HOOVER ARCHIVES:
Watching Stalin Win

By Paul R. Gregory

Transcripts of power sturggles in the Politburo, unseen for more than 70 years, are about to be published. Paul R. Gregory on a major historical find.

Verbatim transcripts of the Soviet Politburo have come to light, revealing candid discussions by the USSR’s ultimate decision-making body as it invented a political, economic, and social system and struggled over who would lead the country. The discovery is like unearthing a lost gospel. Scholars did not know the transcripts existed; they had to content themselves with published Politburo agendas, surmising that transcribers would have been banished when secret matters were taken up. Yet thanks to the Hoover Archives’ pioneering efforts to microfilm significant Soviet state and party documents, and with a key clue from visiting Russian archivists, the transcripts have surfaced and are to be published by a Hoover team. They range from routine economic matters to the highest party politics— the expulsion of Leon Trotsky and his allies in the “United Opposition”— and are peppered with crude jokes, petty arguments, and threats. They chart a crucial 15-year period during which the last opposition to Josef Stalin was wiped out.

The story begins in June 1923, when the Politburo decided to make transcripts (called stenograms in Russian) of its main agenda items. Thirty-one such documents were made between 1923 and 1938 and archived in the Politburo’s top secret “special files,” where they would remain beyond the reach of scholars for almost 70 years. When the first stenogram was made, documenting a meeting of August 2, 1923, the Politburo had seven full members and six candidate members and Vladimir Lenin was still alive. By the end of 1930, of these thirteen, only four remained in the Politburo. The others had been replaced by Stalin loyalists, who oversaw Stalin’s policies of collectivization, dekulakization (eliminating so-called wealthy peasants), and forced industrialization.

Josef Stalin enjoys a drive in the Georgian countryside in this snapshot from the personal photo album of Nestor Lakoba, an Abkhazian communist leader and friend of Stalin’s. During the 1923–38 period in which the Politburo “stenograms” were made, Stalin methodically extinguished all opposition.

Of the twenty-two people who served as full Politburo members during this period, only four died of natural causes, not counting Stalin. Politburo membership was a dangerous business.

The stenograms were relatively few, considering how much work the Politburo performed. In 1930–35, the Politburo discussed 20,911 separate questions. Preparing a single stenographic account was time-consuming: remarks had to be distributed to each speaker for review, editing, and sometimes significant additions or even changes of positions. In one case, Trotsky doubled the length of his remarks, a fact that Stalin and his faction scornfully reported. Without photocopiers, party clerks had to cut out each participant’s comments, paste them on blank pages, send them to the official, and then add the revisions to the final version.

Control of the Politburo meant control of the country. Stalin’s battle to dominate the Politburo started with an advantage: he was allowed to organize the meetings, a practice that went back to at least 1922 and was blessed by Lenin. The agenda remained firmly in his hands. In most cases where a stenogram was made, Stalin wanted to have a transcript to inform his allies of the latest party line and who was in and who was out. Nonetheless, it was often decided not to distribute them after all, especially if they pointed to internal divisions or “deviations” from Stalin’s policies.

Details of the discussions behind closed doors were masked by bland published agendas that were telling for their silences. The bitter struggle between the Politburo majority and the United Opposition of Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev in the sessions of October 8 and 11, 1926 (covering more than 200 pages of transcripts), appears in the official agenda only as “Detailed discussion of the decision of the Politburo from October 7, point 1.” The most significant Politburo decrees, such as the launching of dekulakization and the Great Terror, were acknowledged by titles like “About measures associated with kulaks” and “Question of the NKVD” and were buried in special files.

Leon Trotsky has his portrait taken in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), where he went into exile in 1929 after his challenge to Stalin was crushed. He eventually moved to Mexico, where a Stalinist assassin caught up to him in 1940.

The stenograms bring those dry agendas to life. Transcribers’ notes include descriptives such as “laughter,” “noise,” “jeers,” and “agitation in the room,” as well as the ringing of the bell by the chair to restore order or to signal that a speaker’s time was up. The chair occasionally had to warn a participant to restrain himself. Once, after Stalin had charged Trotsky with “complete intellectual and political bankruptcy,” the chair tried to turn to another speaker, evoking the following exchange:

The transcriptions made some Politburo members uneasy. Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the secret police, had a bitter exchange with Trotsky on June 14, 1926:

But Stalin, too, emphasized the importance of discretion when meetings were being transcribed. He rebuked Politburo member Mikhail Kalinin for speaking out against a Politburo consensus:

Nominal head of state and Politburo member Kalinin warned Politburo members on October 11, 1925, to think twice about statements being transcribed:

Members wanted the Politburo to be viewed as an oracle—wise men issuing wise directives. They did not want crude or petty remarks to sully their pronouncements. Speakers could edit out undiplomatic, or, in the case of Stalin, unstatesmanlike, utterances from the final transcript. Stalin deleted about half of his remarks from a November 27, 1932, meeting called to attack “deviationists.” Many of them were wisecracks or caustic remarks aimed at other speakers, such as: “He [Smirnov] is not capable, like others, of deftly hiding things. It just bursts out of him.” After editing out his comments, Stalin then inserted a long prepared speech extolling the successes of his regime.

In some cases, Stalin chose to leave in his vitriol despite its kindergarten rhetoric. Consider Stalin’s response to Trotsky’s accusation of his bungling during the civil war:

Stalin comes across as an adept, street-fighting debater. His most feared rival, civil war hero Trotsky, reveals himself as egotistical, politically clumsy, and ill-prepared, making himself an easy target for Stalin and his allies. One such ally, Jan Rudzutak, mocked Trotsky in the culmination of a heated debate over Trotsky’s proposed political program:

Caught off guard, Trotsky could only weakly respond:

Requests for transcripts, especially by members under attack by Stalin, were often met with suspicion. At the October 11, 1926, meeting, Stalin opponent Kamenev defended his request for a transcript:

When the Stalin majority moved to remove Zinoviev as chairman of the Leningrad organization, Zinoviev’s ally E.G. Evdokimov (notably not a Politburo member) demanded that the session be transcribed:

Evdokimov was shot during the Great Terror.

The congeniality of the early transcribed sessions had drained away by 1926, as the battle between Stalin and Trotsky intensified. Seeing themselves overwhelmed by Stalin’s control of the party machinery, the United Opposition figures offered peace if they were allowed to present their alternative platform directly to the party rank and file. The absence of Trotsky ally Zinoviev from the October 8 meeting drew immediate derision from the Stalin camp, as represented by trade union leader Mikhail Tomsky:

The chastened Zinoviev, who was in Leningrad trying to drum up support for the opposition position, hastened back to Moscow for the October 11 meeting.

The October meetings ended with a strategic retreat of the opposition, who, with the exception of the stubborn Trotsky, promised that they would cease their factional work. Kamenev’s attempt to formulate a compromise was met with derisive laughter:

Stalin ally Mikhail Kalinin could not resist mocking the recalcitrant Trotsky:

Within a year, the last vestiges of compromise had dissipated. The United Opposition continued to insist that its alternative program be presented to the upcoming party congress. The no-holds-barred tone is reflected in the following exchanges of September 8, 1927:

The defeat of the United Opposition signaled that alternative views now constituted “factionalism” and “betrayal of the party.” Zinoviev accused Stalin of cowardice:

Soon it was the turn of his former allies to be accused of factionalism, as Stalin adopted the ideas of the defeated opposition. Having no tolerance for party officials who questioned his policies and personal authority, he redefined disloyalty to include the failure to support the party line with sufficient zeal and vigor. By 1932, with Trotsky’s supporters long since excluded from the party and Trotsky in exile, Stalin turned his attention to his own former allies—Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Tomsky. They were all excluded from the Politburo in 1929 and 1930. Although the political clouds were darkening, the penalty for disobedience was still exclusion from the Politburo, the Central Committee, or, in the worst case, the party. The first high-level executions would not take place until the Moscow Show Trial of the “mad dogs” Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1936.

The following 1932 exchange shows one of Stalin’s future victims, Tomsky, still calling his former Politburo colleagues by their first names and trying to joke with them. (Tomsky later committed suicide, much to Stalin’s regret at losing a potential star of another show trial.) Tomsky had been summoned to answer the charge that his absence from a Central Committee Plenum was a deliberate insult to the party. The sparring centers on wordplay: “sitting at the front” also means being part of the Stalin majority, and “not hearing” means not accepting Stalin’s policies:

These are examples of the exchanges that make up the more than 1,000 pages of dialogue. Hoover researchers and Yale University Press will publish next year the complete set of transcripts in Russian as a three volume set. Hoover authors are publishing a companion book in English that offers a first analysis of these archives (The Lost Transcripts of the Politburo, by Paul R. Gregory and Norman M. Naimark, Yale University Press). The transcripts surfaced only in July 2003, when visiting Russian archival representatives informed the Hoover Archives that Politburo transcripts had been transferred to them from the closed Presidential Archive—where no one had checked out a document for a half century. Thus was organized a joint project by the Hoover Archives and the Russian Archive for Social and Political History to publish the transcripts in their entirety, even though no one had seen their contents. It will take years to assess them.

The Hoover Institution continues to pioneer the microfilming of Soviet state and party archives, and Hoover’s current holdings of such material number in the millions of documents. The Soviet collections have attracted more scholars to Hoover during the past decade than any other material, reinforcing Hoover’s reputation as the world’s richest study archive for the history of communism.

The final Politburo transcript dates to October 11–12, 1938, a month before Stalin called off the Great Terror. None had been made during the 1935–1938 period in which he was exterminating the Bolshevik leadership and executing nearly three-quarters of a million ordinary people. In attendance at the October session were a new crop of regional party secretaries, most of whose predecessors had been put to death. Stalin delivered to his apprehensive audience a remarkable soliloquy. He began by speculating that supporters of Trotsky and Bukharin had numbered no more than forty thousand:

This chilling off-the-cuff remark, made at a routine Politburo meeting, reveals Stalin’s mind-set. His annihilation of the party leaders was not necessary and was perhaps even a mistake. But no harm was done. Stalin was pleased they were so easy to replace.

Special to the Hoover Digest.

Available from the Hoover Press is Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives, by Paul R. Gregory. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

Paul Gregory, a Hoover Institution research fellow, holds an endowed professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, Texas, and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin.