Another view of Stalin (30 page)

Sabotage in Kazakhstan

Since Littlepage  visited so many mining regions, he was able to notice that this form of bitter class struggle, industrial sabotage, had developed all over the Soviet Union.

Here is how he described what he saw in Kazakhstan between 1932 and 1937, the year of the purge.

`(In October 1932,) An SOS had been sent out from the famous Ridder lead-zinc mines in Eastern Kazakstan, near the Chinese border ....

`(I was instructed) to take over the mines as chief engineer, and to apply whatever methods I considered best. At the same time the Communist managers apparently received instructions to give me a free hand and all possible assistance.

`The Government had spent large sums of money on modern American machinery and equipment for these mines, as for almost all others in Russia at that time .... But ... the engineers had been so ignorant of this equipment and the workmen so careless and stupid in handling any kind of machinery that much of these expensive importations were ruined beyond repair.'

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Littlepage  and Bess,  op. cit. , pp. 106--107.

`Two of the younger Russian engineers there impressed me as particularly capable, and I took a great deal of pains to explain to them how things had gone wrong before, and how we had managed to get them going along the right track again. It seemed to me that these young fellows, with the training I had been able to give them, could provide the leadership necessary to keep the mines operating as they should.'

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Ibid. , p. 111.

`The Ridder mines ... had gone on fairly well for two or three years after I had reorganized them in 1932. The two young engineers who had impressed me so favorably had carried out the instructions I had left them with noteworthy success ....

`Then an investigating commission had appeared from Alma Ata ...\ similar to the one sent to the mines at Kalata. From that time on, although the same engineers had remained in the mines, an entirely different system was introduced throughout, which any competent engineer could have foretold would cause the loss of a large part of the ore body in a few months. They had even mined pillars which we had left to protect the main working shafts, so that the ground close by had settled ....

`(T)he engineers of whom I had spoken were no longer at work in the mines when I arrived there in 1937, and I understood they had been arrested for alleged complicity in a nation-wide conspiracy to sabotage Soviet industries which had been disclosed in a trial of leading conspirators in January.

`When I had submitted my report I was shown the written confessions of the engineers I had befriended in 1932. They admitted that they had been drawn into a conspiracy against the Stalin rйgime by opposition Communists who convinced them that they were strong enough to overthrow Stalin and his associates and take over control of the Soviet Government. The conspirators proved to them, they said, that they had many supporters among Communists in high places. These engineers, although they themselves were not Communists, decided they would have to back one side or the other, and they picked the losing side.

`According to their confessions, the `investigating commission' had consisted of conspirators, who traveled around from mine to mine lining up supporters. After they had been persuaded to join the conspiracy the engineers at Ridder had taken my written instructions as the basis for wrecking the mines. They had deliberately introduced methods which I had warned against, and in this way had brought the mines close to destruction.'

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Ibid. , pp. 112--114.

`I never followed the subtleties of political ideas and man uvres .... (But) I am firmly convinced that Stalin and his associates were a long time getting round to the discovery that disgruntled Communist revolutionaries were the most dangerous enemies they had ....

`My experience confirms the official explanation which, when it is stripped of a lot of high-flown and outlandish verbiage, comes down to the simple assertion that `outs' among the Communists conspired to overthrow the `ins', and resorted to underground conspiracy and industrial sabotage because the Soviet system has stifled all legitimate means for waging a political struggle.

`This Communist feud developed into such a big affair that many non-Communists were dragged into it, and had to pick one side or the other .... Disgruntled little persons of all kinds were in a mood to support any kind of underground opposition movement, simply because they were discontented with things as they stood.'

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Ibid. , pp. 274--275.

Pyatakov in Berlin

During the January 1937 Trial, Pyatakov,  the old Trotskyist,  was convicted as the most highly placed person responsible of industrial sabotage. In fact, Littlepage  actually had the opportunity to see Pyatakov  implicated in clandestine activity. Here is what he wrote:

`In the spring of 1931 ..., Serebrovsky  ... told me a large purchasing commission was headed for Berlin, under the direction of Yuri Piatakoff,  who ... was then the Vice-Commissar of Heavy Industry ....

`I ... arrived in Berlin at about the same time as the commission ....

`Among other things, the commission had put out bids for several dozen mine-hoists, ranging from one hundred to one thousand horse-power. Ordinarily these hoists consist of drums, shafting, beams, gears, etc., placed on a foundation of I- or H-beams.

`The commission had asked for quotations on the basis of pfennigs per kilogramme. Several concerns put in bids, but there was a considerable difference --- about five or six pfennigs per kilogramme --- between most of the bids and those made by two concerns which bid lowest. The difference made me examine the specifications closely, and I discovered that the firms which had made the lowest bids had substituted cast-iron bases for the light steel required in the original specifications, so that if their bids had been accepted the Russians would have actually paid more, because the cast-iron base would be so much heavier than the lighter steel one, but on the basis of pfennigs per kilogramme they would appear to pay less.

`This seemed to be nothing other than a trick, and I was naturally pleased to make such a discovery. I reported my findings to the Russian members of the commission with considerable self-satisfaction. To my astonishment the Russians were not at all pleased. They even brought considerable pressure upon me to approve the deal, telling me I had misunderstood what was wanted ....

`I ... wasn't able to understand their attitude ....

`It might very well be graft, I thought.'

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Ibid. , pp. 95--96.

During his trial, Pyatakov  made the following declarations to the tribunal:

`In 1931 I was in Berlin of official business .... In the middle of the summer of 1931 Ivan Nikitich Smirnov  told me in Berlin that the Trotskyite  fight against the Soviet government and the Party leadership was being renewed with new vigour, that he --- Smirnov  --- had had an interview in Berlin with Trotsky's  son, Sedov,  who on Trotsky's  instruction gave him a new line ....

`Smirnov  ... conveyed to me that Sedov  wanted very much to see me ....

`I agreed to this meeting ....

`Sedov  said ... that there was being formed, or already been formed ... a Trotskyite  centre .... The possibility was being sounded of restoring the united organization with the Zinovievites. 

`Sedov  also said that he knew for a fact the Rights also, in the persons of Tomsky,  Bukharin  and Rykov,  had not laid down their arms, that they had only quietened down temporarily, and that the necessary connections should be established with them too ....

`Sedov  said that only one thing was required of me, namely that I should place as many orders as possible with two German firms, Borsig and Demag, and that he, Sedov,  would arrange to receive the necessary sums from them, bearing in mind that I would not be particularly exacting as to prices. If this were deciphered it was clear that the additions to prices that would be made on the Soviet orders would pass wholly or in part into Trotsky's  hands for his counter-revolutionary purposes.'

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People's Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R. Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite  Centre (Moscow, 1937), pp. 21--27.

Littlepage  made the following comment:

`This passage in Piatakoff's  confession is a plausible explanation, in my opinion, of what was going on in Berlin in 1931, when my suspicions were roused because the Russians working with Piatakoff  tried to induce me to approve the purchase of mine-hoists which were not only too expensive, but would have been useless in the mines for which they were intended. I had found it hard to believe that these men were ordinary grafters .... But they had been seasoned political conspirators before the Revolution, and had taken risks of the same degree for the sake of their so-called cause.'

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Littlepage and Bess,  op. cit. , p. 102.

Sabotage in Magnitogorsk

Another American engineer, John Scott,  who worked at Magnitogorsk, recorded similar events in his book Behind the Urals. When describing the 1937 Purge, he wrote that there was serious, sometimes criminal negligence on the part of the people responsible. The machines at Magnitogorsk were deliberately sabotaged by ex-kulaks who had become workers. A bourgeois engineer, Scott  analyzed the purge as follows:

`Many people in Magnitogorsk, arrested and indicted for political crimes, were just thieves, embezzlers, and bandits ....'

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Scott,  op. cit. , p. 184.

`The purge struck Magnitogorsk in 1937 with great force. Thousands were arrested ....

`The October Revolution earned the enmity of the old aristocracy, the officers of the old Czarist army and of the various White armies, State employees from pre-war days, business men of all kinds, small landlords, and kulaks. All of these people had ample reason to hate the Soviet power, for it had deprived them of something which they had before. Besides being internally dangerous, these men and women were potentially good material for clever foreign agents to work with ....

`Geographical conditions were such that no matter what kind of government was in power in the Soviet Union, poor, thickly populated countries like Japan and Italy and aggressive powers like Germany would leave no stone unturned in their attempts to infiltrate it with their agents, in order to establish their organizations and assert their influence .... These agents bred purges ....

`A large number of spies, saboteurs, and fifth-columnists were exiled or shot during the purge; but many more innocent men and women were made to suffer.'

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Ibid. , pp. 188--189.

The trial of the Bukharinist social-democratic group

The February 1937 decision to purge

Early in 1937, a crucial meeting of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee took place. It decided that a purge was necessary and how it should be carried out. Stalin subsequently published an important document. At the time of the plenum, the police had gathered sufficient evidence to prove that Bukharin  was aware of the conspiratorial activities of the anti-Party groups unmasked during the trials of Zinoviev  and Pyatakov.  Bukharin  was confronted with these accusations during the plenum. Unlike the other groups, Bukharin's  group was at the very heart of the Party and his political influence was great.

Some claim that Stalin's report sounded the signal that set off `terror' and `arbitrary criminality'. Let us look at the real contents of this document.

His first thesis claimed that lack of revolutionary vigilance and political naпvetй had spread throughout the Party. Kirov's  murder was the first serious warning, from which not all the necessary conclusions had been drawn. The trial of Zinoviev  and the Trotskyists  revealed that these elements were ready to do anything to destroy the rйgime. However, economic successes had created within the Party a feeling of self-satisfaction and victory. Cadres had forgotten capitalist encirclement and the increasing bitterness of the class struggle at the international level. Many had become submerged by little management questions and no longer preoccupied themselves with the major lines of national and international struggle.

Stalin said:

`Comrades, from the reports and the debates on these reports heard at this Plenum it is evident that we are dealing with the following three main facts.

`First, the wrecking, diversionists and espionage work of the agents of foreign countries, among who, a rather active role was played by the Trotskyites,  affected more or less all, or nearly all, our organisations --- economic, administrative and Party.

`Second, the agents of foreign countries, among them the Trotskyites,  not only penetrated into our lower organisations, but also into a number of responsible positions.

`Third, some of our leading comrades, at the centre and in the districts, not only failed to discern the real face of these wreckers, diversionists, spies and assassins, but proved to be so careless, complacent and naive that not infrequently they themselves helped to promote agents of foreign powers to responsible positions.'

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