The XXth Century Political History of Russia: lecture materials. Gennady Bordyugov

country, the political struggle which occurred among the Party leadership in March 1928 was carefully concealed from the rest of society.

      Bukharin, in particular, characterized the external and internal situation of the country as «very grave». The program of the XV Congress of the Communist Party was effectively torn apart by the crisis. Bukharin did not admit this directly, but his view was made evident in his demand for a new «overall plan» and the admission that the Party leadership had behaved worse than «superempiricists of the crudest kind». The failure, or at any rate partial failure, of the program of the XV Congress— instead of the smooth «reconstruction» of the NEP, the country had been dragged into crisis – was also obvious to Stalin. But he did not share the forebodings that the extraordinary measures would inevitably lead to civil war. By contrast, Bukharin considered his main task to be that of proving the real danger of civil war and the need for urgent and public repeal of the extraordinary measures. The anti-crisis programme of the «right faction», set out at a key moment in the plenum of the Central Committee in July 1928, was quite simple: the repeal of the extraordinary measures, an increase in the purchase price of grain, the abolition of the ration system, differentiated taxes, and so on.

      In the key speech to the plenum, delivered on the Politburo’s orders by Anastas Mikoyan, it was emphasized that the Party had no intention of transforming the temporary extraordinary measures into a permanent policy, since this would threaten the alliance of peasants and workers, the stability of the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist construction. With regard to the extraordinary measures even Lazar Kaganovich declared: «They must not be brought into the system… It is all the more necessary to declare a decisive struggle against an ideology that wants to legitimize distortions».

      Nevertheless Aleksei Rykov observed, first, that Kaganovich, in his speech, had identified administrative with economic measures, proof of which could be found in the restriction of the law of value in Soviet society and in the fact that bourgeois economy was perceived as the opposite of the Soviet economic system, and, second, that he had called for effort to be put into denouncing «distortions», rather than into considering the further application of the extraordinary measures themselves, or into analyzing the actual results of the grain procurement campaign. In a word, the plenum left a wide margin for very different interpretations of official policy. It is not accidental that members of the Central Committee repeatedly ask ed for clarification: to be precise, «what was the strike about?» The extreme left faction found the answer in the situation of the collective farms, the extreme «right» in the thesis «look to the market», still others in the development of individual peasant ownership. Under these conditions it was extremely difficult to imagine precisely how, and under what slogans, the next grain procurement campaign of 1928/9 would be conducted.

      It was all the more difficult to predict the further course of events because the July plenum had seen the emergence of a faction that was far to the left of Stalin. The position of this faction was expressed, in particular, by several secretaries from regional committees: «Our task is not to stamp out the hatred of the poor towards the kulak, but to organize it.»

      Vyacheslav Molotov also attempted to give a theoretical foundation to the events of the winter and spring of 1928. He accused those who forgot about the real class basis of the crisis of committing a sin against Marxism. Thus there formed within the Central Committee a group that was orientated towards the use of very harsh anti-NEP measures. And although Stalin himself took a more moderate position, he made a number of theoretical and political gestures towards the new left. This appeal to the far left was manifest, for example, in the theory of «tribute», that is, an additional tax which he proposed should be imposed on the peasants, and which the state would need to levy on a temporary basis in order to preserve and develop further the present tempo of industrial development. The following pronouncement was typical of Stalin’s utterances at the plenum:

      «Our policy is not a policy of inflaming the class struggle… but that is not to say that the class struggle has been abandoned or that it – this very same class struggle – will not become more acute.»