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Hostile as the factional struggle thus far had been, nothing prepared—or could prepare—the country for its final act. In 1928–9, Stalin moved against what he labelled the ‘right opposition’ led by Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov (head of the Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom), and the trade unionist Mikhail Tomskii. Neither the party nor the public had reason to expect this offensive. Certainly the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 had endorsed nothing stronger than greater restrictions on the most prosperous peasants, the gradual and voluntary collectivization of agriculture, and an increased effort to develop heavy industry. The congress gave no strong signal that the party was about to scuttle NEP, yet when this final phase concluded, NEP had ended and the USSR was engulfed in class warfare.

Stalin proceeded cautiously, but as always with a strong sensitivity to the prevailing political opinion. By the late 1920s the belief that the revolution had failed to fulfil expectations of 1917 became widespread in Soviet society; a renewed socialist radicalism pervaded the Central Committee and many rank-and-file communists as well. The population outside the party deeply resented the privileges still accorded to managers, engineers, and technical personnel a full decade after Red October. The fact that such a large proportion of state officials were neither workers nor peasants provided an additional irritant. Many also believed that kulaks (the pejorative term for the most prosperous peasants) were withholding their grain from the market in an economy of scarcity. And everywhere one encountered bitterness and jealousy towards those who had used NEP to enrich themselves.

Stalin did not create this mood or control it, but he knew how to exploit it. His first target was a shortage of grain. Marketings by the end of 1927 were down 20 per cent from the previous year. Due to low prices being paid by the state, peasants with a surplus simply held it back in the hope of better terms, used it to fatten livestock for slaughter, diverted it to the illegal production of grain alcohol, or in some cases shifted to planting more profitable industrial crops. These factors, compounded by poor harvests in several areas, accounted for the drop. Stalin, however, placed the blame elsewhere. On a three-week tour of Siberia that began in mid-January 1928, he repeatedly declared the same culprits to be greedy kulaks and local officials too lenient in dealing with them.

He also fanned class hostilities in industry. In March 1928, at Stalin’s personal invitation, the state initiated a show trial of fifty engineers, the first of several against the ‘bourgeois specialists’. Stalin made the class underpinnings of this Shakhty affair, as it became known, the main theme in a speech to the party in April 1928. The defendants, primarily men who had held responsible posts under tsarism and three Germans working under state contracts, were charged with sabotaging coal-mining in the vital Donets basin and conspiring with foreign capitalists. The Shakhty Trial, held in May-July, became a mass spectacle. Newspapers prominently featured the proceedings and sought to intensify class antagonisms.

The General Secretary broadened his assault on the right opposition. In the second half of 1928, Bukharin worried that Stalin would use the power of the Secretariat to replace the editorial staffs of important national publications with his own appointees. And that is precisely what he did. By the end of the year he had also replaced the leading officials in the Moscow branch of the party and in the national trade-union organizations, both of which had previously eluded his control. In February 1929, Stalin led a Politburo attack on Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii for factionalism; the denunciation came into full public view in August. Bukharin was removed from the Politburo in November 1929; Rykov and Tomskii would suffer the same fate in 1930.

This was not, however, merely an exercise in power politics: vital policy issues played a significant role in the outcome. When he made public the specific charges against the ‘right deviation’ in 1929, Stalin accused his rivals of an excessive and non-socialist sympathy for independent economic development. His own formula therefore called for a more rapid, centrally planned, and avowedly ideological transformation to pure socialism. Against detractors who considered its high quotas and objectives unrealistic, Stalin sponsored the First Five-Year Plan in April 1929 (declared retroactively to have begun in October 1928). Its emphasis on accelerated development of heavy industry was the direct converse of Bukharin’s call for a gradual transition and non-centralized endeavours. With his role as party leader secure, in late 1929 Stalin pressed for the immediate collectivization of agriculture and liquidation of the kulaks as a class.