Inevitable Historicity

Source Analysis: Paris Peace Conference

Self-determination of peoples was alleged to be a major cornerstone of the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I and culminated in the Treaty of Versailles, among other treaties. Rather than countries in Central and Eastern Europe consisting of empires, the guiding principle was that of the nation-state, with each nation having its own national territory. However, while this principle seems to have been attended to in the cases of southern Slavs, Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles, it seems to have been largely ignored in the cases of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Particularly in the former case, the difference between the peace envisioned in the Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the peace that ultimately arose emphasizes the ultimate victory of the desire to punish the vanquished over the establishment of a just peace.

The principle of self-determination appears in several places in the Fourteen Points. For instance, in Point IX, Wilson writes, “A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.”[1] This principle is repeated in Point XI with regard to Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, in Point XIII with regard to Poland, and even in Point XII with regard to Turkey, one of the states on the losing side in the war.[2] With regard to Germany and Austria-Hungary, however, the terms are vague or absent entirely. Regarding Austria-Hungary, Point X reads, “The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.”[3]

However, whether these peoples include the German-speaking people is not stated. There is no individually numbered point pertaining to Germany, although it is mentioned in both the preamble to the points and the afterword. Some of the statements are conciliatory, e.g., “We have no jealousy of German greatness, and there is nothing in this program that impairs it.”[4]However, others clearly finger Germany for the lion’s share of the blame for the war, e.g., “The only secrecy of counsel, the only lack of fearless frankness, the only failure to make definite statement of the objects of the war, lies with Germany and her allies.”[5]

Unfortunately, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the territorial changes in Central Europe made it clear that the self-determination of peoples would come at the expense of Germany and Austria-Hungary.[6]While it is understandable that Germany would lose territory that contained a Polish-speaking population, and Austria-Hungary would lose territory peopled by Romanians, Slavs, and Italians, the actual territorial adjustments left a large number of German-speaking people, including those in areas where they were clear majorities, outside the borders of German-speaking states. For instance, areas of what became western Poland still held German-speaking majorities. Even the city of Danzig, which was 90% German-speaking, was removed from German sovereignty, although it was not rewarded to Poland either and instead was given the status of a free city. The most obvious example was the creation of Czechoslovakia, which, while it respected the self-determination of the Czechs and Slovaks, incorporated the German-majority areas of the Sudetenland so that fully 30% of the new country spoke German as its first language. Finally, the rump state of Austria and Germany were forbidden to unite into a single geopolitical unit, again demonstrating the extent to which self-determination was ignored as a principle in application to German-speaking Europeans.

However, the punishment meted out to Germany was not merely territorial. Part VIII of the Treaty of Versailles makes clear that Germany would be forced to make substantial reparations. Some of these reparations are wholly justified, e.g., in the case of Belgium, the neutrality of which was overtly violated by Germany in 1914, the Treaty prescribes:

In accordance with Germany’s pledges, already given, as to complete restoration for Belgium, Germany undertakes, in addition to the compensation for damage elsewhere in this Part provided for, as a consequence of the violation of the Treaty of 1839, to make reimbursement of all sums which Belgium has borrowed from the Allied and Associated Governments up to November 11, 1918, together with interest at the rate of five per cent (5%) per annum on such sums.[7]

However, other articles of Part VIII seem more sinister in intent when considered in light of the territorial changes. For instance, Germany lost territory to France in Alsace-Lorraine and lost economic control over the Saar Region; similarly, it was forced to cede territory in Silesia to Poland. On the surface, these cessions might seem moderate, particularly that in Alsace-Lorraine, given Germany’s relatively recent acquisition of that territory in the Franco-Prussian War. However, when the reparations portions of the Versailles Treaty are read in light of these cessions, particularly when it is considered that much of Germany’s industrial base relied on raw materials from these regions, then terms of the reparations, such as the exportation of coal to the victors,[8]building of ships for the British,[9]etc., appear impossible for Germany to fulfill, as indeed they proved. Clearly, in the struggle between Wilson’s desire for self-determination and French Prime Minister Clemenceau’s desire to punish, the latter prevailed with regard to Germany.[10]

In conclusion, while the ideal of self-determination was meant to be embodiment in the peace process that ended World War I, the reality that emerged for the losing side was one of punishment. Several new states emerged as a result of the application of the core Wilsonian principle, including Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland. However, Germany lost significant territory, including German-speaking people, and was stripped of much of its ability to pay the reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. As a result, it is little wonder that Germany was both unable to pay reparations and, as time passed, increasing unwilling to honor the Treaty of Versailles at all.

[1] “8 January, 1918: President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” The World War I Primary Document Archive, accessed June 20, 2016, http://www.gwpda.org/1918/14points.html

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, afterword, para. 2.

[5] Ibid, preamble, para. 7.

[6] Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large, The End of the European Era, 1890 to the Present,6th ed. (New York: Norton, 2008), 159-60.

[7] “Peace Treaty of Versailles, Articles 231-247 and Annexes, Reparations,” The World War I Primary Document Archive, accessed June 20, 2016, http://www.gwpda.org/versa/versa7.html

[8] Ibid, Annex V.

[9] Ibid, Annex III.

[10] Gilbert and Large, 161-62.

Colonialism During the Belle Époque

Here’s my first forum post from the next course: Modern European History.

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The popular militarism of the Belle Époque is broadly expressed in cultural texts from the period. For the readings for the week, this militarism is expressed within the context of colonialism, but more specifically, the readings provide hints of the conflicts that will arise for the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia over the course of the coming decades. Britain already ruled the seas and, by extension, an enormous empire by the Belle Époque, and its military supremacy would persist until it was supplanted by the United States during World War II. Russia and Germany, as relative latecomers to the “great game,” saw their imperial destines lying in the east, although the specifics were different and their interests overlapped.

A common theme uniting the imperialistic anthems of the United Kingdom is that of divineright. Repeatedly in the songs excerpted in the reading are references to the imprimatur of God on Britain’s colonial endeavors. This expression is perhaps most clear in “God Save the Queen,” here referring to Victoria, under whose reign the empire reached nearly its greatest extent. More explicitly, “Land of Hope and Glory” in more than one line, addressing Britain, says that God has “made thee mighty,”[1] with the direct statement that the borders of the empire will be expanded with God’s approval (“Wider still and wider / shall thy bounds be set”).[2] The association between the imperial enterprise and divine favoritism comes to full fruition in “Jerusalem,” with the United Kingdom cast in Blake’s lyrics as so good a defender of Christendom that Britain approaches Biblical Jerusalem in its holiness.

The excerpt by Prince Ukhtomskii of Russia, written when the author accompanied the future Tsar Nicholas II on a diplomatic voyage to the Far East, is no less explicit in expressing a unique place for Russia in the family of nations, although unsurprisingly, the specifics of Russia’s geopolitical role are quite different. Most importantly, the militarism of Ukhtomskii’s thoughts often seem directed less toward those whom he sees as potential imperial subjects and more toward the European nations that have already colonized Indonesia (the Netherlands) and Indochina (France). He excoriates the greed and racism of European colonialists: “The natives are not brothers in humanity to them; for them the land is one of voluntary exile, and the people are considered as miserable and inferior beings.”[3] Russia, owing to its massive intercontinental geography is different, Ukhtomskii maintains, not only in its greater respect for the people of Asia, but more importantly also in the esteem that Asians feel for Russia and its “White Tsar.”[4] Unspoken but underlying the acknowledgement of Russia’s particular role in Asian imperial rule is impending conflict with Japan, hinting toward the conflict with that country that Russia would fight less than twenty years later.

Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War was published in 1912 and is thus the latest of the readings for the week, as well as closest to World War I. Bernhardi’s point of view is the clearest expression of Social Darwinism and the military conflict necessary for the further “evolution” of European civilization: “War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization.”[5] In referring immediately before this passage to the Hague Peace Conference, Bernhardi seems to be suggesting that European conflict must be waged within certain restrictions, unlike Germany’s recent colonial endeavors in present-day Namibia.[6] Nevertheless, it is clear that Bernhardi sees war as an important aspect of European development. Within the context of both the completed division of Africa among European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1885 and Bismarck’s Drang nachOsten (drive toward the east), in so far as major conflict going forward will be largely imperial in nature, Germany’s conflicts will be with Russia, as the war to come would show.

Thus, the readings from British, Russian, and German writers all engage the topics of militarism via colonialism, but the dimensions of the topics are country-specific. Britain envisions continued military supremacy and an ever-growing empire. Russia sees a manifest destiny of hegemony over Asia, with the realization that such supremacy must be maintained, if not imposed, militarily. Germany believes that militarism and the war that it engenders is a positive process and an innate human need, and its recent geopolitical posturing indicates that it sees its imperial and colonial future in Eastern Europe, under the concept of Lebensraum(living space). That these three countries’ paths would greatly diverge in the coming decades is clear, but perhaps the readings will provide some indication of why they did.

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[1] “British Imperialistic Anthems: Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory, and more,” Modern History Sourcebook, accessed June 12, 2016, http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/rulebritannia.asp

[2] Ibid.

[3] E.E. Ukhtomsky, “Prince Ukhtomskii: Russia’s Imperial Destiny, 1891,” Modern History Sourcebook, accessed June 12, 2016, http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1891ukhtomskii.asp, para. 6.

[4] Ibid, para. 7.

[5] Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War, translated by Allen H. Powles, accessed June 12, 2016, http://www.gwpda.org/comment/bernhardi.html, chapter 1, para 7.

[6] George Steinmetz, “The First Genocide of the 20th Century and its Postcolonial Afterlives: Germany and the Namibian Ovaherero,” Journal of the International Institute 12, no. 2 (Winter 2005): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0012.201/–first-genocide-of-the-20th-century-and-its-postcolonial?rgn=main;view=fulltext;q1=Race+and+Ethnicity

Yeltsin and Putin

Last discussion post for Modern Russia. On deck is Modern Europe, beginning June 11.

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In assessing the two major leaders of Russia since the end of the Soviet era – Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin – it’s difficult not to see Yeltsin as a failure in his goals and Putin as a success in achieving his. In the first case, Yeltsin attempted to shepherd Russian toward a capitalist system, and to some extent, he was successful in having done so. The command economy in place under the Soviet system was rapidly dismantled. However, the end result seems to perhaps be worse than the conditions in the USSR. There are essentially two reasons why the resulting capitalism in Russia is a failure: (1) the overly rapid pace of privatization; and (2) the inherent flaws of capitalism itself.

On the first point, rather than attempting to manage the transition from statism to a free market, Yeltsin merely removed government controls and let the chips fall where they might. As a result, gross domestic product in Russia fell to record low levels. In addition, inflation and a lack of price controls resulted in even greater need on the part of average people. At the same time, because a small proportion of the population had means more than others, these people were able to exploit the new system to acquire massive wealth, resulting in an extraordinarily wide divided between the rich and poor. This last matter is partially a result of the second point above, i.e., that capitalism tends to concentrate wealth upward. As the French economist Thomas Piketty has noted, what can ameliorate that situation is a greater government investment in education and training,[1] but in a rabidly capitalist environment like post-Soviet Russia, such investment was lacking.

Regarding Putin’s desire to return Russia to great-power status, this goal has largely been met, with Russia now engaging in power politics and intrigues with the west, just like in the “good old days.” The problem here is not only that this achievement brings with it all of the ills to the West that it did when the Soviets had superpower status, but also that Putin actually seems to exceed the Soviet leaders (with the exception of Stalin) in terms of sheer ruthlessness. Whether it is the targeting for assassination of politically active journalists, the scapegoating of LGBT Russians, or neo-Stalinist irredentism expressed in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and most recently eastern Ukraine, Putin’s Russia seems every bit as dystopian as the Brezhnev era. Finally, given his apparent desire to hold onto power permanently, Russia seems heading for dictatorship, if it is not there already. If that’s success in achieving one’s goals, then so be it, but I wonder whether reasserting a global role for Russia truly required all of that.

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[1] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2014).

Assessing Gorbachev

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

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

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

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

Stalinism Without Stalin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[5] Ibid, page 1, para 2.

Nazi Germany and the Great Purges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Ibid, 654.

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

[5] Ibid, 133.

[6] Ibid, 91-92.

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

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

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

[10] Ibid, 16.

[11] Ibid.

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

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

[14] Harris, ibid, 538.

[15] Ibid, 541.

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

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

[18] Ibid.

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

[20] Ibid.

[21] Khlevniuk, ibid, 164.

[22] Getty and Naumov, ibid, 141.

Stalinist Intrigue in the Spanish Civil War

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catalysts for the Great Purges

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

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

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

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

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

Source Analysis: Justifying Stalin’s Great Turn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Stalin, “Great Change,” page 3.

[4] Ibid, page 5.

[5] Stalin, “Problems,” Ibid, page 1.

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

[7] Stalin, “Great Change,” page 6.

[8] Stalin, “Problems,” page 1.

[9] Stalin, ”Great Change,” page 3.

[10] Ibid, page 1.

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

Succession to Lenin: Trotsky v. Stalin

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

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

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

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

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

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