1036 Ch. 25 • Economic Depression and Dictatorship

1927, the Central Committee, with Stalin completely in charge, voted to
expel Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Communist Party and refused to pub­
lish Lenin’s “Political Testament,” which had suggested that Stalin be
replaced as general secretary.

Five-Year Plans

Stalin believed that socialism could not be fully implemented until the
Soviet Union had a stronger industrial base. Then an expanded proletariat
would provide a larger base for Soviet Communism. After purging the Left
Opposition, he then openly favored their plan of accelerated industrializa­
tion. This would be paid for by extracting more resources from the peas­
antry. In 1928 and 1929, Stalin resumed the forced requisitioning of
“surpluses” and expropriated the land of wealthier peasants, the “kulaks.”
When this led to growing peasant opposition, he took the next step in
1930: the forced collectivization of agriculture—the elimination of private
ownership of land and animals. The Five-Year Plan marked a complete
abandonment of Lenin’s New Economic Policy.
Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) objected to a policy of renewed requisi­
tioning and immediate collectivization on the grounds that it would greatly
undermine peasant support for the regime. The result would ultimately be
to slow down rather than speed up industrialization. In 1928, he became
the leader of the Right Opposition, which also disagreed with Stalin’s com­
plete abandonment of the principle of collective leadership, thus fortifying
Stalin’s personal authority. Stalin accused Bukharin of trying to surrender
to “capitalist elements.” By the end of 1930, Stalin had purged the Right
Opposition from the party. With both the Left Opposition and the Right
Opposition out of the way, the long dictatorship of Joseph Stalin really began.
Bukharin was executed in 1938.
In formulating his Five-Year Plan, Stalin sought to take advantage of
social tensions in Soviet society. He knew that workers believed that mater­
ial progress was not coming fast enough and that they blamed peasants and
smug bureaucrats. Stalin wanted to inspire workers to storm the “fortress”
of remaining inequalities in Soviet society. He used the rhetoric of class
struggle as a means of mobilizing effort, trying to turn workers against kulaks
and “bourgeois” managers and technical specialists.
The first Five-Year Plan (1928-1933) led to a bloodbath in the country­
side. Hundreds of thousands of peasants who refused to turn over their
harvests, animals, or farms were killed. An officer in the secret police told a
foreign journalist: “I am an old Bolshevik. I worked in the underground
against the tsar and then I fought in the Civil War. Did I do all that in order
that I should now surround villages with machine guns and order my men
to fire indiscriminately into crowds of peasants?” Peasants, often led by
women, resisted with determination and resourcefulness the establishment
of collective farms, the redistribution of land, or the introduction of new