanation and in December it was provided by independent investigators. Their report condemned the NEC. Thus in December (1929) the Politburo delegated emergency authority (blank check) to a special team to get the Tank Industry up to Plan standards immediately.

 “…the Politburo, and mainly Comrade Stalin, demanded from us: take all measures, spend the money, even large amounts of money, run people to all corners of Europe and America, but get models, plans, bring in people, do everything possible and impossible in order to set up tank production here.” (War Commissar Kliment Voroshilov, 1932)

The BT (high speed) Tank

Adopted by Red Army 1932

(6 varieties produced through 1939)

1.Armor thickness:    bulletproof

2.Horsepower:400 (36.4hp/ton) Jumps 15 – 40 feet

3.Machine guns:

4.Main gun:

5.Initial shell speed:

6.Produce-ability

7.Tracks:          Caterpillar and Wheels

8.Engine:

9.Produce-ability:

10.  Speed:         69 mph/110 km/hr

Tracks: a. unpaved roads         520 km/hr

      b: Paved roads  630 km/hr

Wheels: Paved roads      1250 km/hr

11.  Underwater submersible

12.  Diesel engine, over powerful

By the beginning of the Second Plan in 1933 the most advanced tank in the world was the Soviet manufactured High Speed (BT) Tank. It all began in the year 1931, when the Cheka got its hands on two of the most advanced Vickers tanks in the British TO and E. Among many then advanced features these tanks featured independent suspension of the wheels driving the treads on the tanks and this made them much more adaptable to a variety of land surfaces, and allowed them to be built closer to the ground, with a resulting low silhouette. Soviet copies would have this suspension plus other features such as much heavier cannon and effectively thicker (slanted) armor.

It was also the year the Cheka bought two of US manufacturer George Walter Christie’s tanks, for cash under the table, and phony shipping papers as “tractors” to a tractor end-user in Odessa. No other Army in the world than the Red Army was paying any attention to Mr. Christie’s work (including the US Army) so he was cash short. In fact the Russians saved him from bankruptcy.

In 1932 and 1933 (the end of the First Plan and the beginning of the Second) across the board Soviet tanks of three classes emerging qualitatively superior to any of the tanks of the capitalist nations. The most important of these began with the T-28. These first newly designed tanks, were produced in three major Soviet factory complexes but were so simple in design as to be buildable in any auto works factory thus they were also produced in secret in the new Five Year Plan arms factories behind the Urals. They became available in large numbers (more than the rest of the world’s tank forces combined) in 1934. The T-28’s were by far the best tanks in Europe as of 1933. The next question became “can we produce enough of the right types to insure our victory in the inevitable coming world war?”

The T-28 Tank (series)

In 1933, the Red Army adopted these new T-28 tanks as its Main Battle Tank to be backed up by a slightly smaller tank and a considerably heavier one so that all three principle armor attack tactics could be employed in a single battle. In 1937 the T-28 gave way to the then ultra-modern T-34 design as the new Main Battle Tank and the  T-28 dropped down to serving the function of mass armor attack primarily in support of the T-34 vanguards along with the other lighter tanks.

However, when compared to the German panzer series, the T-28 was always an overmatch for them. The T-34’s absolutely commanded any battlefield against any German tanks once they took the field but for purposes of comparison they are far too advanced to be comparable to Panzers. The difference in everyday terms is the difference between a heavy weight fighter and a middle weight.

So, for comparable statistics we should compare T-28’s to German Panzers. At the time these were the only serious contenders in the armor world. This same year (1937) all T-28’s were made submersible to a depth of 4.5 meters through a river over half a mile wide with a downstream force of one meter per second or less.

     T – 28    Panzer

    Armor thickness          30 mm.   15 mm

    Horsepower      500        250

    Machine guns   4 or 5     2

    Main Gun         76 mm   75 mm

    Initial shell speed (1938)   555m/s   385 m/s

January 1, 1939

The Soviet Union has a total of 21,100 battle tanks (of all classes) ready for action

September 1, 1939 – Nazi’s invade Poland

Red Army adopts the T-34 as its Main Battle Tank on December 19 1939

From that time until the day the Second World War began for us (June 22, 1941) The Red Army was equipped with a total of 1363 of these best ever T-34 tanks. Within six months our factories were kicking out 35 per day or 1050 per month. (Stalin had hoped to delay this war another year at least which would have given him at least another 12,600 probably more. This in itself might well have prevented the Nazi attack or redirected it elsewhere.)

      T-34

1.Armor thickness:

2.Horsepower:

3.Machine Guns:

4.Main Gun:   76 mm  (reputedly the best gun in the world)

5.Initial shell speed:

6.Tracks:          Caterpillar – very wide, all terrain

7.Engine:         Diesel especially designed for this tank.

8.Produce-ability:      Easy. Any Auto manufacturing plant

9. 

The T-34 Tank (series)

After the fascist army officers rising in Spain (July, 1936) Stalin decided to intervene as we shall see (Chapter 16 below), and the Spanish Civil War produced the long-awaited combat observational specifications of performance, armament, armor, reliability and produce-ability the Soviet government needed. These were channeled directly to the Soviet engineers in the major show industrial cities, including the secret ones being constructed behind the Urals, who were responsible for improving this Main Soviet Battle Tank. By 1937 the first of the perfected tanks – the T-34 – in its first combat tested, new and improved, form was coming off the secret military production lines.

These T-34 tanks featured “slanted armor” which effectively doubled the amount of steel an incoming projectile had to penetrate in order to kill the tank crew, but at half the weight of the German tanks! This made the T-34s the fastest tanks in the world, which combined with their heavy guns, and independently suspended wheels driving the treads, created a de facto invincible Main Battle Tank.

Stalin went on to build over forty thousand of these by the end of January 1943, so that by the time the finalized version came on line in large numbers (July 1943) the Red Army had the best and biggest (over 100,000 T-34’s) which had made the Red Army armor force the biggest in the entire world (May, 1945)). The “Stalin” tanks (T-34’s, 1942-43 versions and KZ’s) dealt the final death blow to the Germans at Stalingrad, Kursk and each of the ever increasing number of large scale battles that forced the Germans back to Berlin in less than two years after Kursk (July 1943).

The Sturmovic Fighter-bomber

Air power was part of the Army in all the advanced countries of the time. Of equal importance to Stalin and his planners to the land Main Battle Tank (T-34 “Stalin” tank) for the Red Army, was the warplane called Sturmovic (Ilyushin-2; Il-2).

The Sturmovic was made of metal and wood. The main cabin and engine-bearing fuselage was a one piece steel unit, made of such powerful defensive armor it was virtually impervious to bullets other than those fired by the very largest cannons. The stermovic’s rear assembly and rear fuselage was made of wood which made up in weight for the heavy armoring of the personnel carrying frontal steel assembly. Its fuel tanks were self-sealing so that they too were impervious to being blown up by the ignition of the gasoline fumes which would otherwise be in the partially empty tanks in combat.

Fifty thousand Sturmovic air-tanks were produced by the end of World War II and they were by far the best warplane of any nation during that great conflict. They insured the Red Army of control of the air and of the battle on the ground.

The Pace: Five in Four

In the Plan’s third year, 1931 Stalin decided to wrap up the First Plan. That Plan was in shreds anyway compared to its structure at the beginning. The slogan Five Years in Four or simply Five in Four spread overnight across the country. Little children ran through their playgrounds that day singing “Five in Four, Five in Four.” Stalin then kicked off the Second Five Year Plan a little over a year early. (The First Plan wrapped up its loose ends after a total lifespan of 4 years and three months.) This time, with the Second Plan, the Boss and his Plan commissars had a solid grip on the mechanics of central planning and forecasting. Furthermore, despite the chaos of the First Plan years, the errors and disasters, when it was all said and done there had been tremendous infrastructural progress in heavy industry, machine tools, and heavy and light machinery manufacture as well as electricity production and oil and gas exploitation.

But on the question of “pace” Stalin was persevering. The Boss seemed to insist always on the hardest way to go. Why?  To maximize the speed and scope of agricultural collectivization-mechanization and to assure the absolute maximum rapidity in the construction of power, steel, machine tool, heavy and light manufacturing, chemical and fuel industries.

The pace also became a way of keeping potential opposition from solidifying around anything! By the time a few managers might succeed in getting the Central Committee to grant an audience the entire equation would have changed as millions more workers were sent to tackle new targets – e.g., hydroelectric power construction, river linking canals, behind the Urals coal mines and steel industries – and the issues of the day had changed completely. Whatever ill thought out policies had precipitated the managers audience were now “ancient history” compared to the new problems emerging by the increasing demands of the Boss to (i) increase the rate of collectivization to 100% (ii) pour steel before the walls and roof of the factory are finished (iii) decrease dry holes in the oilfields to zero (iv) factories and mines to 24 hour production days – and, oh – by the way, this is now seven days a week!

Opposition within the Party was there and growing – it was there and growing because the “pace” demanded by Stalin was oppressive. Not only in hours worked but under conditions far worse than might have been tolerated by workers from capitalist bosses; yet, Soviet labor proved loyal to Stalin and conformed.

Not the least reason for this conformity was the 24 hour a day propaganda campaign in the arts including motion pictures, the radio, the press, and ad hoc committees created everywhere to bring every artist in the country into the campaign to build a new socialist motherland with posters and graffiti.

It was on the question of pace that Trotsky made a principled point of attack against Stalin. Beginning from his exile base on the Island of Principe (off the Istanbul, Turkey coast) and continuing throughout the First Five Year Plan Trotsky kept up a drumbeat attack on the Stalinists for the forced pace of both the mechanization of collectivized agriculture and the forced installation of everything from the new steel industry to the hydroelectric, machine tool, and massive automotive complexes arising literally from the bare Earth all over the Soviet Union.

Stalin could have stopped Trotsky cold, any time he wished. Why did he let him continue his ongoing assault against everything he was doing, building, dreaming?

One must consider the possibility that Stalin found Trotsky’s nearby “treason” to be useful in his political campaign at home to silence the opposition. Trotsky could not be a very worthy conspirator against the USSR after all unless he was alive and shooting off his mouth. Then it would be quite reasonable to jump to agreement with the Comintern line that he (Trotsky) as a man of action would naturally be actively organizing all kinds of uprisings and conspiracies against his nemesis.

As Stalin unfolded the trial of the Zinovievist-Trotskyist Opposition in June 1936 it became apparent the central issue was going to be sabotage of “the pace” of the Five Year Plans. In this limited way the prosecutors were right. Zinoviev and Trotsky had publicly opposed the pace and made that opposition the center of their political opposition.

Whatever Trotsky, Zinoviev et. al. thought they were doing the real effect had been to set themselves up to be the principal targets of the most recent Cheka drama. I suspect these two so disrespected Stalin’s intelligence they never saw they were walking away into the sunset of political oblivion. However, that may have been, objective observers within the Party could see the real targets were going to be anyone with a history of objecting, even quietly, to the pace set by the Boss anywhere anytime for any reason he might consider sufficient at the moment. Smart bureaucrats, who could, ducked for cover and conformed too.

The Cheka drama might be really unusual in another country and culture but those of you familiar with the modern history of Russian literature will see some obvious historiography in the way the trial writers and choreographers worked. The point is the specifics of the drama were nothing beyond the central point of the stupidity of opposition to the most rapid pace humanly possible in industrial and agricultural and infrastructural, not to mention military production, which was the social structural point of the entire matter. It’s not our job, at this time, to make a moral or ethical judgment on these developments only to reconstruct them so we can accurately understand what was going on.

Comrade Stalin then proceeded to explain how the pace could be stepped up thanks to the socialist dedication of miners led by Comrade Stakhanov who had increased coal production by several thousand percent on their individual shifts! With Stakhanovism Stalin had the “solution” to increasing the pace. Total speed-up on the job advocated and enforced by trade unions. The opposition was completely cowed – in fact, all opposition was now dead (sometimes literally not just politically). – And, just to be sure, there were a few more trials, public and en camera.

1937 - Reorganizing the Military and the Military-Industrial Complex

The final phase of the Stalin purge of the Party-Government-State apparatus in preparation for the next phase of the worldwide class war featured many generals from the old days replaced by a new generation of officers. It was this new generation of officers who would win the coming World War (II) for Stalin.

Chief in importance among the newly emerging General class was George Zhukov who was given command of the Soviet Far East Military District. You will recall when, in this Handbook, (Ch. 13) we last saw Zhukov, he had just begun as a Calvary sergeant at Lvov and Warsaw (1920), after service as a private soldier, in the Konarmia (1st Red Cavalry Army) under Buddeny and was a long time Stalinist.

The military and military-industrial complex purge of 1937 - 1938 brought critical war industries, especially in aviation, up to the most modern par then in existence. From the new institutes (e.g., Ilyushin) came what Stalin was demanding and which turned out to be the most important air weapon of the Second World War the Ilyushin 2 (IL2) or “Sturmovic” tank-buster. This air tank ground-attack aircraft (what is called a fighter-bomber in US parlance), along with the T-34 Tank, (also, qualitatively the best tank by all historian accounts of any and all countries of the entire Second World War) both came from the early Soviet lead in tank and aircraft design, Spanish civil war experience and the military and military-industrial complex purge-reorganization which began in 1937.

The Sturmovic was a mass producible heavily armored fighter-bomber, especially designed to fly low to the ground for close air support to attacking infantry and armor. It could fly slow enough to do the job on the ground and fast enough to drive off the best German fighters.

Imagine a land tank with wings coming at you at 100 feet off the ground firing heavy cannon and .50 cal. machine guns and then dropping one of a hell of a bomb! Worst of all your bullets have no effect! Heavy armor and self-sealing gasoline tanks made the Sturmovic seemingly invincible as Nazi warplanes and anti-aircraft ground fire, found their bullets bouncing off or seemingly having no effect!

This weapon was designed and produced according to specifications provided to industry from Orlov and Stalin!  These specifications a direct result of combat experience in Spain. The Sturmovic is the air-tank Stalin was fighting with Tukhachevsky about wanting 20,000 of. Probably more than any other one thing it was this single critical issue which led to the latter’s death.

(However, the personal-historical hatred we know Stalin had for Tukhachevsky should not be underestimated. Stalin would tolerate Kalinin’s alcoholism, barely, because of their old times together - for the same reason, their mutual historical experiences, he would cut Tuckhachevsky no slack at all.)

The T-34 “Stalin” tanks were also designed on the basis of Spanish civil war experience to have slanted armor which doubled the amount of steel an enemy shell had to penetrate, while giving the Red tanks a heavier punch at half the Panzer weight – thus, at half the weight of German tanks, the T-34’s were very fast, safer  (diesel as opposed to gasoline engine), better protected, and with the additional plus of being heavily armed with bigger cannons than any of the Nazi tanks.

These changes perfected (in personnel and equipment) the 1938 Red Army Field Manual theory of Deep Battle, and took on new and great importance, because the theory and method of what the Germans would call “blitzkrieg” could actually be implemented. (Something the Germans originally learned from the Red Army instructions of General Tukhachevsky during the early Rapallo years.)

The new weapons provided our side with the best tank and best close-air ground attack warplane of the entire coming World War (II) regardless of side. In short, the military changes won the war for us.

Furthermore, by June of 1941 the Red Army was not only the biggest army in the world it also had three times as many tanks and twice as many warplanes as all of the rest of the world combined. This overwhelming numerical superiority combined with Stalin’s construction of the vast coal-steel-machine tool-tank and aircraft factory construction behind the Urals, saved socialism, when the inevitable imperialist war against the Soviet Union began.

The Tukhachevsky Affair

Every single aspect of this modern war capability came as a direct result of the five year plans and everything they entailed. Both the historians of the US imperialists and the Trotskyists are allergic to the truth in this matter, for obvious reasons. This is why they have given you a totally arbitrary, one-sided, and always false, version of the particular event known in socialist scholarship as the Tukhachevsky Affair.

For Stalin “pace” was a question upon which compromise was not possible – not any real compromise. For example, at the beginning of the 1928 harvest, the pace of the forced collectivization had forced a temporary compromise to come from Stalin who blamed those underneath him for pushing the pace too far and too fast. In his Pravda article “Dizzy with Success” Stalin seemed to be coming to the defense of the mass of the now pathetic capitalist farmers. But, after the grain was in, in early 1929, the moment the Party and Police were back in the saddle, the pace was pushed even faster. – And, by whom? By the Boss himself.

Experience

Why? Because Stalin had learned, as a fourteen year old boy, the way to win (organizing strikes and robbing banks) was to keep moving so fast the police could never catch you. It kept him out of jail for years. In the 1904-1905 war and revolution, he learned the way to beat the Czar was to keep events moving in front of him and out of control. Stalin found during the Civil War (1918 – 1920) the way to win was to move troops quickly from one part of the Soviet Republic to another part using trains and trucks, relying on the telegraph and telephones as opposed to courier dispatches of old, cavalry and dragoons (mounted infantry.) It is Trotsky’s Red Train which military historians never seem to fail using as an illustration when commenting on Bolshevism’s commitment to modernity in warfare, but it was Stalin who used the railroads more than any other of the three supreme commanders (himself, Lenin and Trotsky.)

At the same time, Stalin was shrewd enough to see the superiority of Budenny’s Cavalry when fast and hard hitting movement was what was needed, and several times had shown his ability to move a powerful (Budenny’s First Red) cavalry army across a vast distance and go right off the march and into combat against superior White or foreign (e.g., English, French, Polish) forces, dealing them death and total destruction. It was the combination of these successes of Stalin’s in the Civil war which gave him a much deserved military reputation among his peers.

Stalin learned during the aftermath of the Civil War how important it was to move extremely fast against the opposition; whether that opposition came in the form of revolting would-be capitalist farmers in Tambov (where General Tukhachevsky’s quick application of poison gas on rebel peasant forces brought about their demise), or mutinous sailors at Kronstadt (where Trotsky led an immediate attack by the Party members in Congress in Petrograd along with available Red Army forces, liquidating the mutiny before it could gain support), such potentially lethal opposition could be kept isolated and thus overwhelmable by a rapid movement of superior forces against them.

By this time the idea of speed combined with deep probing armor thrusts backed up by close-air support for superior infantry frontal assault was the basis for the new Soviet military doctrine known as Deep Operations (simultaneously known as Deep Battle as in the 1936 Red Army Field Manual.) This doctrine had as its first principle the use of deep behind the lines armor and air attacks to break up enemy formations before they could get their act together and retreating formations before they could regain their footing. This is exactly the strategy Stalin used against the Kulaks and other capitalist elements in the countryside

In short Stalin had learned the utility of speed and surgically applied overwhelming force in getting a decisive victory once you made up your mind about where you wanted to go. Stalin knew what he wanted in Russia: (1) a modernized and socialized capitalist industrial base and (2) a socialized mechanized agriculture.

It was for this reason Stalin did not compromise on the question of pace. He really could not without giving his opponents the breathing space they would need to organize against the man in control of the Party and its State and Government. Nor could he reduce the pace if he really believed what he said; namely, the USSR had only a decade in which to prepare for the final imperialist world war the capitalists must inevitably unleash against us.

The Congress of Victors – Winter-Time with Stalin – 1934

During the middle of January, 1934, the build-up for the Party’s greatest Congress since the death of Lenin, exactly a decade ago, was well underway. For two weeks beginning January 26th the Party’s highest officials met in Moscow for the Party’s 17th Congress. The Press was calling it The Congress of Victors. The last Congress of that name as the Soviet press frequently pointed out was held by the Victors of the Napoleonic Wars in Vienna in 1815. That time Russian troops backed up international reaction. This time in the winter of 1933-1934 Russian troops backed up the world’s First Worker’s Government.

For Stalin the outcome was bitter sweet. Why? Because while the Congress gave him the adulation he deserved for the great successes of the First Five Year Plan and Okayed his decision to launch the Second Five Year Plan over a year early, discontent among the Party brass was seething just below the surface. The Party rank and file faithful may have been thrilled with the Boss but much of the brass felt terribly abused and insecure.

The Victors further agreed with Stalin’s now famous summation speech; e.g.: to paraphrase, ‘the Soviet Union which four years earlier had produced only four million tons of steel now produced over six million tons of steel industry annually; the Soviet Union which had the most primitive machine tool building industry now had a massive one; he Soviet Union which had the most primitive chemical industry now had one adequate to the most modern demands; the Soviet Union which had no aluminum industry now had one; the Soviet Union which had had an uncertain supply of petroleum products now had a permanent supply and transportation system of ships and pipelines. The Soviet Union which had no hydroelectric power industry now had one of the greatest in the world.’

Stalin pointed out that in the four years from 1928 to 1932:

1.      Population in the urban areas had doubled from 16 to 31 percent; within that figure one had to take into account the rapid proletarianization of these cities with the number of industrial workers jumping from 3,124,000 to 7,921,000.

2.      The number of women workers employed in the years of the First Plan jumped from 2.795 million to 13.9 million – a jump within overall employment for women from 24% to 39% of the total work force.

3.      By the end of the First Plan the number of workers beginning their industrial careers, since 1926 had reached a level of 45 to 60% depending on the specific industry.

4.      Industrial production overall had doubled within these four years.

5.      Not only had steel production increased over 50% so had the production of coal jumping from 35.4 million tons annually to 64.3 million tons annually.

6.      Electricity production to support industrial expansion had jumped from 5 million Kilowatt hours to 14 million kilowatt hours.

The list went on and on, and everyone knew this was the bottom line. They had given Stalin what he wanted and had demanded and when you stepped back and looked at the results of the past few years you knew that the Boss for all of his seeming unrealistic demands and enforcement measures had been right after all. Fundamentally, that also meant he had saved their lives. For if the capitalists succeeded in their eventual inevitable world war against them, the Party leaders and cadre would be hung along with their families and friends.

On the other hand the voting went heavily against Stalin wherever it counted. – And this in a Congress organized by the man who had organized every successful Congress since 1921! His regional bosses were extremely pissed off!

The Boss, of course, finally persevered in the vote count and in the formalities of leadership approval, but it was as close run a thing as was possible in those days. Stalin had reason to see treason all around him and this time within the Party itself!

Yes, the Congress of Victors was a tremendous success for the Russian Party and for the international communist movement too, which saw what came out of the Congress as approval of Stalin’s leadership. But, quietly, at home, Stalin knew he would face significant opposition from within the Party to his leadership. Opposition left over from these early years as well as overcoming contradictions not even thought of at the moment. – And the Boss planned on stepping up the pace!

Stalin Names the New Class: as the “classless intelligentsia”

Stalin had to have managers - bureaucrats - to run the publicly owned means of production; he went about creating a new class that he called the “classless intelligentsia,” until by the mid to late 1930’s there were over ten million of them. Along with the industrial workers and the collective farms this made the Regime very stable. As long as oppositional elements were continuously weeded-out by the secret proletarian police, the Stalinist Socialist Stage was permanent!

Class Struggle in the Nation leads to Class Struggle in the Party

Stalin, like all politicians, used pressure against his opposition. - And, there was an increasing amount of opposition to Stalin’s break-neck pace of industrialization not to mention his increasingly heavy demands on the collective farms. When he announced the law that made death sentences mandatory for oilfield managers failing to meet their quotas, the Party and government bureaucrats revolted. This incentive program could spread to them and was too much!

At the Congress of Victors in 1934 they named Sergey Kirov - the Leningrad Party Chief - to be Stalin’s successor in the event that he was to die or be recalled! They ordered Kirov from Leningrad to Moscow where he would be the Moscow Party Boss. That would have put him right next to the seat of government and power in the Kremlin. Kirov confided in Stalin, perhaps his closest personal friend, offered to refuse the appointment, and continued his close friendship with the General Secretary (Stalin’s then current, most important official title) who urged him to accept the appointment.

However, Stalin was warned. He wasn’t omnipotent and the bureaucracy wouldn’t stand still for that kind of punishment, just for the radical and seemingly impossible speeds he was demanding in the industrialization of the nation. – And one-time Politburo luminary Nicolai Bukharin and associates were already plotting Stalin’s assassination, as we have learned in subsequent years.

In the event it was Kirov who was assassinated before he could get to Moscow. Stalin believed Zinoviev (and his organization), which Kirov had replaced as Party Boss (bosses) of Leningrad, to be responsible. However that may have been, Stalin used the Kirov assassination. (Kirov was probably Stalin’s closest friend,) as a pretext to launch a series of internal purges of the state and government apparatus and the Party itself. As Stalin saw it eliminating his opponents in the Party, Government and eventually State (Red Army, Navy, and Police) was the only way to maintain the rate of industrialization. - And, Stalin was convinced that Socialism as a Stage could still be reversed, in the coming capitalist World War, if the USSR was not totally modernized, industrially, by that time.

As you may have guessed Stalin equated any person’s opposition to the Party Politburo and Central Committee Plan and Pace with such a person being a criminal counter-revolutionary. Subsequent trials centered on the accusation that Trotsky, Zinoviev and other well-known long time trouble makers had conspired with Hitler and the British and the French and innumerable others in attempting to sabotage the pace of the Five Year Plans in order to sabotage the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership. The defendants linked to these plots in a variety of ways.

Soviet Socialism Continues Encircled by Imperialism

Meanwhile, in China, Mao Zedong had built a Red Base Area in Kiangsu-Hunan, and had withstood four successive “anti-Red Bandit” campaigns of the fascist Chiang Kai-shek, and his Nazi German and Imperial Japanese advisors and suppliers. Finally, in 1934, Mao had had to launch the Long March of some 7000 miles across all of South China, and then up China’s western frontiers, swinging east to Yenan in the northern mountains of Shensi. It was a two year long migration and featured this mobile army fighting on a daily basis. Eventually, the Chinese communists were in the right place for the coming struggle.

Shensi was part of the very heart of Ancient China, and always had been. Furthermore, this put the Chinese communists on the frontier with Soviet Mongolia and the USSR. Given the plans of the Japanese capitalists to attack both Mongolia and the Soviet Union this was  strategic gold! Japanese military forces could not deal with those two and leave their entire left flank open to attack!

By the middle 1930’s, the European capitalist classes in country after country had placed total police state regimes, called “fascist,” over the mass of workers and peasants. The European capitalist rulers were fully committed to fascism, and to the destruction of their own native labor movement, and the Red Heartland of Socialism in the USSR.

They had begun by placing in power fascist regimes; such as that in Hungary after the defeat of Bolshevism’s (Bela Kun’s) first attempts in 1919 to establish a Bolshevik government, where Admiral Horthy became the first fascist leader; then in Italy under the rabble-rousing (previously socialist) Benito Mussolini, who had given the name “fascist” to his philosophy of the rich ruling the poor; then came Portugal under Dr. Salazar; then, in Spain, General Franco. Of course, in Germany, they appointed Hitler. All these men were committed to raising legal violence against workers as their first principal and political program. Lesser fascist leaders took command in places like Austria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Only France and the United Kingdom had not yet gone fascist. France soon would with a little help from her friends in high places (the Duke of Windsor) and the French Hitlerites. - And, in London the capitalists were relying on a succession of Tory (Conservative Party) governments to put a London-Berlin-Rome axis together.

On the far right of Britain’s Tory class were those, such as the Nazi Duke of Windsor, who would be on the General Staff of the British Expeditionary Force in France, in 1940, and would engage in ultimate treason by providing all the information at his disposal to the Nazi’s. Then, the British capitalists figured, (with or without their former King) they would be able to liquidate the labor movement in Great Britain and join with Hitler in a worldwide onslaught against Bolshevism.

This was the policy of all of the Tory governments in the 1930’s, but became shamefully obvious under Chamberlain as 1939 approached. Concession after concession was given to Hitler; he was allowed to take country after country. Finally, in 1938, Chamberlain betrayed Czechoslovakia with whom Britain and France had a solemn collective security treaty! Both the British and the French ruling classes refused to step up their war preparedness because they wanted to be sure that a clear and present signal was being sent to Hitler. Namely, that they were no threat to him. Hitler should just go right on building his military machine; go right on and attack the USSR. A task they were  not up to, given the Red sentiment in their own countries and, as Winston Churchill had pointed out in 1920, the Bolshevik’s ability to maintain massive standing armies indefinitely.

Stalin’s Spies: The Proletarian Secret Service

As you will recall, Lenin had placed Stalin in charge of both the Russian Party’s intelligence service and that of the Comintern. One division of that service had to do with reporting on the machinations of the imperialist governments and ruling classes against the proletarian State and the world wide working class movement.  – And, here Stalin’s spies gave more than yeoman service – they provided absolutely essential information in a reliable and continual way. Among those we know about, because of their public exposure, were the British Ring of Five: Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald D. Maclean, and Anthony Blunt (adding the American Michael Straight would make it the Ring of Five). The first four recruited by Alexander Orlov.

Also a separate British ring, only two of which members are known, “Sir” Roger Hollis (eventual head of MI-5) recruited in China by Red Army G2 and John Cairncross (Cairncross was another G2 recruit but had a separate control from Hollis, as did Wallis Simpson the Duchess of Windsor, another G2 recruit). – And, in Japan, Richard Sorge, embedded in the Nazi embassy in Tokyo. Recruited by Otto Kussinen, Molotov and Stalin. Also, the so-called Red Orchestra in Germany and Switzerland, not to slight Steve Nelson and associates in the USA, who ran the espionage program into the Manhattan Project for Beria. Each with its own recruitment history. There were many many more Soviet spies - many of this caliber - many still unknown.

All in all, these spies provided Stalin with the inside information as to what the British and American rulers were doing and plotting, and the Germans and Japanese. As a consequence Stalin was able to plan his military strategy knowing what all commanders dream of knowing and that is “the intention and activity of one’s ‘friends’ as well as enemies.” There was almost no anti-Soviet plotting by the British and Americans or the Germans and the Japanese that Stalin didn’t know about all of the time! (Including their secret development of the atom bomb.) That in itself is a tremendous accomplishment and makes the Soviet Secret Service the most successful of all such entities that have ever existed. (Read Kim Philby’s book My Silent War and my book, The Buccaneer, for that matter, for some of the “inside” on intelligence activities of those days. – And, my forthcoming history of the proletarian secret service’s first few decades called Red Sword, Red Shield.)

One might ask, if all that is true, and it is, how is it that Hitler caught Stalin unawares on June 22, 1941? Especially since both the English and his own spies were warning him of the Nazi buildup and intent to attack. – And, the answer is, that Stalin had to make a judgment call and he made the wrong one.

But, it was an understandable one. The British and French ruling classes had been involved non-stop in trying to start a German-Soviet war and it was provocations of this type which had been keeping Stalin busy – and his spies – for a decade prior to the Nazi attack. The Brit-French conduct during the Spanish War had been aimed at putting the Russians in a position from which they could be denounced and subsequently attacked by the so-called democratic continental powers (France and England) in alliance with Germany and Italy. The British-French ruling class failure in that regard became apparent when Hitler switched his emphasis from Spain to first Austria and then Czechoslovakia. Meaning, as 1937 unfolded, Hitler’s focus was on Germany’s World War enemies, France and England, and perhaps not so much on Bolshevik Russia (i.e., Spain), at least for the moment.

At that point – June 1941 - Stalin had no reason to trust the life-long virulent anti-Bolshevik Churchill, who would have done anything to take the German pressure off of his back and certainly would have loved to see the Nazi’s switch their forces to an attack on the Soviet Union. – And, the Nazi build-up along Soviet frontiers coincided with other Nazi war-making in the Balkans and against Greece. Goods were still moving back and forth, as per the Rapallo Treaty, between the Soviet Union and Germany, some of which the Germans could not do without.

Furthermore, and most importantly for Germany, to attack the Soviet Union would be suicidal – Stalin had limitless natural resources, and limitless human reserves, and the most advanced armaments in the world on the eve of the German attack.

The Red Army had just proved its power by destroying the Japanese attack in Mongolia. Stalin credited Hitler with too much intelligence to provoke such a war at that time – a war he could not win – certainly to provoke such a war while his war with the UK and its empire was far from finished. Stalin had to believe this based on the results of the Spanish War and the performance of German and Soviet tanks and aircraft, where Soviet arms were proven far superior.

Hitler on the other hand felt if he didn’t move now, in 1941, the Soviet superiority would be twice as great within a year or three times as great within two or three years. In which case by the time Germany might win against the British it would be an exhausted Germany emergent; one that would not have the ability to even consider attacking the Soviet Union. Finally, Germany had failed in its program to develop an alternative source of oil. It had to have Soviet oil or give up on its program of world conquest. This oil had been largely cut off, by Stalin, since 1936, and was just one more practical reason for destroying Bolshevism.

– And, this objective, of rolling back Bolshevism, was one the nincompoop in Berlin would not give up. No, if he was going to do it he had to take the chance that surprise and luck would do the job, and 1941 was the last year Hitler correctly reckoned that he would have a chance relying on those two factors. Only a mentally unstable analyst could have reached the conclusion that a historical, and indeed epoch making, choice, that at best could be fifty-fifty, should be deduced. Even so, unbalanced, in the end, Hitler almost succeeded.

But the point is even though Stalin’s intelligence service was warning him; Stalin still had to make the final judgment call and his decision turned out wrong. So was FDR caught off guard at Pearl Harbor six months later. When you are in the “receiving” position there is only so much you can do. No matter how much vigilance you practice a well set-up trick can work, as proved by Hitler in his assault on Bolshevism and by Hirohito in his assault on the USA, although, in the end Stalin was right and Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union failed, and with its failure Nazism was crushed.

Stalin’s Boys

As you might imagine, had you been running the biggest intelligence operation in history for some fifty years (1903 until 1953), you would probably have a special place in your heart for some of your stars. Stalin certainly did. Among those who earned his everlasting affection are several worth looking at closely for a moment, even in a handbook. Why? Because as case studies they show us so much about ourselves, our movement and the people drawn to it. As such they constitute models for those of us who would like to make similar contributions to humanity’s struggle to enter the Era of Freedom, as Frederick Engels called that period soon to begin, in the near future in other words, with the Stage of Communism. Let us take a glimpse at several who entered the proletarian secret service after the establishment of the first worker’s government and state in history.

Within six weeks of the October 1917 seizure Lenin and the then quite small Politburo authorized the creation of the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation (on December 20th, 1917). Russian initials for this new body led to the use of the term Cheka for this and every subsequent Soviet intelligence department regardless of name. For example, members of the last of the Soviet intelligence agencies – the KGB (Russian initials for Committee for State Security) – and perhaps the most famous – were still called Chekists. – And still being paid on the 20th of the month (the day the Cheka was created in December 1917, during the Politburo meeting of that date.)

Lenin and the Politburo were acting on the recommendations of Joseph Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky. Stalin was on the Politburo. Dzerzhinsky was not. At this time there were only seven Politburo members and all matters having to do with state security had been handed to Stalin by his colleagues because Lenin wanted it that way. Lenin wanted it that way because Stalin had been acting, when not incarcerated, as chief of all Bolshevik secret financial and other similar activities since 1903.

Dzerzhinsky had been incarcerated and brutally treated after the failure of the 1905 revolution and was burning literally with hatred for his oppressors and the class they served. He had the habit of wearing jackets with the sleeves cut short enough to show the scars of the manacles that had been on his wrists for many years. He had recruited a special force of Latvian Riflemen to act as his agents in his work during the October 1917 seizure and thereafter they were the first ever-present Praetorian Guard of the Bolshevik Revolution. These two men – Stalin and Dzerzhinsky – were the closest of friends who saw eye to eye on the nature of the world-wide class struggle and how to conduct it for the people’s side.

At any rate, as I say, Lenin had directed Stalin to prepare the report on the condition confronting the Revolution in terms of security and how to fight subversion from the enemies of the people. Stalin had done so but turned the December 20th meeting over to Felix Dzerzhinsky who he proposed to take command of the new Commission which the two of them were recommending to Lenin, to (1) protect the Revolution’s leaders and (2) to guard the Revolution itself.

Alexander Orlov

 Lev Feldbin was a young lawyer and scholar who had been drafted into the Czarist Army and when restrictions against Jews becoming officers were abolished, as a product of the February bourgeois revolution, Feldbin was commissioned. He soon became a Bolshevik and after the seizure had been recruited by Dzerzhinsky into the Latvian Riflemen Red Guards. Here he was at hand when it was decided someone had to try and subvert the Anglo-American invasion from within, in the area of Russia north of Petrograd. Dzerzhinsky and his friend Joseph Stalin decided on Feldbin as one of the two to take charge of that area and Feldbin was personally given a new name more in accord with the locality and of course all Chekists would have secret identities anyway. Stalin picked the name Alexander M. Orlov for Feldbin.

The Romantic Years

Orlov and his comrade Maria Rodontslov fell in love and the two were married and together for the rest of their lives. – And what lives they were. Always at the forefront of the global class struggle. To make their long story too short let me say that Orlov succeeded in bringing the Anglo-American forces into the orbit of Bolshevik sympathizers and ended up as the leader of the secret military forces Stalin needed to protect his flanks on the ill-fated Polish-German-European campaign of 1920.

Afterwards Stalin made Orlov the top Chekist for all of Europe and in that capacity Orlov recruited the British Ring of Five – Kim Philby, Donald MacClean, Guy Burgess, Michael Straight, and Anthony Blunt. (Contrary to Spycatcher author Peter Wright’s implication, Sir Roger Hollis, MI5 chief in the 1950’s and 1960’s, (as well as John Cairncross) was not recruited by Orlov but by Red Army G2, and in China not Europe. I learned about Hollis in June of 1961 from my KGB contact in London, Lady “X”, as described in my book The Buccaneer.)

These are only a handful of the most famous of Soviet spies and so I mention them here, but the fact is that Orlov recruited thousands of men and women, especially in Germany, but also in Italy and France where he served as the “resident” (chief of intelligence operations) for the Cheka’s foreign department.

At the Foot of Carlos Prieto

It was not until 1962 however that I discovered from my most highly placed source in the international red secret service, the Mexican Communist, playwright and Soviet agent, Carlos Prieto, what would become Orlov’s greatest accomplishment. Namely, the penetration of the US government at many levels with one objective. No, not the atom bomb. That job was handed to Steve Nelson to run for the Cheka. (At least this is what Steve Nelson told me in Portland, Oregon, in 1963 when he was trying to recruit me.) Orlov had a more important task. What could be more important than the atom bomb you may ask? I know I did.

The answer appears complex because it demonstrates the extreme sophistication of Stalin’s personal intelligence expertise as well as that of his closest associate and fellow Politburo member Vyacheslav Molotov. Stalin confronted a situation in 1936 which led him to believe that the Rapallo arrangement with the capitalist world was about to give way to a new united onslaught of the European capitalist class against the USSR and also that he had to get ready for a simultaneous attack from Japan. In other words all of the world’s capitalist countries against the USSR and the People’s Republic of Mongolia. A two front war that could not be won! Despite the fantastic progress in Russian industrialization the fact was that it would take longer than the ten years Stalin had been talking about to get Russia sufficiently industrialized to win a Gross National Product World War II. Unless, unless, the United States were to join with Bolshevism.

It was clear by this time that Bolshevism was not going to seize power in the USA. At least not in the foreseeable future. Had that opportunity ever been present the American communists had missed it. So, how could the US be persuaded under a capitalist government to join with Russia against Europe and Japan? Stalin did not know, but he felt that the FDR government in the US was at least relatively neutral with regard to the USSR and if some set of circumstances might emerge which would put the US at war with Germany or Japan – especially Japan seemed possible (Billy Mitchell wasn’t the only one who could see the obvious) – then the FDR administration might well ask Russia for its support. Then the practical basis for changing the nature of the Rapallo World from a Soviet-German alliance against the rest of the imperialist countries into a Soviet-American alliance against the rest of the imperialist countries would exist. Stalin didn’t know how this could be made to happen, but he knew if there was anyone in the Cheka who could influence US events in this direction it was Orlov.

An Historic Strategic Decision

Accordingly, in 1937, Stalin called Orlov back from Spain (where he was running Cheka operations in support of the Soviet-allied Republican government against Spanish fascist chieftain Francisco Franco, and overseeing the shipment of Spanish gold to Odessa) and explained his new task. Again making this fascinating story too short let me sum it up by saying Orlov established an elaborate ruse and made his way to New York, along with his wife and daughter.

This is not the place to go into further details of his mission and many of the details are still considered highest state secrets in Putin’s Russia. However, the ruse worked and when many years later Orlov was discovered living in the US he managed to fool his FBI interrogators convincing them of his “true” secret refugee status.

In fact, they didn’t find him. He wrote a book claiming to be an enemy of Stalin and upon its post-World War II publication the FBI read it and got in touch.

Stalin could not believe how incompetent these Americans were. Stalin said to Beria about the American FBI: “I can’t believe it. How these guys survived the war is amazing. A spy has to write and publish a book to get their attention.” – And, there was a new reason in 1948 for Orlov to need their attention. But that is another story for another book.

Since the truth of Orlov’s mission is about to be exposed by the Russian leaders themselves (Putin, Medvedev et. al.) it might as well be mentioned here that the reality Stalin spoke of was not a comment of deception – as he well knew Orlov had established direct contact with FDR in a manner later to be used by Albert Einstein – but a remark as to the efficiency of the FBI which the Russians considered a joke. That direct contact between a trusted emissary of one nation and the boss of another, was and is, an old and distinguished mechanism in the diplomatic corps of many nations over many centuries

So, of Stalin’s Boys it was Lev Feldbin (Alexander Orlov) who occupied one of the ventricles of what so many consider to be a rather cold heart. Stalin himself, by the way, felt that way about himself – at least he said after the death of his second wife “with her passing my heart turned cold.”

Inside the SS – Richard Sorge

When it comes to being the Boss’s favorite pet, no one stood higher in Stalin’s affection than the German Richard Sorge. As we have seen, Sorge began his adulthood as a soldier in the Kaiser’s army and was interned in a Russian POW camp. After the Capitalist Provisional Government was established in February of 1917 Sorge made his way back to Germany where he eventually joined the soon to be formed German Communist Party (Autumn and Winter of 1918.) There he became a leading member, and when the Comintern held a Conference in 1922 in Berlin, he acted as a bodyguard for several delegates including Finnish Communist leader Otto Kuusinen (the man who brought me into the international communist movement in June of 1961 when a copy of his book (Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism) was personally given to me in London by the chiefs of the Communist Party of Great Britain.) Kuusinen recommended Sorge to Cheka boss Felix Dzerzhinsky and accordingly he was recruited.

At this time the Cheka’s foreign operations were at Starasky Square in Moscow where Joseph Stalin had his main offices and secretariat. Here he met Sorge for the first time and the two men hit it off big time. Sorge had learned Russian while a Czarist prisoner and Stalin knew a little German from his years of working the oilfields of the Black and Caspian Seas. Sorge went on many foreign assignments for Stalin but the one that changed the world was his mission to Japan.

In Japan Sorge had a blank check as far as money was concerned and he used his Chinese and Korean espionage agents to build a radio system that would send clear, “in the open” (verbal communication) as well as code, for Sorge with “Moscow Central”, or directly to Molotov (Stalin), from wherever he established his base in Tokyo.

In the event, Sorge established his radio base near his office which was in the Nazi embassy in the Japanese capital! Yes, by this time Sorge had become a Colonel in the SS intelligence service and been assigned to this nest of evil in the Nipponese capital.

Sorge told Stalin that the summer 1939 attack of the Japanese on Mongolia was a test. One faction inside the Jap general staff (Sorge attended their meetings as a German observer at their request) wanted to expand and seize Siberia for all of its potential and as a place to put their army of unemployed. The other half of the Japanese general staff wanted to attack south and seize all the colonies of the British, the Dutch, and the French and expel the Americans from everywhere in Asia and the Pacific – especially from China which this faction wanted to take completely into the Japanese “co-prosperity sphere.”

Sorge gave Stalin the detailed Order of Battle of the Japanese forces on the Mongolian frontier. Stalin saw immediately what Sorge had seen. – And, that was the Japanese did not have modern equipment and depended on suicidal soldiers to accomplish their missions. Accordingly Stalin sent General George Zhukov to take command of the most modern land and air machinery the Soviet Union had, including planes and tanks jerked right out of their design institutes and prototype production lines.

As a matter of interest these new tanks and planes had been perfected as a direct result of our intervention in Spain. They had been the best planes and tanks by far in Spain and had been further improved, immediately, in the USSR war plants in the years from 1936 to 1939.

Shit Kicking

When Zhukov attacked the Japanese, at the end of August 1939, at the Mongolian-China river border formed by the Khalkin-Gol River he wiped out their entire 80,000 man expeditionary spearhead and destroyed what armor they had and virtually their entire committed air force. It was a “turkey shoot” as Soviet soldiers took on the Japs two to one with flanking waves of the most modern tanks in the world supported by the world’s first fighter-bomber close-air-support warplanes in a new Soviet tactic called Deep Operations or Deep Battle. (Actually, as we have seen, Soviet pilots had flown prototypes of these fighter-bombers in Spain to the extreme distress of the Falangist (Franco’s fascist Party) forces attacking Madrid in November 1936 and thereafter, they dominated the air in 1937 and in 1938 they turned the tide again and again in land and air warfare in Spain.)

To give you an idea of desert warfare in those days think of a tank with a heavy cannon capable of accuracy at several miles against a supposedly armored Japanese target, itself unknowing and in any case unable to do anything but run! Before they could turn and run, again and again, Soviet tanks blasted Japanese “tanks” and mobile artillery to smithereens and Soviet ground-attack fighter-bombers finished off those further away. In the meantime charging Soviet infantry took on the men of the Japanese spearhead hand-to-hand.

Russians are a lot bigger than Japanese. These men took the Japs apart like a surgeon gone mad! The Mongolian landscape stank of decaying flesh for the better part of the year! An otherwise bad year for us had turned terribly wonderful.

  Japan had assembled another million men to follow their spearhead into Siberia but when their spearhead was liquidated they sat dumb. The Imperial General Staff back in Tokyo was shocked and permanently resolved not to get involved again in Soviet territory and decided to move south against the Europeans and the Americans. This made Pearl Harbor inevitable. Stalin’s boys had done it once again. Richard Sorge namely. One of our greatest heroes.

Preparing for Nazi Attack

As 1940 and 1941 unfolded Stalin arranged his Western forces quietly. Too early obvious preparation for defense against a broad attack might well trigger that attack even earlier than it was already planned. Too little preparation and the USSR would not be able to go over to a counterstrike or a preventive attack of its own on Germany. For example, deploying troops and aircraft to the western frontier would be provocative as seen from the Nazi side. Yet, failure to do so would make assault against Nazi Germany a lengthy process to prepare when the time came, and what if the German’s were to attack in the meantime? Would it be better to have occupied forward positions or deep defensive positions? Difficult questions. As we have seen Stalin wanted to wait one more year, BEFORE this inevitable war began, or perhaps two if at all possible, so he could keep building the Red Army in both men and materiel. – And, jockey as best he could to prevent a unified capitalist onslaught.

The Second World War Begins for Us

Two years later Sorge warned Stalin the Germans were going to attack on June 22, 1941, at 6:00 a.m. WST (West Soviet Time). But, this time Stalin chose not to believe it. He convinced himself that Sorge had been taken in by his own SS misinformation bosses. Of course, Sorge was right, and thus rose in Stalin’s esteem.

Accordingly when Sorge next told him the Japanese had rejected Germany’s demand that they enter the war against Russia, Stalin paid attention. (The Anti-Comintern Pact Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan, had signed required all to come to the aid of any one of them involved in war with the other capitalist countries but primarily the Soviet Union as indicated by the name). Now he began preparing to shift George Zhukov and his troops from Mongolia and Siberia to the Soviet West. Consequently Zhukov smashed the Nazi’s at Moscow in December 1941 dealing Hitler his first massive defeat of World War II.

Shortly after this final transmission where he spoke directly with his close friend Joseph Stalin, Sorge was uncovered by the Japanese secret police. Jailed, tortured and executed, the Boss’s favorite spy passed into the pantheon of Soviet heroes. To this day Sorge’s Japanese grave is the contemporary site of an annual pilgrimage of many communists wishing to pay respect to the Boss’s favorite. Respect we should pay today!

Michael Borodin: From Chicago to China

Some of Stalin’s boys had been with him in the very early years. One was Michael Borodin. After the defeat of the 1905 revolution Borodin, a member of the Bolshevik Party, had fled Russia for the United States. Along the way he met another person – a young Bolshevik woman – and she became his wife and accomplice in Chicago where they both went to work teaching school and trying to help working people build a political base.

When the Capitalist Provisional Government was established after the February 1917 revolution in Russia, and then within six months his own Bolshevik Party turned the revolution socialist, (the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917), Borodin made his way back to Moscow. There he renewed his personal friendship with Joseph Stalin, met with Lenin, and was recruited into the Cheka’s foreign operations department. Borodin went on several missions including Mexico and the United Kingdom where he accomplished much and made his mentors proud. So proud that they sprung him from jail in London and gave him a new assignment. China.

Borodin arrived in Canton (Guangzhou) China in December 1923 on a tramp steamer with two hundred dead sheep killed in a hurricane (typhoon). The Brits were looking for him after the jailbreak in London and he could not venture anywhere near Hong Kong on his way up the Pearl River; thus, the tramp steamer.

If his arrival lacked a certain dignity that was soon remedied when the rest of his team arrived a few weeks later. For Stalin had sent several thousand Soviet advisors and nearly fifty ships full of small arms, tanks and airplanes. Why? Lenin had argued for and gotten unanimity in the Politburo for a policy of intervening in China to support the creation of a progressive capitalist government under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen. In charge of military operations for Sun Yat-sen was General Blyukher, a hero general of the Red Army in the civil war and now Lenin’s hand-picked chief of Soviet-Chinese military operations in China. We have already reviewed this topic in depth in chapter 14.

Kim Philby

Finally, as a case study is Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby. Kim Philby was the son of a rather famous, in his own right, British iconoclast Harry Bridger St. John Philby, Orientalist and Arabianist, who would become the closest personal advisor to Ibn Saud, King of what is now Saudi Arabia. His descendants still rule. St. John Philby engineered the US entrance into Saudi Arabia cutting out his British compatriots. The Saud family that rules today owes virtually everything they have to him.

But it was St. John’s son the world would come to know best. Orlov recruited Kim Philby and the rest of the British Ring of Five. He guided Kim through the maze of Spain and then into MI6 (the British Secret Intelligence Service.) It took some six years to get him this far because Kim had rather carelessly let it be known far and wide that he had communist sympathies in the late 20’s and early 30’s so this had to be covered up.

Once inside MI6 Kim rose rapidly because he did such great work work largely conducted by Stalin’s Chekists who were helping him accomplish his assignments in Iberia (German agents in Spain and Portugal being shot down like flies).Eventually he became chief of Anti-Soviet and Anti-Communist operations for all of MI6. Along the way he became a member of the XX (20) committee so named because these two letters together look like a “double cross”. This referred to the British breaking of the German military code via the machine code-named Enigma – and the subsequent formation by Anglo-American-Canadian intelligence of the project called Ultra. Needless to say all this data was transmitted to Molotov forthwith. – And, Kim found out about the atom bomb almost immediately and that meant of course Stalin found out immediately. Even more importantly as a member of the XX (double cross) Committee Philby acquired all of the information he needed to give directly to the Boss about Enigma (the German military code broken by the Brits and how they did it, which is to say, how the machine worked.)

After the war Kim was recommended by “M” to become the next “M” (really “C” but since one-time MI6 agent Ian Fleming made the letter “M” famous as the code name for the chief I have used it that way in my new book Red Sword, Red Shield.)Then US President Harry Truman asked that Philby be sent to Washington to guide the American former OSS agents, at their request, in setting up the US equivalent to MI6 – that is what would become the CIA.

Kim turned down the offer to become M because he said it was more important to help the Americans get into the fight against communism. Kim was in at the beginning and throughout the formation of the CIA and supervised some of its earliest attempts to overthrow Soviet power. The most famous of these being his sabotage of the CIA campaign against communist Albania. Anyway, this story has a long way to go but I think you get the idea.

These are just a handful of the agents who were close to Joseph Stalin. If it is true you can judge a person by the friends he keeps then our judgment about Stalin should reflect these associations with heroes of our cause.