Sebastian Furline: The Memoirs of a Captive Feral

Stalin was well informed about the problems. Unaccountable regional party machines, meanwhile, were consumed by skirmishing. After a collective denunciation had arrived from Western Siberia against Roberts Eihe, Stalin wrote to Molotov August 13, that Siberia had just been divided into two regions, west and east, and that no one had complained about Eihe when he had run all of Siberia. I advise you to kick out all the intriguers and.

The dictator also kept a close eye on Mikhail Kalinin, who enjoyed a high profile because of his peasant origins and his role as ceremonial head of state chairman of the Soviet central executive committee. Molotov hesitated to circulate the extracted testimony. Even as he attended to his personal power, Stalin drove the financing of industrialization. Prices for industrial machinery remained more or less stable, meaning that in , twice as much Soviet grain had to be exported per unit of machinery imported than had been the case in They ought to be horsewhipped, because they are dragging us into a trap.

In order to hold out, we must have hard currency reserves. In short, we must push grain exports furiously. The Soviets would export just over 5 million tons of grain at an average price of only 30 rubles per ton half that of ; they would earn Stalin continued to insist that the economic troubles in the capitalist world had only reinforced the dependence of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states on the imperialist powers, which eyed these states as platforms for attacking the Soviet Union.

In fact, the Polish government had secretly rebuffed the urgent entreaties of the Ukrainian national movement in Poland to invade the Soviet Union, evidently deterred by Soviet military measures on the frontier. This means that we will have to bring our current army reserves up from , to , men. Thousands of specialists had been sentenced. Privately, Stalin acknowledged his didactic purposes.

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It would not be a bad thing if they did. The entire country, it seemed, was honeycombed with wreckers—including in the Red Army command: Tukhachevsky had been demoted from chief of staff to commander of the Leningrad military district. He remained a polarizing figure, a former nobleman who mixed prominently with tsarist general staff types, even though he had never gone to the general staff academy. Tukhachevsky argued that no modern army could prevail without tanks, aircraft, chemical weapons, and parachute infantry for greater mobility.

He called for annual production of no less than 50, tanks and 40, airplanes which would rise in the future to , tanks and , aircraft. Voroshilov had had the memo vivisected by the new chief of staff, Shaposhnikov. Although Tukhachevsky had not specified the size of his proposed standing army, Shaposhnikov reckoned it at a preposterous 11 million, fully 7. It would be worse than any counterrevolution. Collectivization had provoked hints of wavering in the Red Army something Voroshilov denied , and Stalin was preternaturally given to seeing an ideological affinity between the party right deviation and the tsarist-era officers.

Police informants who suffused the military milieu reported gossip, on the basis of which the OGPU had arrested two military academy teachers close to Tukhachevsky. Had Stalin believed in the existence of a genuine military plot, could he have suggested waiting to arrest the plotters and remained on holiday, far from the capital, for another month? It is impossible to establish his thinking definitively. Elections in Germany on September 14, , meanwhile, delivered a sensation: Communist deputies increased from 54 to Clearly, this cannot continue. Radical measures are needed.

As to what kind, I shall tell you when I get to Moscow. This is now inevitable. But for the time being, this is just between you and me. He appears to have written the same to Kaganovich. From reports of eavesdropped conversations, Stalin could read that the populace was unhappy with the consequences of wholesale collectivization, dekulakization, and accelerated industrialization—which was why Rykov was especially dangerous: It was not Rykov alone, moreover: I do not know if Klim knows.

It turned out that Tukhachevsky is a captive of anti-Soviet elements and was thoroughly worked over by anti-Soviet elements from the ranks of the rightists. Of course, it is possible, since it is not excluded. It seems the rightists are prepared to embark on the path of military dictatorship if only to escape from the Central Committee, collective and state farms, Bolshevik tempos of industrialization.

And yet, Stalin concluded the letter ambiguously: We need to think this through. We shall launch as broad a campaign as possible against interventionists and thwart them in their attempts for the next one or two years, which is of great significance to us. Nadya had already returned to Moscow in August. He sent peaches and lemons from his Sochi orchard. But something was amiss. This summer I did not feel that you would like me if I prolonged my stay; quite the contrary. Last summer I felt very much that you would, but this time I did not.

Of course, there was no point in staying in such a mood. Write, if my letter does not make you cross, but as you like. Probably you are distracted by your quail-hunting trips. She said that you were exceptionally jolly and gave no rest to everyone taken aback by your personage. I am glad to hear it. But will things get better if there is a change? Molotov wrote that same day, listing the reasons he was unsuitable and encouraging Stalin to take the post, but acknowledging that party work and the Comintern would suffer.

Unsurprisingly, Stalin decided to hold on to the party apparatus, which afforded him the final word on policy and personnel without the day-to-day burdens of the government. Stalin had forwarded to Bukharin some Industrial Party interrogations that mentioned a terrorist plot against the dictator, with connections to the right deviation.

On the phone, Stalin accused Bukharin of fostering an atmosphere for terrorist acts by criticizing the party line. Bukharin exploded that day in a private letter: Back from holiday, in his Old Square office, he received economics officials, the head of the railroads, a professor who had founded the Soviet biochemical industry, and the new head of foreign trade, Arkady Rosenholz known as Rozengolts , in tandem with the foreign affairs commissar.

The politburo assembled again October 20 and, with Syrtsov reporting, ordered the designation of several priority regions—Moscow, Leningrad, the Donbass, Baku—with higher norms of supply for workers. The politburo ruled that Stalin had been correct in refusing the one-on-one meeting. Stalin was not the only one engaged in provocations. We need to dispel these illusions. In reality, all decisions are made behind the backs of politburo members, by a small clique of party insiders, who meet in the Kremlin or in the former apartment of Clara Zetkin. They played at staging a coup; they played at being the politburo.

Meanwhile, Tukhachevsky, in the presence of Stalin, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, and other politburo members, had been made to confront his two accusers from the military academy, and he, in turn, accused them of lying. This is very good. Syrtsov and Lominadze would not get off as easily. Further, I did not like and do not like that sometimes especially during the days of his 50th jubilee , in certain speeches in the press, Stalin was placed on the same plane as Lenin. If memory serves, I said this to comrade Orjonikidze and pointed to the corresponding places in the press.

Their cases were adjudicated at a joint session of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission presidium November 4 , where Lominadze and Syrtsov both confessed to engaging in political discussions with the other. Syrtsov did not back down from claims that politburo decisions were pre-decided. It seems to me we could have avoided many of the costs by doing so. Yes, we did, mostly in the Central Committee building [on Old Square]. What is bad about that? Is this the case now? Such a state of affairs cannot last long.

But a vote for expulsion from the Central Committee had already passed. Soviet newspapers November 11, published lengthy indictments of prominent scientists and engineers accused of establishing a clandestine Industrial Party. Meetings at Soviet factories and the Academy of Sciences approved resolutions demanding the death penalty. Columns of workers were marched through snow in Moscow and other cities carrying banners: The problems faced by Soviet workers were all too real. All eight defendants pleaded guilty. Stalin needed no further evidence of such Western plots, but he had received a copy of a transcript of a recent confidential conversation between Winston Churchill, the former chancellor of the exchequer out of office following the Labour party victory , and Prince Otto von Bismarck, a grandson of the famous chancellor.

Presiding judge Andrei Vyshinsky, as per instructions, read out guilty verdicts, sentencing three to prison terms and five, Ramzin included, to death. This came without right of appeal. The hall erupted in an ovation. Two days later, the regime announced that Soviet power was strong and had no need for revenge: As it happened, that same day, Stalin returned a devoted young apparatchik of uncommon diligence to the central party apparatus as department head for economic personnel.

His name was Nikolai Yezhov b. Stalin received him on November 21, the first of what would be hundreds of private audiences connected to rooting out sabotage and treason. Rumors that Stalin had been killed were being spread out of independent Latvia, where many governments ran their intelligence operations against the Soviet Union, and on November 22 Eugene Lyons, a Belorussia-born, New York—raised UPI correspondent in Moscow and a Soviet sympathizer, suddenly got summoned to Old Square for a seventy-minute audience.

Stalin met me at the door and shook hands, smiling. He was remarkably unlike the scowling, self-important dictator of popular imagination. Lyons established for a foreign audience that Stalin had a wife and three children the Soviet populace did not know , and that he could be charming. Lyons returned to the United States for a twenty-city lecture tour. Belatedly, Duranty, too, was granted an interview, also of seventy minutes, on November He wrote that Stalin believed that the current global crisis in capitalism would deepen but not mark its demise, and yet the result would be a war over markets in the future, and the downfall of the the Versailles settlement.

Knickerbocker, got his own scoop: I took him out on account of his health. He did not want to go. I took him out. He was my only [surviving] son. He works too hard. Pervasive domestic difficulties rendered the treason tales plausible, press reports gave them life, and Stalin afforded them great intensity.

On December 1, , Syrtsov became the first politburo official expelled by the method of merely polling Central Committee members over the phone, without a plenum. One had been postponed, perhaps because Stalin had to cajole members into accepting the sacking of Rykov. No matter how much you cursed me, I have never forgotten that friendship that we had. We can always talk, if you want.

Finally, on December 17, , the delayed plenum opened, and at the last minute it became a joint session of the Central Committee and the punitive Central Control Commission. No one could doubt who stood behind the move. The vote was unanimous. I am deeply sorry for this fact, but it is not my fault. Molotov had no prior experience in government, but he would prove himself up to the task. Petersburg Polytechnic and edited Pravda before Bukharin did. On the final day December 21 , Rykov was expelled from the politburo; Orjonikidze assumed his spot on that supreme body.

Whereas Molotov had been methodical and wooden, Kaganovich was dynamic and showy. Molotov had known Stalin since , and Kaganovich had known Stalin since He not only pressurizes, but is somewhat personally self-regarding. He is strong and direct—a strong organizer and quite a good orator. Voroshilov and Orjonikidze were closer to Stalin personally the former had known him since , the latter since , and while Voroshilov continued to oversee the military, Stalin appointed Orjonikidze head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, in place of the faltering loyal dog Kuibyshev, who was transferred to the state planning commission.

Accounting is exceptionally weak and muddled. INTO , his seventh year as general secretary, Stalin had continued to enlarge his personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship, and by the end of he had amassed still vaster power. Around the time of the December plenum, Iona and Alexander Pereprygin, two of the six siblings of Lydiya Pereprygina—the orphaned, scandalously young teenager with whom Stalin had had a long cohabitation during his last Siberian exile—were arrested for long-ago White Army service. What Stalin forced through all across Eurasia was flabbergasting, using newspaper articles, secret circulars, plenipotentiaries, party discipline, a few plenums, a party congress, the secret police and internal troops, major foreign technology companies and foreign customers for Soviet primary goods, tens of thousands of urban worker volunteers and a tiny handful of top politburo officials, and the dream of a new world.

Trotsky perceived him as an opportunist and cynic, a representative of the class interests of the bureaucracy, a person bereft of convictions. But it seems to me wrong to think that he is an opportunist and that for him Communism is a mere name. The perpetual emergency rule required to build socialism afforded free rein to his inner demons as well. Indeed, it is striking how much potential power the right wing of the party had possessed within the politburo, and how Stalin crushed them anyway. Rykov was respected but had made no friends throttling army budgets, and, unlike Stalin, had not earned plaudits at the front in the civil war.

Stalin had adroitly positioned himself as the incarnation of the popular will and historical necessity, but his resounding political triumph of —30 had demonstrated a certain dependency, beyond even the luck of the harvest. Not for nothing had he promoted Yevdokimov. Molotov, Kaganovich, Orjonikidze, and Voroshilov. The first two seemed unlikely ever to waver.

But Orjonikidze and Voroshilov? Of course, the question would have been, Who could replace him?

Cry to Heaven

Still, what if, going forward, they changed their minds? Using deception, slander, and cunning against party members, with the aid of unbelievable acts of violence and terror, under the guise of a struggle to uphold the purity of Bolshevik principles and party unity, and using a powerful centralized party apparatus as his base, Stalin has over the past five years cut off and eliminated from positions of leadership all the best, genuinely Bolshevik cadres in the party and has established his personal dictatorship within the party and throughout the country as a whole, breaking with Leninism and taking a path of the most unbridled adventurism and uncontrolled personal tyranny, bringing the Soviet Union to the brink of the abyss.

More ominously, he would warn of deliberate deception, collusion, double-dealing, and sabotage. But the dictator himself would turn out to be the grand saboteur, leading the country and his own regime into catastrophe in —33, despite the intense zeal for building a new world. Henry Ford popularized the fact that manufacturing could be revolutionized by large capital investments and superior organization, throwing up a direct challenge for industry throughout the world economy.

Mass manufacturing required costly, risky, up-front investments and a large market, but the Soviet statized economy removed competition internal and foreign and manipulated domestic demand, enabling industry to take advantage of assembly lines. The construction industry continued to use brick and timber rather than concrete; steam, not electricity, continued to power railways.

Still, industry expanded significantly, and simultaneously with a plunge in production all across the capitalist world. Tsarist Russia had produced almost no machine tools in ; the Soviet Union, in , produced 20, Full employment, a magical idea, resonated globally. By the end of , unemployment had reached 2.

But the disappearance of the unemployed in the USSR gave rise to unprecedented labor turnover—workers had options—which in turn provoked draconian laws such as prison sentences for violations of labor discipline or perceived negligence, and mandatory labor books to track workers. The flux was staggering: Moscow, which received migrants from other cities, too, swelled from 2 million to 3.

No central decree explicitly outlawed private trade, but Stalin incited attacks against NEPmen traders. Party-state pressure also squeezed out individual artisans. Molotov then decried the severe scarcity of wooden spoons at factory canteens and the sheer impossibility of having clothes or shoes mended. The larger factories would soon establish their own farms, granaries, and goods warehouses, an unplanned yet foreseeable result of the suppression of legal private trade and private enterprise.

Simply by virtue of its monopoly over politics and the public sphere and its dynamic mass organizations, the Soviet party-state stood out from other contemporary authoritarian regimes, but piecemeal introduction of a socioeconomic monopoly, too, added another major dimension to fulfilling the aspirations of totalitarian control. Centralized procurement and distribution imposed a nearly impossible administrative burden, and vast corruption and everyday ingenuity afforded people space to maneuver.

The state itself was in upheaval, undergoing headlong expansion, thanks to elimination of private property, and political purging. Orjonikidze opened an All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry January 30—February 4, with a speech that defended quantitative output targets but called for controlling costs, supplementing centralized allocation with direct factory-to-factory contract relations for additional supplies, and holding managers accountable for financial results and output quality.

But on the final day, Stalin arrived in the hall. And those who fall behind get beat up. But we do not want to get beat up! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten up by the Mongol khans. She was beaten up by the Turkish beys. She was beaten up by the Swedish barons. She was beaten up by the Polish-Lithuanian pans. She was beaten up by the Anglo-French capitalists.

She was beaten up by the Japanese lords. All beat her—because of her backwardness, her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. Such is the law of the exploiters: You are backward, you are weak—and therefore you are wrong; therefore you can be beaten up and enslaved. You are mighty, therefore you are right, therefore we must handle you carefully. We must make good this gap in ten years.

Either we do it, or they will crush us. How is it that we Bolsheviks,. The reason is that it is easier to sign papers than to manage production. It is time Bolsheviks themselves became experts. And an economic manager who does not want to study technology, who does not want to master technology, is a joke and not a manager. Who, precisely, was a kulak—an owner of three cows? Criteria could be murky. But centrally imposed quotas forced answers. Up to 30, heads of households were summarily executed. All the while, the regime was supposed to be facilitating the planting for the next harvest, the first in which the collective and state farms would predominate.

Stalin got warnings of lagging harvest preparation as well as locust infestation and ordered some actions, but the regime seems not to have perceived the danger. State procurements took such a large proportion of the grain grown here that herders and their animals were effectively left to starve.

Urban rationing, meanwhile, was mired in bureaucracy, while investment in housing, health care, and education took a backseat. Stalin attended both days of a conference of industrial managers June 22—23, Control over the military is always an issue in a dictatorship. OGPU special departments continued to maintain watch lists for officers with tsarist pasts. Hence, the counterintelligence operation was code-named Springtime. More than 3, former tsarist officers in Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad were charged with conspiracy and espionage. Thus was the sweeping Springtime operation wound down, for now; the collection of compromising materials on Tukhachevsky and others did not cease.

Stalin, in parallel, kept a watch on military technology. In mid-June , with Voroshilov in tow, he visited the central aerodrome, in Moscow, to inspect Soviet aircraft, climbing into the cabin of the new Polikarpov I-5 fighter, under the direction of Alexander Turzhansky b. Next up for inspection was a French Potez aircraft. Some OGPU operatives looked askance at the primitive fabrications against what were unthreatening military administrators and teachers already on a short leash. Additionally, although Yagoda liked to advertise his office on the third floor of Lubyanka, 2, as open, many operatives despised him.

His weight had ballooned to more than pounds, exacerbating his heart condition, bronchial asthma, and endocrinal deficiency, and he had been reporting to work at Lubyanka perhaps twice a week for a few hours, before finally being sent to Crimea. Stalin could have seized on the intrigues to promote a favorite, such as Yevdokimov. Yagoda nominally fell to second deputy. Stalin also advanced Balytsky to third deputy, a new post.

Yevdokimov was assigned to run the OGPU in Leningrad in place of Filipp Medved who was reassigned to Belorussia , but then the politburo reversed itself. Global financial shocks were spiraling, but how much Stalin understood or paid attention remains uncertain. That, in turn, had provoked bank runs in Hungary and Germany, too, and attacks on sterling. On July 8, strict controls were imposed on all German foreign exchange transactions, but five days later, one German bank collapsed. Voroshilov traveled for more than two months in the summer of , stopping in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Blagoveshchensk, Ulan Ude, Chita, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, and Magnitogorsk, and writing to Stalin about the benefits.

Stalin took full advantage of his southern holiday, writing to Yenukidze about having spent ten days in Tsqaltubo, in central-western Georgia, twelve miles from Kutaisi, where he had once sat in a tsarist prison. Its radon-carbonate springs boasted a natural temperature of 91 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. His mailbag was the nexus of what normally would be called the policy-making process.

He chose what to read or not , and his preferences and habits profoundly shaped state behavior. He tended to go on holiday during harvest season and inquired often about grain procurements while paying little attention to the cultivation of crops or animal husbandry. Stalin usually forwarded this filtered correspondence to responsible functionaries, expecting an answer. The holiday correspondence revealed that Stalin knew of the terrible food situation. Do you really think Molotov should be excluded from this ruling circle that has taken shape in the struggle against the Trotsky-Zinoviev and Bukharin-Rykov deviations?

Of course Molotov has his faults. We have to respect one another and deal with one another. The preservation of the unity and indivisibility of our ruling circle! In Sochi, Stalin was staying up high at the Zenzinovka dacha and measuring temperature differences with the lower Puzanovka dacha, in a reprise of his youthful days as a weatherman at the Tiflis observatory.

Nadya had again departed early; her fall classes were resuming. Nadya replied that she had gotten safely back to a dreary capital. On the 14th, he wrote again: The Molotovs have left. They say Kalinin is coming. How are you doing? Have Satanka [Svetlana] write something to me. Stalin wrote to Nadya about a visit from Kirov.

It was very good! I read about it in the White press, where they say that it has the most interesting material about you. Instigator of mayhem at home, Stalin received a jolt from abroad. Now, Japan claimed to be restoring stability following the supposed vacuum opened up by the Red Army withdrawal after its military confrontation with China over the Chinese Eastern Railway. Soviet-Japanese relations had been tense, but Soviet exports to Japan had doubled between and , while Japanese exports to the USSR, from a very low base, had increased tenfold.

Tokyo pressured Moscow to allow it to use that rail line to move its troops against Chinese forces and, when Moscow refused, arrested some of the Soviet employees; one died in custody from typhus, Japan claimed , another from supposed suicide. Stalin was preoccupied with the limitrophes, the former tsarist lands on the western frontier.

The Kwantung leadership judged the USSR incapable of real war, so that if the Red Army did engage, the Japanese would pounce—and if the civilian government in Tokyo opposed a full-scale clash, then let it fall. Stalin chose not to hurry back to Moscow. At the politburo, some officials demanded resolute action to uphold Soviet administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway, just as in , but Stalin suspected other countries would take advantage of a Soviet-Japanese clash, especially after Kaganovich and Molotov informed him of the lack of reaction by the British and the French.

Production had barely increased in the first nine months of the year. The ambitious export plans to pay for imported industrial machinery remained in place. Across the Union, the larger-than-expected bulge in the urban labor force had pushed the number of people on rations to 46 million by fall , from 26 million at the start of On Monday morning, September 21, —nearly simultaneously with the Japanese aggression in Manchuria—Great Britain stunned the world, abandoning the gold standard, even though it had not run out of reserves. Stocks on the New York exchange lost half their value, the second crash in eighteen months.

This effectively ended a long epoch of Britain upholding an open global economic order. In fact, human decisions transformed structural problems into what came to be known as the Great Depression. Central bankers and their acolytes had long believed in the necessity of convertibility between currencies and gold, but a fixed-exchange-rate system works only if there is convergence in the macroeconomic performance of the participants similar levels of wage and price inflation, public and private deficits, competitiveness and an absence of shocks.

Now, confronted with a shock, monetary authorities chose to raise interest rates, exacerbating the problems. And finances became unglued anyway. Most Eastern European countries hesitated to depreciate their currencies, for fear of a repeat of hyperinflation, but they closed banks, imposed foreign-exchange and trade controls, raised tariffs, and postponed or suspended foreign debt payments—moves toward autarchy that magnified arbitrary bureaucratic power at the expense of markets and imparted further impetus to authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and xenophobia.

Stalin had been preoccupied with a possible French-led collective boycott that could cut the Soviets off from all advanced technology, and Orjonikidze had bent over backward to a delegation of German industrial luminaries, while Stalin restrained the insurrectionist impulses of the German Communists.

A bilateral trade agreement had been signed that extended German government-guaranteed credits to the USSR for a period of twenty-eight months, longer than the usual. German exports to the USSR would jump to double the level of But the agreement had not resolved the severe Soviet balance-of-payment problems.

Soviet reliance on expensive short-term credits—the only kind predominantly available to the Communist regime—imposed relentless pressure to retire maturing debt and obtain new loans. With Soviet foreign debt more than doubling in the period —31 it would increase 50 percent in alone , rumors of a pending default spread in the Western press.

Turkey and much of Latin America defaulted at this time. Compared with the robust harvest—officially estimated at State collections in fall and into early would leave farmers with less grain, meat, and dairy than in any year since the mids. Stalin was the sole bulwark against retreat from building socialism. On November 16, , as he was walking the short distance between party headquarters on Old Square and the Kremlin, down Ilinka Street, a former White officer and presumed British agent, whom the OGPU had under surveillance, chanced upon him.

Either way, Ogarev was arrested. He was moving slowly and looked at me intently. I also did not take my eyes off him. But the armed Ogarev was no Princip. Japan, with its invasion of Manchuria, had seized an industrial territory larger than Germany, France, and Austria combined, while losing just 3, killed, 5, wounded, and 2, frostbitten. Such a pact had been signed with Lithuania , but he sought them with Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Romania, and, above all, Poland. Stalin, finally, had replaced foreign affairs commissar Chicherin—a hypochondriac frequently absent abroad for treatment—with his deputy, Maxim Litvinov.

He was also Jewish. He had lived in exile in the UK from through early and afterward as a midlevel embassy counselor, spoke fluent accented English, and had married an English writer, Ivy Low, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, whom he called his bourgeoise.

Also on December 13, Stalin sat for a two-hour interview with the German psychoanalytical writer Emil Ludwig. But utterly independent of that, another could have been in my place, because someone had to sit right here. Despite Soviet groveling, the Japanese government did not bother to reply through diplomatic channels to renewed offers of a nonaggression pact.

Secretly, however, Stalin had embarked on energetic steps. Japan had changed his mind. Fewer than 2, had been manufactured in , but Stalin wielded the preposterous new target to force expansion of assembly lines and creation of systematic tank-building capability at tractor and automobile factories, too. Stalin needed advanced tank designs—and, amazingly, he got them.

The Soviet trade mission in Britain had secured permission to purchase 15 Vickers-Armstrong medium six-ton tanks, 26 Carden Loyd light armored machine-gun carriers, and 8 Carden Loyd amphibious tanks, as well as a license for production and blueprints. Walter Christie was an engineer, who sometimes tested his designs with race car driving, and his dual-drive tank designs were notable for their innovative suspension and speed; he had offered to sell the technology to the U.

Evidently, the Japanese had discovered that the Soviets had broken their codes. Japan did not annex Manchuria, as it had the far smaller Taiwan and Korean Peninsula, but it orchestrated the proclamation of a puppet state of Manchukuo Manchu Land and, on March 9, installed Henry Pu-Yi, the deposed last Qing emperor whom the Japanese had recently kidnapped , as head of state in what was the Qing ancestral homeland.

The Soviet envoy in Tokyo was instructed to convey that Moscow would not be intimidated. Negotiations for nonaggression pacts had been concluded with Finland January 21, and Latvia February 5 , and one would be signed with Estonia May 4 , but talks with Romania deadlocked over its disputed annexation of Bessarabia. Stalin received fresh reports that Warsaw had not desisted from attempts to destabilize Ukraine or cooperate with Japan in a possible military strike against the USSR.

German fears were borne out: This posture had always been aimed at preemption of an anti-Soviet bloc, which the trade agreement with Berlin and the nonaggression pacts with Warsaw and Paris would manage to accomplish, for now. Nonaggression pacts were signed between enemies. A land commissariat internal report in early noted that peasants were quitting the collectives by the hundreds of thousands to roam industrial sites in search of food.

There was little to ration. But every time he conceded grain procurement reductions, every time he allowed strategic reserves to go unfilled, the already low rations for workers had to be lowered and grain was not exported, putting the military-industrial buildup at risk.

The much delayed first blast furnace at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine had been started up early , in a furious rush in horrendous frosts, to coincide with the 17th party conference. Two giant chemical factories, the first aluminum factory, and a ball-bearing plant were started up, and the first four trucks rolled off the line at the Nizhny Novgorod auto factory.

But these were political startups. Industrial output began to stagnate or even decline in spring Voices were being raised. You confiscate not only land but livestock, huts, and possessions from the middle and poor peasants. You threw out Trotsky and call him a counterrevolutionary, but you, comrade Stalin, are the real and first Trotskyite, and a pupil not of Lenin but of Trotsky.

Campaign in Russia, The Waffen SS on the Eastern Front - Leon Degrelle - PDF Free Download

They taught us in political circle that Trotsky proposed to build socialism with force at the expense of the muzhik. Suddenly, the regime backed down from socialization of all livestock, with a decree March 26, initiated by land commissar Yakovlev and accepted by Stalin. Functionaries in the commissariat interpreted it as a retreat from collectivization—some asked whether it contained a typo—but the aim was tactical: Local officials did not hurry to return collectivized animals. Stalin dispatched Kaganovich, who mobilized local party agitators to speak with workers and himself heard out their grievances.

The strikers were further stymied by the state monopoly over newspapers, radio, and the public sphere. More profoundly still, the strikers were trapped in the socialist vocabulary of class war. He managed to browbeat most strikers back to the shop floor, after which the OGPU arrested worker organizers and officials accused of worker sympathies.

The targets for state farms were raised, from 1. This was just 81 percent of actual procurements. The decrees even forbade further liquidation of individual household farms, ordered the return of confiscated livestock and an end to lawlessness, and stipulated that, after peasants had met procurement quotas for the harvest deadline: As recently as the October party plenum, Mikoyan, speaking for Stalin, had flatly rejected suggestions to permit rural trade at market prices after fulfillment of state obligations.

Still, it turned out that peasants had to be incentivized with private livestock holdings and market sales of even some of their collective farm output. Workers, too, had to be provided incentives through wage differentiation. The surprises kept coming. Stalin returned Shaposhnikov to a high-profile post in the capital, as director of the Frunze Military Academy, and on May 7, , he even sent a written apology to Tukhachevsky for having denounced his January super-rearmament memorandum as Red militarism.

Stalin had long forbidden directing more consumer goods to villages to incentivize the flow of grain, but now he acquiesced in this, too. Mongolia, the Soviet satellite, provides a stark contrast. Inflation soared, shortages proliferated. In spring , revolts led by lamas overtook four provinces in the northwest, amid rumors that either the elderly Panchen Lama from Tibetan exile or the Japanese would arrive with troops to liberate Mongolia from Communist occupation.

The Soviets dispatched consumer goods and ten fighter planes, which strafed the rebels; about 1, would be killed. Facing annihilation, rebels engaged in murder and cannibalism. Whether the grudging concessions could save the situation was uncertain. The politburo rejected this, but it reduced allocations to the Red Army by 16 percent and resolved to accelerate grain imports from Persia.

Stalin conceded release of another 41, tons of seeds from the strategic reserves in Ukraine and Belorussia. In late May, Stalin departed for his annual southern holiday, which would be especially prolonged through late August. Where, exactly, and how many? A great river, the Volga. Just when I think I am beginning to get better, it turns out that I have a long way to go.

Book: Stalin, Volume 2

I am not having rheumatic symptoms they disappeared somewhere , but the overall weakness is not going away. While on the terrace or out fishing, he would tell tales of the revolutionary underground and prison. He tended to his mandarins, berries, and grapes and played badminton or skittles with a cook against a bodyguard. Gypsy dances and other performances accompanied the late-evening meals and drinking. The lights usually went out in his quarters at 2: That same day, Stalin conceded a significant reduction in grain exports for the third quarter. Stalin wrote back on June The loss of airplanes is not as scary the hell with them as the loss of living people, aviators.

Live human beings are the most valuable and most important thing in our entire cause, especially in aviation. Then, on July 24, Stalin undermined their hard work. This is necessary not solely from the point of view of justness, but also in view of the special condition of Ukraine and its common frontier with Poland. Sown acreage had shrunk noticeably. Tractive power, seed grain, and fodder were scarce. The spring sowing season had proved short, and wheat sown beginning in late May always produced lower yields and was more susceptible to August rains, which would descend torrentially as early as the beginning of the month.

Rust epiphytotics damaged a significant part of the wheat harvest, to the surprise of officials who had failed to identify it. And this needs to be done as soon as possible. Without this, the defense of the Far East is only an empty phrase. Only a third of the projected divisions could be fully outfitted.

The war minister in Tokyo was said to have been barely restrained from launching an attack on the USSR. Telegrams, letters, and reports swamped Sochi with news of mass death of horses, mass failure to sow crops, mass starvation, mass flight from collective farms, and a bewildering lack of government response.

One could view the compulsory state grain procurements—paying a mere 4. Stalin exploded at Kaganovich August 11 over fresh requests from Ukraine to lower procurement targets yet again. This is not a party but a parliament, a caricature of a parliament. If things get worse, these elements will not hesitate to open a front inside and outside the party, against the party. Polish spies were infiltrating the USSR, and being caught.

Nadya had again accompanied him to Sochi, with the children, Vasily then ten and Svetlana five , but she again returned to Moscow before he did. Collectivization-dekulakization was his policy, which all party officials knew, having been bombarded by extremist directives in his name.

They also knew that the right deviation had predicted calamity. Individual efforts to get Stalin to ease up provoked his rage. Ryutin, infamously, had been a Trotsky scourge. One of them hosted a follow-up meeting in his apartment, where it was decided that the documents should be circulated hand to hand. Another conspirator passed copies to Trotskyites in Kharkov. Bukharin would later deny that he had received a copy or knew of the Ryutin group. There it was again. The subject of endless party discussions that had prompted Stalin to offer to resign at least six times between and December And he undertook no such preparations.

Ryutin was hauled in on September That same day, Kamenev and Zinoviev were summoned to explain why, having read the Ryutin documents, they had failed to report them, a party crime. Ryutin was not alone. It consisted of selected material from an internal state planning commission report on the first six months of In September , back from his three-month holiday, Stalin quietly softened his August 7 law: Half of all Kazakhs—as many as 2 million—had picked up their tents and remaining herds and fled the collectives.

Half of the party functionaries in that republic were said to have deserted their posts. In , the regime would export just 1. Tsarist Russia in had exported more than 9 million tons of grain. With the harvest over, he aimed to reduce the spring concessions to household plots and private markets.

Several tons of meat, sausage, chicken, and fish, kilos of caviar, kilos of cheeses, and large amounts of fruit, vegetables, and mushrooms had been ordered up for the plenum, some of which the attendees were allowed to haul home. Gossip in Moscow had Stalin tendering his resignation, only to have it rejected. He was remanded to the prison near the large Urals village of Verkhne-Uralsk, joining Trotskyites he had once condemned.

I have signed everything. He slept on a divan in an undersized bedroom. Nadya had her own, more ample room, with an oriental carpet of distinct color, a Georgian takhta divan on which she placed embroidered pillows, as well as a bed, desk, and drawing table. Down a hall were bedrooms for Svetlana and Vasily; Svetlana shared hers with a nanny, Alexandra Bychkova. Farther down the same hall, the governesses had a room, as did Karolina Til, an ethnic German from Latvia who oversaw the household.

The children could see their father everywhere—on posters and newspaper front pages—but not so much at home. Most visitors to the Kremlin apartment were regime officials. Stalin had no surviving siblings, and his father was deceased. Keke, his mother, lived alone in Tiflis; Nadya, in letters, expressed regret that Keke could not come to Moscow because of the severe climate. The one surviving letter from Keke to her son, from the s, has her wishing him complete annihilation of his enemies.

He planted an orchard, and raised pheasants, guinea fowl, and ducks, and liked to lie down on the warm tiled stove in the kitchen to alleviate the pain in his joints. While Kirov, Voroshilov, and even Molotov danced, he watched. The effects of her exposure to the student milieu—young women in the city selling themselves to make ends meet; students with ties to the famine-stricken countryside—remain difficult to gauge.

She kept an emotional distance. The Master is very rough with her, but even he is afraid of her sometimes. Especially when the smile disappears from her face. Nadya was diagnosed with a defective heart valve, angina, and general exhaustion and suffered from migraines, evidently from a cranial impairment that the best doctors could not alleviate.

Some observers thought she had clinical depression or schizophrenia. But there were episodes of affection, too. Nadya rarely revealed the stress of their almost parallel lives.

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I do not find studying in itself difficult. But it is pretty difficult trying to fit it in with duties at home. Still, I am not complaining, and so far I am coping with it all quite successfully. Iosif has promised to write to you himself. As far as his health is concerned, I can say that I marvel at his strength and his energy. Only a really healthy man could stand the amount of work he gets through. In November , Nadya was weeks from graduation and facing exams. Nadya marched with the Industrial Academy delegates.

The children were taken to the Sokolovka dacha, another state facility used by the family, where they could ski. On November 8, Stalin was in his office between 2: Nadya was in the apartment, preparing for the customary holiday banquet that evening in the Voroshilov residence in the Grand Kremlin Palace. She was thirty-one years old; her husband was turning fifty-four. Some witnesses say he flirted with Galina Yegorova, the thirty-four-year-old actress wife of his military crony Alexander Yegorov. There had been much talk of dalliances a hairdresser; a pretty woman who worked in protocol.

Stalin threw something at Nadya a bread crust, an orange peel, a cigarette butt. They took a walk on the Kremlin grounds. It was late at night, and she complained to my wife: It was all simple: Stalin had drunk a little too much, he made some jokes. Nothing special, but it had an effect on her. On the morning of November 9, Karolina Til found Nadya in a pool of blood in her room, near a small toy-sized pistol. Nadya had shot herself in the heart. Svetlana appears to have remained behind with her nanny. He moved in silence. She loved Stalin very much—that is a fact.

Bukharin, who used to visit Nadya in the apartment, would offer to exchange Kremlin apartments with Stalin. Soon, however, he and the children instead moved into the Imperial Senate, to an apartment one floor below his Kremlin office. It comprised seven rooms on a long corridor, with rooms for servants and bodyguards at each end and windows looking out onto the Arsenal. The casket was placed on a white catafalque for an unhurried procession to the Novodevichy Cemetery on November Stalin exited the Kremlin on foot, behind the horse-drawn hearse. Whether he marched the full four miles, through many narrow and winding streets, is uncertain.

We, close friends and comrades, understand the severity of the loss of comrade Stalin, and we know what duties this imposes on us with respect to comrade Stalin. Returning home, we had lunch. Stalin sat silently, contemplatively. Soon he left for a meeting of the government. Secret reports were now mentioning a threat of starvation even for Moscow and Leningrad. But the spring concessions had failed to produce a harvest miracle, and now he ratcheted up the repression again to squeeze blood from a stone.

Smirnov had become a Central Committee member back in , the same year as Stalin. Eismont had been on the recent commission to the North Caucasus led by Kaganovich and had seen the swarms of starving refugees at railroad stations. Under the influence, the trio had discussed possible replacements for the general secretary: Voroshilov, Kalinin, even Smirnov.

Stalin had been there, too, and Smirnov had fed him. Eismont and Tolmachev were the ones expelled from the party, and Smirnov from the Central Committee, although they were not arrested. The next day, Japan belatedly replied to the Soviet offer of a nonaggression pact in a note to Soviet envoy Alexander Troyanovsky with a rejection.

He said this was the primary cause of his break with Trotsky. He explained that they had neither the time nor the money to try to communize the whole world, even should they wish to do so. He aimed to diminish the pressure on the urban food supply and force peasants back into the collectives. Despite the greater repression, procurements as of January 1, , had reached only We now have one. We had no tractor industry. He admitted that the first Five-Year Plan prioritized heavy industry but baldly asserted that living standards had improved.

He had reduced industrial growth targets for the second Five-Year Plan to a more realistic 13—14 percent per annum. On this soil, smashed groups of old counterrevolutionary parties of SRs and Mensheviks, bourgeois nationalists of the center and periphery, may stir and come to life, shards of counterrevolutionary elements of Trotskyites and right deviationists may stir and come to life.

But all this needs to be kept in mind if we want to do away with these elements quickly and without especially large numbers of victims. The politburo closed ranks around the dictator, and the others fell in line. That is why we are with him. Yes, he vigorously chops off what is rotten, he chops off what is slated for destruction. We are currently at war and must exercise the strictest discipline. That is why such groupings must be hacked off without the slightest mercy, without being in the slightest troubled by any sentimental considerations concerning the past, concerning personal friendships.

That same day, Stalin permitted the politburo to approve, in a poll vote, another reduction in the yearly grain procurement for Ukraine, of , tons; other regions got smaller reductions. The OGPU, in any case, was consumed with forming local detachments to enforce a draconian decree, on January 22, , ordering interdiction of peasant flight from grain-growing regions and blaming local authorities for allowing an exodus, which had helped spread epidemics and become a weapon for discrediting regime policies.

In any case, the decree showed that he was very anxious to prevent the spread of further discontent to the urban socialist core.

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He also had to feed the cities, which could become death traps. Overall, the number of fleeing peasants captured and sent back would be relatively small low hundreds of thousands, when there were 17 million peasants in collective farms in Ukraine alone. Many farmers were already trapped in regions without adequate food. Molotov, meanwhile, gloated to the central executive committee of the Soviet on January 23, , that more and more capitalist states were recognizing the Soviet Union. Write a customer review. Showing of 9 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now.

Please try again later. Had me laughing aloud. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. Yes I am a cat lover so perhaps I enjoyed this more than a non cat lover would. I found this a delightful surprise to read. The story is told by Sebastian, a rescued feral. I don't laugh easily but I truly was laughing out loud.

Five stars is not something I give often, however I do feel this story deserves it. Whiteley has a gift for writing as well as humor. Wish it had been a longer read as I was captivated by Sebastian's tale, perhaps there will be a sequel! This is a pleasant short story about Sebastian Furline, a wild outdoor cat who is rescued and moved to the city Sebastian tells this tale from his own point of view and shares his life adventures with us I really enjoyed reading this book and highly recommend it to all animal lovers Please give it a try!

I got his book when it was free, and I am glad t did, for after reading it, I would have been sorry to pay for it. It is a short story of how the feral cat Sebastian becomes a domestic one quite by accident, written from his point of view. I feel that the author went overboard in trying to make the book funny, for often I felt that it was all too artificial to be proper cat-thoughts. A quick short story about how a feral cat might see humans.

Well written, straight to the point, this cat sees the warmth comfort humans supply, yet never truly trusts people. A nice quick read with a happy ending, much luckier than most feral cats when in contact with us humans. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and had the experience of reading it in a public place I can totally imagine my cats thinking these things. A great book for anyone who has ever wondered exactly what is going through their cat's little mind!

A very entertaining diary of a captive cat. Full of laugh out loud humor, this story is sure to please! See all 9 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. The Memoirs of a Captive Feral. Set up a giveaway.

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