The Politics of Crisis: Economy, Ethnicity, and Trotskyism in Belorussia

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, 1 (Winter 2014): 49–74.

Articles

The Politics of Crisis

Economy, Ethnicity, and Trotskyism in Belorussia

Andrew Sloin

Following the expulsion of Lev Trotskii, Grigorii Zinovév, and Lev Kamenev from the party ranks during the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, the Belorussian Communist Party (KPB) undertook a sweeping campaign to wipe out vestiges of “Trotskyist” opposition in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Across Belorussia, the KPB organized mass meetings to draw oppositionists into open debate and force them to recant their ideas or face expulsion. Records of these proceedings reveal an unmistakable pattern. In Minsk, 144 party members voted against or abstained from voting on a resolution supporting the expulsion of Trotskii and Zinovév from the party; of these, 116 were Jews.1 In Vitebsk, Jewish party members accounted for 55 of 72 identified oppositionists.2 In Bobruisk, 46 of the 49 party members opposed to the expulsion of the opposition leaders were Jews.3 In total, some 326 party members in Minsk, Vitebsk, Bobruisk, and Gomel´ abstained from voting or voted against the expulsion of the opposition leaders and/or the theses supporting the Five-Year Plan and collectivization. Of these, 264 (81 percent) were Jews. Ultimately, of the 36 party members excluded from the KPB as particularly recalcitrant oppositionists, 23 were Jews.4

For their helpful critiques, dedication, and careful thought, I thank the Kritika editorial staff and the anonymous reviewers of the original submission. I am also indebted to my fellow contributors to this forum, as well as Zvi Gitelman, Nancy Sinkoff, Brian Horowitz, Mark Loeffler, Jason Dawsey, Elizabeth Heath, and the participants in the Chicago Critical Historical Studies conference in December 2011 for their invaluable feedback. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Richard Hellie. 1 Natsional’nyi arkhiv Respubliki Belarus´ (NARB) f. 4-P (Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia), op. 5, d. 656, ll. 21–23, 40–42 (lists of party members voting for opposition, compiled by okrug party committees for the Central Committee of the KPB). 2 Ibid., ll. 4–6, 13–14. 3 Ibid., ll. 60–62. 4 For a list of the excluded, see ibid., ll. 30, 167.

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The marked concentration of Jews among the supporters of the United Opposition in Belorussia suggests two commonsensical explanations. First, it is possible that Jewish party members gravitated toward the opposition out of a sense of ethnic solidarity. Perhaps it was “natural” that in Belorussia, where Jews constituted half of the urbanized population and the most influential nontitular nationality, Jewish party members should have sided with the “Jewish” triumvirate of Trotskii, Zinovév, and Kamenev.5 Second, antisemitism in the party mainstream may have driven Jewish members into the oppositional camp. Indeed, records of the anti-Trotskyist campaigns in Belorussia appear to lend credence to Trotskii’s assertions that antisemitism played a critical role in the campaign against the opposition.6 In either case, the prevalence of Jews in the opposition ranks seems to suggest a struggle defined by nationality.7

A radically different picture emerges, however, if one turns from the question of nationality to that of the occupations of the accused oppositionists. while students, teachers, clerks, bookkeepers, administrators, and white-collar workers (sluzhashchie) made up one-quarter of the identified oppositionists, workers “from the bench” (ot stanka) formed the vast bulk of Jewish oppositionists. Shoemakers (37) constituted the single largest occupational group among the accused, followed by sizable contingents of tailors and seamstresses (29), leatherworkers (26), and woodworkers and carpenters (25). A dozen bristle makers, eight typesetters, six housepainters, three locksmiths, and assorted joiners, bakers, brewers, slaughterers, milliners, furriers, mechanics, metalworkers, and unskilled laborers rounded out the ranks.8 The high concentration of shoemakers, tailors, seamstresses, and leatherworkers among the opposition suggests a pattern familiar in the history of labor radicalism in Europe: the opposition seemed to draw its strongest support from industries resting on the fault line separating petty manufacturing from full-blown industrial production.9

The apparent dichotomy between occupation (a social category) and nationality (a category of constructed identity) embodied in the oppositionists

5 Isaac Deutscher, for example, stressed the role that the “Jewishness” of the leading oppositionists played in the party struggles (The Prophet Unarmed [London: Verso, 2003]). 6 Leon Trotsky, Stalin, vol. 2: The Revolutionary in Power (London: Panther Books, 1969), 224–25. 7 The primacy of nationality as an analytic tool for interpreting the politics of the Soviet periphery is stressed in Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 8 Culled from okrug reports in NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656. 9 For one particularly pertinent example, see Eric Hobsbawm and Joan wallach Scott, “Political Shoemakers,” Past and Present, no. 89 (1980): 86–114.

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of Belorussia reflects a dichotomy prevalent in studies of worker opposition in the Soviet Union. Social historians have generally stressed that worker opposition emerged as a direct response to the state-driven attempt to intensify the pace and scale of industrial production.10 According to a recent variation, the opposition drew its primary support from workers who expressed their “class consciousness” by opposing the new Stalinist regime of industrial rationalization and forcible accumulation.11 Scholars embracing postmodern theoretical approaches, in contrast, have questioned the primacy of the social, challenging the social historical emphasis placed on economic and industrial policy. Igal Halfin, most notably, has argued that the increasingly violent campaign against “the Opposition” should be understood as the product of the totalizing, Manichean language of politics endemic to the Russian Revolution itself.12 The quasi-religious language of Bolshevik redemption necessitated the construction of existential enemies possessed of debased souls in need of reformation at best and, at worst, annihilation. Ultimately, it was not substantive policy disputes (the “why” of Soviet history) but rather the logic of “quasi-Messianic” political rhetoric and “language games” (the “what and the how” of Soviet history) that drove internal party fighting toward a prefigured, fratricidal eschaton.13

The case of the opposition in Belorussia poses direct challenges to Halfin’s provocative thesis. First, insofar as Halfin asserts the primacy of a universalizing discourse of political purity, the opposition should have logically emerged as a socially general phenomenon, cutting across social and demographic divides. Yet far from being socially general, the opposition in Belorussia was highly marked in terms of nationality and social position. Second, the concentration of workers from handiwork industries in the oppositional ranks calls into question attempts to decouple political language from the social. Simply stated, “opposition” evoked different meanings in discussions about economic policy before the Central Committee in Moscow, or among students at the Petrograd Communist University, than when deployed against

10 Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–1924: Soviet Workers and the New Communist Elite (London: Routledge, 2008); Chris ward, “The Crisis of Productivity in the New Economic Policy: Rationalization Drives and Shopfloor Responses in Soviet Cotton Mills,” and John Hatch, “The Politics of Industrial Efficiency during NEP: The 1926 rezhim ekonomii Campaign in Moscow,” in New Directions in Soviet History, ed. Stephen white (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). <PAGE RANGES FOR THESE CHAPTERS?>11 Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 227–28.12 Igal Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 27.13 Ibid., 29.

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peripheral producers directly affected by the concrete manifestations of those policies. Finally, the particular temporal dynamic of the opposition in Belorussia suggests an intrinsic relationship between political discourse and social-structural transformation. Unlike in Leningrad, where the opposition developed steadily between 1923 and 1927, the opposition in Belorussia materialized abruptly, coinciding directly with the onset of economic crisis in 1926. while “language games” did indeed develop around the concept of Trotskyism, evidence strongly suggests that this discourse was structured less by an intrinsic quasi-Messianic logic and more by concrete pressures engendered by economic crisis.

In Belorussia that crisis erupted in 1926–27. As it unfolded, the state and KPB (following Moscow) sought to overcome the problem through the intensification of labor productivity and the rationalization of production. The economic crisis brought a reconfiguration of political language that reconstrued workers’ economistic agitation against rationalization as an existential political threat, ultimately labeled as “Trotskyism.” The concept of “Trotskyism” thus served the function of driving through economic restructuring in the midst of acute economic crisis.

Far from being incidental, ethnicity proved critical to the construction of the concept of Trotskyism in Belorussia. Charges of Trotskyism fell heavily on Jewish labor because Jewish laborers constituted the vast majority of workers in industries that bore the brunt of the campaign to intensify industrial production. In this context, ethnicity entered into political language as a mechanism to further intensify industrial rationalization. By associating economic opposition with political and, ultimately, ethnic non-belonging, the language of “Trotskyism” became a mechanism for suppressing resistance to economic rationalization. In turn, ethnicity came to be reinterpreted as the ontological cause of economic deviation. The example of Trotskyism suggests that in the context of Belorussia, economy structured political language; political language, in turn, became a mechanism for reconstituting not only economy but also ethnicity.

Oppositions EverywherePolitical opposition, real and imagined, was purported to be a threat from the first days of Bolshevik power in Belorussia.14 In the earliest months of Soviet rule, party organs inveighed against the Belorussian Rada, the Belorussian

14 The Red Army recaptured Minsk from Polish forces and reestablished Bolshevik rule in July 1920.


Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, and other nationalist opponents.15 As the KPB consolidated power, attention focused increasingly on specifically Jewish political opposition. Throughout the 1920s, the Jewish Sections (evsektsii) campaigned tirelessly against the influence of Zionism on the so-called “Jewish street.”16 In the mid-1920s, the Central Committee of the Party launched a broad campaign to eradicate vestiges of political and philosophical allegiance to the Bund, the leading prerevolutionary Jewish Socialist party.17

Jewish political opposition constituted a conceivable threat in Belorussia for three seemingly logical reasons. First, Jews composed a significant, politically active portion of the population. According to the 1926 census, the 407,000 Jewish citizens made up the largest nontitular population in Belorussia.18 Jews formed pluralities or majorities in countless small towns (shtetlekh, mestechki) and in the major cities of Minsk, Bobruisk, Gomel´, Slutsk, and Vitebsk. Although numbering roughly 8 percent of the total population, Jews formed “overrepresented” majorities among nonagricultural laborers, constituting an estimated 75 percent of all artisans, 90 percent of all kustari (cottage producers), and half of all unionized, nonagricultural producers.19 Jewish workers formed 98 percent of the 1,626-member Needleworkers Union, 83 percent of the Printers Union, and 74 percent of the Leatherworkers Union.20 Second, Jews made up a considerable portion of the Bolshevik party ranks. According to a 1921 evsektsii report, some 60 percent of all Bolshevik party members from the 26 largest industrial undertakings in Minsk were Jews; Jews likewise constituted 84 percent of all party members

15 For the repression of Belorussian nationalist political movements, see T. S. Prot´ko, Stanovlenie sovetskoi totalitarnoi sistemy v Belarusi (1917–1941 gg.) (Minsk: Tesei, 2002), 38–51.16 For a broad overview, see Ziva Galili, “Zionism in the Early Soviet State: Between Legality and Persecution,” in Revolution, Repression, and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experiment, ed. Zvi Gitelman and Ya’akov Roi (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).17 The best work about the evsektsii remains Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPU, 1917–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). For an excellent study of Jewish political life in Vitebsk province, see Arkadii Zel´tser, Evrei sovetskoi provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki, 1917–1941 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2006).18 Gershon Hundert, ed., The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 140. Out of a total population of just below 5 million people.19 “Partrabota sredi kustarei i kustarok,” undated, early 1926, NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 204, l. 44. Jewish workers made up 55 percent (7,367 of 13,363) of the members of “productive” unions: the metalworkers, woodworkers, needleworkers, food producers, leatherworkers, chemical workers, printers, and builders unions. In total, Jews made up 36 percent of all trade union members in the republic (18,979 of 52,466 unionists). Statistics from a 1921 report of trade unionists by nationality (NARB f. 265 [Central Soviet of the Trade Unions of the BSSR], op. 1, d. 666, l. 13).20 Ibid. <2 different sources mentioned in n. 19. Which one does “ibid.” refer to?>

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from the main Soviet administrative bodies in Minsk.21 Although the high percentage of Jews in the party ranks would be “corrected” over the decade, Jews continued to constitute one-quarter of the total party membership in 1927.22 Finally, of those Jews who entered the Bolshevik Party, a significant number began their political lives as members of specifically Jewish political parties. The cities of Belorussia had been prerevolutionary strongholds of the Bund.23 Between 1917 and 1921, hundreds of left-wing Bundists and Labor Zionists (members of Poalei Tsion) went over to the Bolsheviks. According to one estimate, former Bundists accounted for some 9 percent of the 3,998 declared party members in February 1924.24 At a minimum, they composed a sizable share of the 1,253 Jewish members of the KPB in early 1924.25

Far from being restricted to the party ranks, Bundists appeared to constitute an acute threat on the shop floor. Indeed, the same industries that previously formed the core of support for the Bund reemerged as volatile sites of labor unrest during the early years of the New Economic Policy (NEP). wild fluctuations in employment rates and wages during the NEP era engendered widespread dislocation, anger, and worker militancy, particularly in industries producing consumer goods for the NEP markets.26 when labor disturbances broke out in workshops across Belorussia during the second half of 1923, activists in the needleworkers and leatherworkers unions blamed renewed militancy on falling real wages and unemployment due to the “scissors crisis”

21 “Obzor deiatelńosti Glavbiuro evsektsii pri TsB KPB,” no date but early 1921, NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 228, ll. 19–19 ob.22 Of approximately 25,000 total party members in 1927, 6,012 were Jews. See Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 79.23 For early Bundist activity in Belorussia, see G. Aronson et al., Di geshichte fun Bund, 4 vols. (New York: Unzer tsayt, 1966); M. Rafes, Ocherki po istorii “Bunda” (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1923); and N. A. Bukhbinder, Istoriia evreiskogo rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii (Leningrad: Akademicheskoe izdatel´stvo, 1925). On political militancy in the Jewish working class, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970).24 B. Markiianov, Ukreplenie edinstva riadov Kommunisticheskoi partii Belorussii (1921–1937 gg.) (Minsk: Belarus´, 1970), 77–78. 25 NARB f. 4-P, op. 10 (Evsektsii), d. 5, l. 11 (Evsektsiia Glavbiuro report, March 1923–March 1924).26 Unrest mirrored the general upheaval of the NEP, captured in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, Russia in the Era of NEP (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); william Chase, Workers, Society, and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918–1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Lewis Siegelbaum and Ronald Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Diane Koenker, “Factory Tales: Narratives of Industrial Relations in the Transition to Nep,” Russian Review 55, 3 (1996): 384–411.


that paralyzed the economy.27 At the other end of the spectrum, many party activists stressed the fundamentally political nature of such opposition. For example, Samuel´ Agurskii (then a minor evsektsii functionary) attributed strike agitation at the Vitebsk bristle-making factory in early 1924 to “Bundist–Menshevik tendencies” within the labor force.28 Evsektsii activists routinely blamed social unrest on a myriad of alleged enemies, including Mensheviks, representatives of the American Relief Agency, petty bourgeois nationalists, practitioners of “clericalism,” and, above all, Zionists.29 Glaringly absent from the list of enemies, however, was the group that constituted the primary political threat in the centers of Russian politics during the 1923–24 period: the Left Opposition.

The evsektsii were hardly mistaken in ignoring the threat posed by the Left Opposition. Compared to Moscow and Leningrad, where significant groups of intellectuals, functionaries, students, and workers lined up behind Trotskii and the signatories of the “Platform of the 46,” support for the Left Opposition remained marginal in Belorussia during the 1923–24 period.30 Central Control Commission (TsKK) records from the 1924 Party Review, launched to eliminate “nonproletarian elements” from the party ranks, excluded some 1,018 individuals across Belorussia.31 Particular cells—most notably that of the Belorussian State University (BGU) in Minsk—came under scrutiny as hotbeds of support for the Left Opposition.32 One leading historian claimed that the party excluded 65 members across Belorussia for support of the Left Opposition during the period of the review.33 Yet unlike 27 On the “scissors crisis,” a term coined by Trotskii to describe the detrimental phenomenon of rising prices in industry alongside falling prices in agriculture, see E. H. Carr, The Interregnum (New York: Macmillan, 1954). For one specific episode, see “Zaiavlenie prezidiuma pravleniia Mingubotdela kozhevnikov,” 6 March 1923 (NARB f. 265, op. 1, d. 1178, l. 11–12).28 “Doklad instruktora Glavbiuro evsektsii pri TsK KPB T. Agurskogo o poezdke v Vitebskii raion,” May 1924, NARB f. 4-P, op. 10, d. 5, l. 74.29 See, e.g., the report from the July 1924 evsektsii conference on political tendencies among kustari, which stressed the danger posed by each of the above-stated groups (“Protokol soveshchaniia sekretarei evsektsii pri Okruzhkomakh KPB,” 7 July 1924, NARB f. 4-P, op. 10, d. 5, l. 140). 30 On Moscow, see Murphy, Revolution and Counter-Revolution; and Darron Hincks, “Support for the opposition in Moscow in the Party Discussion of 1923–1924,” Soviet Studies 44, 1 (1992): 137–51. On Leningrad, where the Left Opposition was considerably weaker, see Halfin, Intimate Enemies.31 “Materialy k dokladu o rabote TsKK,” 5 August 1924, NARB f. 15 [Control Commission], op. 4, d. 131, l. 22.32 Of the 16 party members excluded from the party cell of the Belorussian State University, 5 were excluded in part for their ambivalent positions during discussions about the Left Opposition (review of the BGU party cell, 4 July 1924, NARB f.15, op. 4, d. 113, ll. 113–20).33 Markiianov, Ukreplenie edinstva, 77. Based on archival evidence, the claim seems highly dubious. It is probable that Markiianov added excluded Bundists and Poalei Tsionists into

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the later period, when a coordinated anti-Trotskyist campaign was carried out across the republic, the party did not stage a systemic campaign to wipe out support for the Left Opposition. Quite to the contrary, the TsKK went so far as to send a secret memo condemning local okrug control commissions (OKK) for expelling “party members and candidates who speak in defense of Trotskyism.”34 Compared to the perceived challenge posed by Bundists and Poalei Tsionists, “Trotskyism” appeared to be a minor threat in Belorussia.35

This changed dramatically two years later, with the outbreak of a new economic crisis in the summer of 1926. The crisis that swept away the economic institutions of the NEP brought about a profound transformation of political discourse across the Soviet territories. In Belorussia, the crisis fused multifarious forms of worker opposition into a singular political specter, labeled retroactively as Trotskyism. That Trotskii—erstwhile champion of the “mass conscription of labor” and fierce critic of the workers’ opposition of 1920–21—came to be associated with worker opposition in Belorussia suggests the profundity of the political realignment unleashed by the crisis.36

Economic Crisis and the Invention of the OppositionThe causes of the crisis that began to unfold in mid-1926—which can be sketched here only briefly—were multifarious and driven by policy decisions far removed from Minsk.37 On the one hand, the crisis emerged from the realm of production, the result of saturated industrial capacity and outdated plant.38 On the other, the crisis had a pronounced monetary dimension.39 Following a brief period of restabilization brought about by the full introduction of the gold-backed chervonets currency in 1924, inflationary tendencies resurfaced abruptly in mid-1926. The collapse of international grain prices, on which the stability of the chervonets depended, depleted gold reserves, intensifying his calculation. He is alone among Soviet-era Belorussian historians in claiming significant support for the Trotskyist opposition prior to 1926.34 “Circular from the TsKK to all okrug control commissions and party organizations,” 6 January 1925, NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 53, l. 23.35 Former Bundists and Poalei Tsionists were far more numerous, and faced far greater scrutiny during the party review, than Left Oppositionists. Former Bundists and Poalei Tsionists made up roughly a third of the 150 Jewish party members expelled from the party in Minsk alone.36 On labor militarization and the “Dictatorship of Industry,” see Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 183.37 For a fuller treatment of the crisis, see Oscar Sanchez’s contribution to this issue.38 For an overview of Soviet industrial policy, see E. H. Carr and R. w. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1969–78); and Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).39 The monetary dimension was stressed by Arthur Arnold, Credit and Money in Soviet Russia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937).


inflationary pressures.40 By mid-1926, prices for manufactured goods began to rise, especially on the private market, where prices increased an estimated 117 percent from 1926 to early 1929.41 workers, in turn, began to call for wage increases to offset price increases.42 Despite the rhetorical defense of monetary stability, the state began to use the printing press to meet budgetary demands and fuel economic expansion, effectively abandoning the brief experiment with the gold standard in March 1926.43 Expansionary fiscal policies intensified inflationary pressures. within state-run institutions, price controls provided added incentives to dump devalued currency for items of stable value.44 The buying up of goods created widespread shortages, as rapidly expanding supplies of money chased increasingly scarce goods. By late 1927, the circulation of goods slowed dramatically and basic commodities disappeared from shelves; by late 1928, the state was forced to reintroduce widespread rationing.45

It was against the background of this protracted economic crisis that the final political struggle between the Central Committee and the United Opposition unfolded. Despite acrimonious debate, both camps embraced industrialization as the key to overcoming the economic rupture.46 From October 1926 to the end of 1929, state expenditures for the expansion of fixed capital more than doubled (jumping from 485 million rubles to 1.165 billion).47 while agreeing on the necessity of industrialization, the opposing camps fell out violently over who would pay for what Evgenii Preobrazhenskii 40 On the collapse of grain prices beginning in 1926, see Charles B. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 61–65.41 Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 2:2, 691. Private prices for industrial goods increased by 28 percent from October 1927 to October 1929; agricultural prices increased by more than 232 percent during this period (Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 71–72). 42 Franklin D. Holzman, “Soviet Inflationary Pressures, 1928–1957: Causes and Cures,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 74, 2 (1960): 167–88.43 Means of payment grew by some 6.6 percent from 1925 to 1926, jumped an additional 17 percent in 1927, and rose another 25 percent the following year (Arnold, Credit and Money in Soviet Russia, 256–57). Meanwhile, officially Moscow refused to acknowledge the move away from gold. See Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1:2, 778. For a fascinating account of the demise of the gold standard, see Yuri Goland, “Currency Regulation in the NEP Period,” Europe–Asia Studies 46, 8 (1994): 1267–82.44 Simon Johnson and Peter Temin, “The Macroeconomics of NEP,” Economic History Review 46, 4 (1993): 750–67; V. N. Bandera, “The New Economic Policy (NEP) as Economic System,” Journal of Political Economy 71, 3 (1963): 265–79, esp. 274.45 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “After NEP: The Fate of NEP Entrepreneurs, Small Traders, and Artisans in the ‘Socialist Russia’ of the 1930s,” Russian History 13, 2–3 (1986): 187–234.46 R. w. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. wheatcroft, eds., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerty Press, 1994), 14.47 Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 70.

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labeled “primitive socialist accumulation.” Preobrazhenskii and the United Opposition favored “squeezing” the peasantry to finance industrialization, a program ultimately appropriated by Stalin with unmitigated brutality; the Stalinist bloc, then following the theories of Nikolai Bukharin, argued that industrial expansion should increase the availability of cheap consumer goods to spur consumption, restore equilibrium, and restabilize price levels.48 Placing price stability at the heart of this policy, they emphasized the need to finance industrialization though the maximum rationalization of industrial production.49

where possible, rationalization took the form of replacing outdated plant with new “labor-saving” (or, more correctly, labor-intensifying) technology. where this possibility did not yet exist, factory administrators, backed by state and party directives, drove labor to greater levels of productivity through old-fashioned means: industrial speed-ups, increased productivity norms, and the more efficient exploitation of labor time. Insofar as rationalization was intended to reduce production costs, wage policy formed an integral element; real wages were driven down by roughly 50 percent across the USSR during the first four years of the Stalin revolution.50 In 1927, the Stalin bloc sought to further intensify production through the introduction of a seven-hour workday designed to streamline production, combat unemployment, and slow wage inflation.51 Taken in sum, rationalization entailed the radical devaluation of labor, which materialized as a solution to price instability and general economic crisis.52

48 See Alexander Erlich, “Preobrazhenski and the Economics of Soviet Industrialization,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 64, 1 (1950): 57–88.49 On the relationship between intensified productivization and the Stalin revolution, see Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Productive Relations, 1928–1941 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986).50 The estimates of falling real wages—stressed in Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Janet Chapman, Real Wages in Soviet Russia since 1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); and Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)—have been accepted by Carr, Davies, and Filtzer. The claim has been challenged in Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Allen argued that real wages increased by about one-third over the 1930s if one factors in the movement of peasants into the industrial labor force.51 Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 11. 52 By devaluation of labor, I am following David Harvey, who argued that economic crises are resolved in part when one sector proves capable of forcing the pain of devaluation onto a different sector of the economy. See David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2007), 200–3.


In Belorussia, the implementation of rationalization exhibited this double-sided logic. when leading officials spoke of the need to rationalize production, they stressed the ideal of intensified production through expanded mechanization. A March 1927 report from the Belorussian Sovnarkom stressed the need for a two- to threefold increase in industrial investment to rationalize production.53 Building new factories and refurbishing outdated ones would allow Belorussian enterprises to “keep pace with the industry of the entire [Soviet] Union and offer competitive prices on the all-union market.”54 Capital investment for new and refurbished plants doubled between 1925/26 and 1926/27 and quadrupled again the following fiscal year.55

Yet the emphasis on industrial investment masked the other side of rationalization, which entailed a particularly selective process of labor devaluation. As consumer prices began to rise noticeably in 1926, workers in Belorussia agitated for wage increases to keep pace with inflation. Soviet and party organs in Minsk, following the Central Committee in Moscow, initially insisted that wage increases be predicated on proportionate increases in industrial productivity.56 Under pressure from the United Opposition, the Central Committee in Moscow acquiesced and agreed to increases in August 1926.57 In October, the Belorussian Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) followed suit, but with telling discrepancies in rates of increase. In a number of industries—including the linen, chemical, and distilling industries—the Sovnarkom ordered wage increases ranging from 10 to 12 percent; in the sewing, leatherworking, and metalworking industries, however, increases were to be capped at 3 percent.58 The discrepancy reflected a broader pattern: between 1924/25 and 1926/27, wage increases significantly outpaced increases in industrial productivity in the metalworking, minerals, food production, and paper industries; by contrast, productivity increases

53 “O ratsionalizatsii i sokrashchenii sovetskogo apparata v sviazi s provedeniem rezhima ekonomii,” from TsK Biuro, 5 March 1927, NARB f. 4-P, op. 3, D. 25, ll. 136–50, esp. 138–40.54 Ibid., l. 139.55 From 8,130 million rubles in 1925/26 to 15,105 million in 1926/27 (F. S. Martinkevich and V. I. Dritsa, eds., Razvitie ekonomiki Belorussii v 1921–1927 gg. [Minsk: Nauka i tekhnika, 1973], 72). For the next year, see F. S. Martinkevich, Ekonomika sovetskoi Belorussii, 1917–1967 (Minsk: Nauka i tekhnika, 1967), 151.56 Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1:2, 488–91.57 Ibid., 488.58 See the instructions of 27 October 1926 from Sovnarkom BSSR on pay increases among industrial workers, in V. N. Zhigalova et al., Industrializatsiia Belorusskoi SSR (1926–1941 gg.): Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Minsk: Belarus´, 1975), 34–35.

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outpaced wage growth in the leatherworking, shoemaking, needleworking, and woodworking industries.59

The ratcheting up of productivist pressure was intensified further by substantial investment in industrial plant.60 Beginning in mid-1926, the Belorussian state inaugurated a broad campaign to mechanize and expand industrial production. The construction of the Krasnyi Metallist machine plant in Vitebsk in the summer of 1926 was followed by the refurbishment of the Energiia metalworks in Minsk,61 matchstick factories in Borisov (Krasnaia Berezina) and Gomel´ (Vezuvii), the Dvina linen factory in Vitebsk, and the Geroi Truda paper factory in Gomel´.62 A significant portion of new construction focused on the clothing, textile, and leather industries. New mechanized garment factories were established in Vitebsk (Profintern) and Gomel´ (Gomshvei). In Minsk, a new shoemaking factory in the Nemiga shopping district reached full capacity in 1926.63 In August 1927, Minsk welcomed the opening of the brand new Bol´shevik tannery on the appropriately named Lekert Street.64 Zviada, the main party organ, celebrated the new state of the art facility, hygienic ventilation system, worker cafeteria, and 500-horsepower engine capable of powering the production of 85,000 high-quality hides per year.65

In addition to horsehides and box calf, however, the Bol´shevik factory began to produce a less conventional byproduct: Trotskyists. Over the course of 1926–28, the factories and industries that experienced the worst of the rationalization campaign became primary flashpoints of real and imagined Trotskyist opposition in Belorussia. Of the above-mentioned factories, all but

59 Between 1924/25 and 1926/27, productivity in the metalworking industry increased 119.2 percent, while wages increased 146 percent. Similar increases occurred in the mineral, food, and paper production industries. Among leatherworkers, however, productivity increased 150.9 percent, while wages increased 129.8 percent. Similar patterns existed for shoemakers (productivity 141.6 percent; wages 123.8 percent), needleworkers (productivity 233.4 percent, wages 221.4 percent), and woodworkers (productivity 143.0 percent, wages 139.5 percent). See Matrinkevich, Razvitie ekonomiki Belorussii, 84. 60 Far from constituting the antithesis of capitalism, the process mirrored and in many respects realized more fully the temporal logic of capitalist production. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).61 G. B. Budai and N. S. Orekhvo, Khronika vazhneishikh sobytii istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Belorussii, pt. 2 1919–iiun´ 1941 (Minsk: Belarus´, 1970), 184, 190.62 Martinkevich, Razvitie ekonomii Belorussii, 73.63 Ibid.64 The street was named after Hirsch Lekert, a shoemaker and Bundist “martyr” executed for attempting to assassinate the governor of Vilńa in 1902.65 “Korrespondentsiia o puske kozhevennogo zavoda v g. Minske,” Zviazda, 27 August 1927, repr. in V. N. Zhigalova et al., Industrializatsiia Belorusskoi SSR, 59.


Energiia and Dvina came to be identified as main centers of support for the United Opposition. Of the 72 identified oppositionists in Vitebsk in 1928, 17 were members of the party cell at Profintern; similarly, 16 oppositionists were members of the Metprom 3 party cell at the Krasnyi Metallist works.66 In Minsk, 23 of identified oppositionists were party members at the Bol´shevik tannery; 16 more worked at the Minsk shoe factory or the affiliated bootmaking workshop.67 In Gomel´, the Vezuvii matchstick factory and the Trud shoe factory, as well as the recently mechanized bristle-making factory, were identified as centers of opposition support in late 1927.68 As the economic crisis unfolded, the opposition gained its strongest footholds in industries subjected most intensively to the devaluation and mechanization of labor. Coincidentally or otherwise, they also tended to be industries with high concentrations of Jewish labor.

Making Workers TrotskyistsThe formation of the United Opposition alliance among Zinovév, Trotskii, and Kamenev in the spring of 1926 triggered a renewed political campaign against “antiparty” activity across the Soviet Union.69 In Belorussia, local party cells, regional party institutions, and trade unions conducted meetings throughout the summer of 1926 to warn of the danger and sniff out oppositionists. In late 1926, the campaign reached the upper echelons of the KPB in Minsk, when Sergei Mikhailovich Gessen, a leading Belorussian Bolshevik, was driven from his position as the head of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) due to his outspoken support for Trotskii. As the anti-Trotskyist offensive gained steam, the Central Committee of the KPB (TsK KPB), and particularly the okrug and central control commissions (TsKK) took the lead in ferreting out the opposition. The campaign climaxed following the expulsion of Trotskii, Zinovév, and Kamenev from the Party in December

66 NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, ll. 4–6, 13–14; TsKK report on the opposition in Vitebsk, undated, 1928, NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, ll. 105–9.67 NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, ll. 21–23, 40–42; TsKK report “Vyvody po voprosu likvidatsii Trotskistskoi oppozitsii Minskoi organizatsii,” undated, 1928, NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, l. 29.68 Report from the TsKK Belorussia to the All-Russian TsKK, filed July 1927, NARB 15-P, op. 4, d. 253, ll. 63–67; okrug KK report on the Trud shoe factory, March 1928, NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, ll. 76–77.69 On the broader campaign, see Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 273–321.

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1927, as the KPB organized mass meetings and votes throughout Belorussia to demonstrate support for the expulsions.70

Notwithstanding the broad political campaign, internal party correspondence suggests that self-understood oppositionists remained a distinctly limited group until a rather late date. In July 1927, Secretary of the Central Control Committee P. G. Vilenstovich sent an atypically frank report to Emelian Mikhailovich Iaroslavskii, the secretary of the all-union TsKK, assessing the state of the opposition across Belorussia. The report delineated two distinct forms of antiparty activity in Belorussia.71 On the one hand, Vilenstovich identified a handful of “conscious” oppositionists, drawn mostly from the intelligentsia, who carried on active political agitation against the party. Included in this group were Sergei Gessen; Fedor Tikhonovich Volvok, a university lecturer at BGU in Minsk; Ia. M. Drapkin, a museum curator in Gomel´; and several students and low-ranking party officials dispersed across the republic. On the other hand, he identified a second, much broader threat: workers with no formal ties to the opposition who nevertheless expressed increasingly sharp criticisms of party policy. These “hidden oppositionists” (skrytye oppozitsionery), for the most part “non-conscious” and “politically illiterate” workers, expressed oppositional sentiments even though they did not consciously support the United Opposition. Many had previous ties to other parties, particularly the Bund; many others came from a “petty-bourgeois–trading environment,” (meshchansko-torgovaia sreda) with strong Bundist influence. Dropping euphemisms, Vilenstovich cut to the chase: “Characteristically for these groups, particularly among former members of Jewish parties, there still appears to be hidden sympathy for the figure of Trotskii.”72

By attributing support for the opposition to latent ethnic solidarity, Vilenstovich prefigured what would ultimately become the party consensus. Yet the more nuanced sections of his report suggested a far more complicated reality, detailing a litany of worker complaints about falling wages, pressures of industrial rationalization, unemployment, and rising prices. Records from party meetings convened across Minsk during the summer of 1926 to discuss the danger of the opposition further accentuate the predominantly economic nature of worker demands. while outright support for the United Opposition remained muted, concerns over wages and rising prices

70 Records from the Central Control Commission detailing the anti-opposition campaign from mid-1927 to mid-1928, are compiled in NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, dd. 253, 254, 255, 256, 257.71 Ibid., ll. 63–73.72 Ibid., l. 65.


were rife.73 In the Minsk tannery, party activists compiled a list of worker questions to facilitate a mass meeting on the dangers of opposition; the 84 questions focused almost exclusively on economic issues. Among the workers’ questions: “why do production norms for workers increase, while wages stay at the same level?”; “Doesn’t the increasingly high cost of everything amount to an actual lowering of wages?”; “How much has unemployment increased … as a result of the ‘Regime of Economy’?”74 In the cell of the Minsk glassmaking factory Proletarii, workers called for wage increases to keep up with rising prices, while defenders of the party line argued that wage increases would only intensify inflationary pressures.75 Members of the Minsk shoemaking factory engaged in a fierce argument over falling real wages. One shoemaker, Comrade Shafer, posed a pointed question: “why,” he inquired, “did [the Party] not think about increasing wages until the opposition [raised the issue]?” Another shoemaker, Comrade Klionskii, chimed in, arguing that higher wages would stimulate production: “we would be able to purchase more, if they increased our wages.” Comrade Shneider chastised the party leadership for denying pay increases to rank-and-file workers while amply rewarding “executives” in the factory. A “few of the executives receive up to 183 rubles salary, and their wives also receive 150 rubles—from where do they get the money?” Comrade Shneider wondered. Ultimately, he drew his own conclusion: the “economic regime is always deflected onto the shoulders of the workers.”76

Low wages remained a flashpoint for worker grievances, even after the introduction of differentiated wage increases in October 1926. Overt anger remained most pronounced in industries targeted for restricted wage growth: notably, the leatherworking, shoemaking, needleworking, and woodworking industries.77 Over the course of 1927, worker grievances in these industries expanded to include broader criticisms of the rationalization and streamlining of industrial production. Increasingly, worker agitation converged with 73 Extant reports of proceedings from the Minsk okrug committee (OK) of the KPB and okrug control commission are compiled in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Minskoi oblasti (GAMO) f. 12-P (Minsk OK KPB), op. 1, d. 458.74 Questions for meeting at Minsk Tannery, undated, fall 1926, GAMO 12-P, op. 1, d 458, ll. 164–66.75 Closed meeting of the KPB of the Proletarii glassmaking factory, 10 October 1926, GAMO f. 12-P, op. 1, d. 458, l. 32 ob.76 Report of meeting on opposition at Minsk Shoemakers workshop, August 1926, GAMO f. 12-P, op. 1, d. 458, ll. 259–60.77 The wage increases of October 1926 exacerbated divisions between lower-skilled and lower-paid workers and skilled labor, with consequences similar to those outlined in Hiroaki Kuromiya, “The Crisis of Proletarian Identity in the Soviet Factory, 1928–29,” Slavic Review 44, 2 (1984): 280–97.

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criticisms of industrial policy articulated by the United Opposition, blurring the line between “conscious” and “hidden” opposition.

The relationship between industrial rationalization and the formation of the opposition was explicitly visible in the Belorussian leather industry. Throughout the mid-1920s, the industry confronted perpetual provisioning problems, episodes of overproduction followed by sharp collapses in demand, and acute volatility. In early 1927, the Belorussian Leather Administration resolved to rationalize production in Minsk. Previously, production had been dispersed over four small workshops around the city. The Leather Administration closed the small shops, opened the aforementioned Bol´shevik tannery, and consolidated production across the city. As a result, large numbers of leatherworkers were thrown out of work. Given the newly saturated labor market, wages at the new mill declined, and a hostile mood spread over the tannery. Support for the opposition within the 179-member factory party cell spiked over the summer of 1927, as workers blamed the rationalization of production for increased unemployment and falling wages, while criticizing attempts to bring about the further “compression” (uplotnenie) of labor through the introduction of the seven-hour day.78

Criticisms of industrial rationalization, the compression of labor, and the seven-hour workday reverberated across Belorussia throughout the summer of 1927. In Gomel´, party members at the Trud shoemaking factory denounced measures to rationalize production, arguing that the streamlining of production would increase unemployment.79 Bristle makers, leatherworkers, and shoemakers articulated similar concerns in Bobruisk.80 Members of the Minsk Furniture Makers’ collective blamed industrial rationalization for high rates of unemployment in the industry and worsening conditions for employed carpenters.81 At the Gomel´ needlework factory (Gomelshvei), the labor force, composed mostly of women, complained of a different effect of industrial rationalization: the construction of mechanized factories in Minsk and Vitebsk had driven down piecework rates in their non-mechanized factory, leading to widespread discontent.82 In Vitebsk, workers at the Metprom 3 metalworks forcefully criticized the proposed introduction of the 7-hour workday as a ploy to speed up the labor process and suppress wages: 78 For the OKK report to the TsKK, see NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, ll. 13–15.79 Report on Trotskyist opposition at the Trud factory, March 1928, NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, l. 76.80 Report on Trotskyist opposition in Bobruisk, undated, early 1928, NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, l. 185.81 Report on Trotskyist opposition in LesBel, undated, late 1927, NARB f.15-P, op. 4, d. 254, ll. 9–10.82 Report on Conference of women workers, June 1928, NARB f. 4-P, op. 3, d. 29, l. 728.


“It is no secret among us,” he observed, “that 30 percent work overtime” to meet production norms. Comrade Zabezhinskii, a carpenter at Metprom 3, agreed: the “seven-hour day gives us nothing; it is only agitation. we need to correctly enforce the eight-hour day.”83 Denunciations of the seven-hour day were echoed by woodworkers in Gomel´, leatherworkers in Bobruisk, and bootmakers in Minsk.84

In the midst of the deepening economic crisis, the line between worker economistic agitation and outright support for the opposition blurred, both on the shop floor and in the eyes of party regulators. workers were clearly becoming more receptive to the opposition line. One particularly revealing report from Comrade Zelenkovskii, the chairman of the local OKK in Bobruisk, noted, that “until July–August 1927, the question about the opposition did not have particularly strong reverberations in our party organization.”85 Over the summer, however, the political mood in the city changed radically. workers in the sewing, leathermaking, shoemaking, and bristle-making industries began to complain bitterly about falling wages, unpaid wages, rising prices, and increasing rents. Increasingly, party organs deployed the designation of “Trotskyism” to identify and ultimately marginalize recalcitrant workers.

Perhaps no group demonstrated the slippery relationship between economistic agitation and allegations of Trotskyism as clearly as did the members of the Needleworkers Collective of Bobruisk (Bobrshvei). According to the above report filed by Zelenkovskii, agitation in the collective erupted abruptly in the summer of 1927, triggered by bitter complaints about falling wages and rising prices. Seemingly overnight, members of the collective began to oppose all efforts to intensify production, arguing that the “rationalization and the compression [of the workday] comes at the expense of workers.” Recalcitrant workers reportedly saved their greatest scorn for the proposed seven-hour workday, which they decried as an attempt to reintroduce detested night work into the workshop.86

while Zelenkovskii’s initial report depicted unrest as a spontaneous phenomenon triggered by deteriorating economic conditions, a second, anonymous follow-up investigation presented a far different interpretation of events. Claiming that workers in the collective received high wages ranging 83 Report from the okrug committee to the Central Committee on the opposition in Vitebsk, November 1927, NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 655, ll. 52–54.84 For woodworkers in Gomel´, see NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, ll. 120–22; for Minsk, see ibid., l. 120; for Bobruisk, see NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, ll. 94–96.85 Report from the local OKK to the TsKK, undated, early 1928, NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, ll. 185–91.86 Ibid., l. 187.

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from 50 to 100 rubles per month, the report asserted that “lack of material means among the party members and candidates must not be considered a source of opposition,” and dismissed the economic claims of the Bobrshvei workers outright.87 Rather, the report insisted that oppositional tendencies at the collective resulted from politics alone. Specifically, the report blamed the spike in oppositional activity on the machinations of political agitators: Comrades Kitaichik, Vaikhman, and Faivusovich, three students studying in Moscow, who had returned to Bobruisk during their summer break to stir up trouble.88 In short, the Bobruisk OKK ultimately attributed unrest to the agency of political agitators instead of rapidly deteriorating economic conditions wrought by economic crisis.

whatever the cause, members of Bobrshvei responded to official indifference for their concerns by becoming explicit and unrepentant Trotskyists. Angered by the lack of redress for their grievances, members of the collective came up with a pointed way to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1927. In commemoration, they pooled donations and purchased a bust of Trotskii, which they proudly placed next to a bust of Lenin in the front window of the workshop. The needleworkers then attempted (unsuccessfully) to purchase a matching gift—a picture of Trotskii from his Red Army period—to hang on the workshop wall. 89 Local party leaders in Bobruisk accused workshop members of partaking in the “idolization of Trotskii” and demanded that the bust be removed. The needle-workers grudgingly complied, yet the opposition continued to gain steam in the run up to the 15th Party Congress in December.90 During the congress, the Bobrshvei cell rejected resolutions supporting the expulsion of the oppositionists from the Party. Despite intense political pressure, 6 workers voted against the resolution and 12 abstained—meaning that 18 of 29 workers expressed sympathy, if not support, for the opposition.91 The party responded by dragging Comrades Kazimirovskii and L´vovich—two alleged ringleaders from the cell—before the OKK, and expelling them for counterrevolutionary agitation.92

87 OKK report to the TSKK on conditions at Bobrshvei, undated, mid-1928, NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, ll. 91–93. workers at the bottom of the stated scale would actually have ranked among the worst-paid laborers in the republic.88 All were subsequently expelled from the Party. See NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, l. 92.89 See ibid., l. 93.90 One of the oppositionists, S. G. Kazimirovskii, took the bust of Trotskii and reportedly put it on display inside his apartment.91 NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, l. 92.92 NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, l. 92.


As reports concerning the Bobrshvei collective suggest, a critical tension existed in the official interpretations of the growing worker unrest that sprang up like mushrooms after the proverbial rain during the second half of 1927. Read against the background of the rapidly deteriorating economic situation, worker agitation appeared as a comprehensible response to deepening economic and structural crisis. As the Central Committee line swung decisively toward austerity and intensified rationalization as mechanisms for combatting the crisis, such explanations proved politically unacceptable. Control commissions across the republic exhibited remarkable uniformity in reducing manifestation of worker anger to politics alone and attributing opposition to the pernicious influence of malignant political agents. Despite detailing the critical role that economic restructuring played in triggering worker agitation at the Bol´shevik tannery, for example, the Minsk okrug control commission ultimately attributed opposition in the tannery to the malignant influence of outside troublemakers—the “infamous” Comrade Fedor Tikhonovich Volkov and Comrade Gol´man, a “well-known Trotskyist” who allegedly infiltrated factory meetings to stir up the rabble.93 The OKK placed the rest of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the leatherworkers themselves. Rather than addressing the legitimacy of worker economic grievances, the OKK blamed oppositional stirrings on the “weak political development of a large portion of party members and the presence of a significant number of workers who come from the petty-bourgeois milieus.”94 According to this argument, the fundamental problem stemmed from the manipulations of political wreckers and the debased social origin of the workers in question, not the deterioration of labor conditions in the industry.

It was not, however, the “social” origins of recalcitrant workers alone that came under question. Rather, the unspoken, and in certain respects unspeakable, reality was that a significant portion of the oppositionists were ethnically marked. Given the ideological emphasis on the debased nature of race and ethnicity as analytic categories, party officials struggled to account for this phenomenon in the language of acceptable politics, ultimately settling on the category of “Bundism” to account for the overrepresentation of Jews in the ranks of the opposition.

Making Trotskyists JewsSupport for the opposition in Belorussia cut across ethnic boundary lines. To be sure, the ranks of the opposition included representatives of all the predominant nationalities of the Belorussian Republic. The 36 party 93 Ibid.94 NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, l. 13.

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members expelled from the party ranks for oppositional leanings following the 15th Party Congress included 6 Russians (including the “infamous” Fedor Volkov and the “well-known Trotskyist” Gol’man), 6 Belorussians, and 1 Pole.95 Russians, Belorussians, Poles, and Ukrainians were likewise well represented among white-collar and student supporters of the opposition. Given the peculiarities of the labor force, however, rank-and-file support for the opposition came overwhelmingly from Jewish workers.

The reasons for the concentration of Jewish workers among the opposition were primarily structural. Yet as the Party sought to downplay the social pressures that drove unrest, ethnicity entered into political language as an explanation for opposition. The most pronounced examples of the conflation of ethnicity and politics involved expressions of outright antisemitism among critics of the opposition. Numerous reports on the mood in the party ranks emphasized the growing prevalence of antisemitism within the anti-Trotskyite camp. One report recorded a variety of typical comments made during a meeting at Metprom no. 1 in Vitebsk: “To the devil with Trotskii! It serves him right”; “Trotskii—king of the yids” (zhidovskii tsar´ ); “it should have happened a long time ago,” and so on.96 One Professor Turnel´taub, in a lecture on the subject of antisemitism delivered before party members in Minsk in January 1928, claimed to have heard the repeated comment that “all the oppositionists are petty shopkeepers who hang on the words of Lev Davidovich [Trotskii].” when asked to elaborate, the mutterers of such sentiments invariably responded, the lecturer noted, in the following fashion: “why is there antisemitism? … The opposition brought it about.”97 Another worker in Minsk reportedly noted that “the majority of the oppositionists are Jews—they want to grab the whole party in their hands.”98

Such expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment fell beyond the limits of acceptable discourse, but they were hardly isolated utterances.99 By all accounts, the period of the anti-Trotskyite campaigns coincided with a significant resurgence of popular antisemitism across Belorussia.100 Cognizant of the growing threat, the Party launched wide-ranging rhetorical campaigns

95 NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, ll. 30, 167. 96 Ibid., d. 655, l. 64. 97 GAMO f. 12-P, op. 1, d. 737, l. 29. 98 Ibid., l. 7. 99 Nor were they unprecedented. For an illuminating example of the persistently ambiguous line between acceptable discourse and antisemitic agitation, see Robert weinberg, “Demonizing Judaism in the Soviet Union during the 1920s,” Slavic Review 67, 1 (2008): 120–53. 100 This tendency culminated in a high-profile, sensationalized case of antisemitic violence at the Oktiabr´ glassworks in Bobruisk okrug. For the procurator’s report, see NARB f. 188, op. 1, d. 1777.


against antisemitism. Yet even as it sought to combat antisemitism in its most explicit forms, party discourse about the nature of Trotskyism explicitly linked this political deviation with the stigma of Jewishness. Occasionally, internal party reports stated the matter openly. A 1928 report from the control commission in Orshansk okrug, for example, explained away the large number of Jews in the local opposition as evidence of ethnic allegiance. The Jews of the region, the report claimed, supported the opposition out of a sense of ethnic solidarity, since “the Central Committee is composed only of ‘goyim.’ ”101

The inference that Trotskyism constituted a particularly Jewish deviation was usually articulated in subtler tones. Internal party reports attributed oppositional sentiment not to economic concerns or even political principle, but to basic social categories, which were themselves laden with ethnic associations. A secret report from the secretary of the TsKK to the okrug offices explained that “one always notices petty-bourgeois leanings on the part of the comrades” in the shoemakers’ and needleworkers’ cells, “among whom the majority come from the kustari.”102 Others, like the aforementioned Comrade Vilenstovich, blamed the weak political development of oppositionists on the “petty-bourgeois–trading milieu” in which oppositionists invariably seemed to originate. The categories utilized to delegitimize the opposition were, of course, abstract class designations. Yet in the context of Belorussia, where the overwhelming bulk of kustari and merchants were in actuality Jewish, social categories necessarily suggested ethnic marking and ethnicized meaning.

The use of purportedly objective social categories to explain away the persistence of opposition left room for ethnic ambiguity. Such ambiguity was absent from the most common rhetorical tactic employed to undercut the legitimacy of the opposition. Defenders of the emerging party orthodoxy increasingly sought to delegitimize the opposition by associating it with discredited, non-Bolshevik political parties—in particular, the Jewish Bund. Far from being simply a designation of previous political affiliation, the charge of Bundism carried with it a series of unmistakable and undesirable connotations. Bundists allegedly promoted narrow trade unionism, emphasized nationality over internationalism, rejected state campaigns for linguistic Belorussianization, sought to protect the labor market in “their” industries by speaking Yiddish on the shop floor, and generally opposed efforts to integrate Jewish workers into the general labor force.103

101 NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, l. 249.102 Ibid., d. 253, l. 98.103 For one report on Bundist vestiges in the Party, see NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 409, ll. 1–6.

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As anti-Trotskyist campaigns spread, party observers repeatedly attributed oppositional leanings to the persistence of Bundist influence in the Party. A 1928 report from the TsKK to the Executive Committee of the Party minced few words, explaining that cities like Minsk, Gomel´, and Bobruisk had become hotbeds of opposition precisely because they had previously been Bundist strongholds. “Former members of Jewish parties,” the report asserted, “display secret sympathy for Trotskii.”104 The Bobruisk okrug control commission blamed the strength of the local opposition on the prevalence of “former Bundists” among the local, largely kustar´ working class. These Bundists, the Bobruisk OKK complained, disrupted a local party conference with shouts of “Long Live Trotskii” and managed to bring a number of Komsomol members under their influence.105 A report on the Bobruisk shoemakers’ cell likewise attributed the groundswell of support for the opposition to the “persistent Bundist–petty-bourgeois smell” (meshchanskii dushok) in the cell.106 The party kept close tabs on former Bundists in opposition ranks and publicized these affiliations, noting, in particular, that 8 of the 36 members ultimately expelled from the party for their dogged oppositionism had been former Bundists.107

Insofar as the Bund, historically speaking, stressed the primacy of nationality, it is entirely probable that some former Bundists felt drawn to the United Opposition out of a sense of solidarity, despite Trotskii’s own notoriously hostile views toward the Bund. whether these groups of former Bundists drove the politics of opposition on the floor in “Jewish” industries is, however, a different matter. From archival records, there is little doubt that although former Bundists did indeed join the opposition, the overwhelming majority of those Jews who sided with the opposition had no previous party affiliation. Of the 264 Jewish party members who either voted with or abstained from voting against the opposition position across Belorussia during the 15th Party Congress, about two dozen had previously been members of the Bund. Nearly 70 percent of all active and passive Jewish supporters of the opposition in Belorussia joined the party following the Lenin Levy of 1924, meaning that they were likely younger workers without previous political experience.108 Of the 37 or so Jewish workers who voted with the opposition in Vitebsk, only one had been a Bundist. Of the 122 Jewish oppositionists in Minsk, 15 had Bundist backgrounds.109 Even in Bobruisk, the purported

104 Ibid.105 NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, l. 188.106 Ibid., l. 94.107 NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, l. 30.108 Unfortunately, records do not include data concerning the ages of oppositional voters.109 NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, ll. 21–23, 40–42.


hotbed of Bundism, only 3 of the 40 identified oppositionists had previously been Bundists.110

In sum, there was a rather significant disjuncture between allegations of Bundist influence and the actual presence of former Bundists in the opposition. Regardless of the reality, the association of the opposition with Bundism served a discernible purpose. The appellation of Bundism marked the opposition as being recalcitrant, nonintegrated, and definitively Jewish. As the anti-Trotskyist campaign unfolded, party activists at all levels increasingly stressed the ethnic dimension of Trotskyism through outright assertion, association, or innuendo. Ignoring the economic tensions that drove Jewish workers into the ranks of the opposition, the political language of Trotskyism asserted, subtly or otherwise, that the problem lay not with the economics of intensified rationalized production, but with the ontological difference of those who opposed such overwhelming rationality. In the era of fundamental structural instability and rising antisemitism, such politicized language served the function of disciplining labor. By marking political opposition—as well as the whole array of economic concerns that framed the opposition—as ethnically dubious, the rhetoric of anti-Trotskyism undoubtedly served to tame and undermine economic grievances on the shop floor.

Unsurprisingly, as opposition became ethnically marked, many Jewish laborers turned into vociferous defenders of the party line. Comrade Slonimskii, a rather typical worker from Minsk, joined the majority in denouncing the opposition during a mass meeting in 1927. “It is necessary to say to Zinovév and Trotskii,” he declared, “for the betrayal of the Party, you get your just deserts.”111 Comrade Shafer, the Minsk shoemaker introduced above as an early supporter of the opposition, broke ranks and became a fierce critic of the opposition. During an open meeting of the Minsk Shoemakers Union in 1927, he went on the offensive. Asserting that the “opposition is, of course, incorrect,” Shafer called on the Party to stamp out the deviation: “we don’t need discussion; we need a unified, unbroken idea of what should be—not a schism [raskol]. Down with the opposition!” Comrade Gol´blat forcefully seconded this opinion: the “opposition thinks that it represents the point of view among the whole working mass … because it uses pay increases as bait.” The workers, however, did not follow them, he continued, “because they know that the opposition is mistaken in its beliefs.”112

In denouncing the economic policies of the opposition, Comrade Gol´blat asserted the superiority of a regime of rationalized, intensified production. 110 Ibid., ll. 60–60 ob.111 Ibid., l. 120.112 GAMO f. 12-P, op. 1, d. 458, l. 140.

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By making this claim on behalf of “the workers”—an abstract, universalizing category of labor—Comrade Gol´blat sided against the purportedly particular claims of Trotskyist labor –branded implicitly as petty-bourgeois, Bundist, and Jewish. As opposition became marked with the stigma of ethnicity, the only way forward for a shoemaker in Minsk was to transform himself into a proponent of a regime of abstract, undifferentiated labor. Or, stated otherwise, into a Stalinist.

ConclusionIn early 1928, the Party convened anti-Trotskyite campaigns, meetings, and hearings across Belorussia. Despite the full-scale offensive, the Party steadfastly insisted that only a handful of members supported the opposition. A concluding report put the total number of oppositionists at 86 people, of a party of about 32,000 total members in 1928.113 A composite report from Minsk okrug maintained that less than 1 percent of the more than 8,000 local party workers supported the opposition in 1927.114 Official accounts of the size of the opposition should be taken with a sizable grain of salt. In numerous party cells, hardliners cajoled recalcitrant workers and threatened them with expulsion if they failed to renounce their support for the opposition.115

Regardless of the final calculations, Trotskyism was understood to be a far-reaching and intractable problem. It was not, however, a socially general phenomenon. The opposition gained its strongest degree of proletarian support from specific sectors of the Belorussian economy. opposition flourished among leatherworkers, shoemakers, bootmakers, woodworkers, tailors, dressmakers, carpenters, and metalworkers. Opposition thus flourished precisely in semi-artisanal, labor-intensive industries most directly threatened by the onrush of mechanized production. The forms of compulsion faced by workers in these 113 NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, l. 166. The total for party members on 1 October 1928 is taken from N. Vlasenko, Bor´ba Kompartii Belorussii za postroenie ekonomicheskogo fundamenta sotsializma (Minsk: Belarus´, 1970), 37. Not all party cells appear to have taken part in the votes. P. T. Petrikov and I. E. Marchenko place the number of those voting in Minsk and Borisov combined at 4,124 (Istoriia rabochego klassa Belorusskoi SSR [Minsk: Nauka i tekhnika, 1985], 2:378). The latter numbers constituted about one-half the total party membership in Minsk alone. It seems probable that the resolutions were introduced and voted on only in “problematic” industries. 114 NARB f. 15-P, op. 4, d. 254, l. 29.115 To cite but a few examples: the oppositionists in the Minsk bootmakers’ workshop all repudiated their support following the expulsion from the cell of four ringleaders (NARB f. 15, op. 4, d. 254, ll. 26–27); in the party cell of the city administration of Rechitsa, 14 of the 15 supporters of the opposition reversed their position following a severe reprimand (NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, ll. 47–48); a worker in Gomel´ stated the problem succinctly: “it is difficult to enter into the debates, because the regional committee [raikom] will sack us” (NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, l. 119).


industries were not simply political; they were simultaneously structural. One woodworker from Gomel´, Comrade Bykhovskii, intuitively captured the underlying structural pressures: “At the present time, we produce in 8 hours what we used to produce in 12; and if we further introduced the 7-hour day, then all these hours would still be a crushing burden on the workers.” Even if production intensified in this fashion, Comrade Bykhovsky lamented, “we will still not be as efficient as mechanized production.”116

The precarious state of laborers like Comrade Bykhovskii—a hand-worker confronted with the social reality of industrial revolution—was hardly a novel phenomenon. At the dawn of the machine age across Europe, such social groups played critical roles in the development of radical activism, ranging from machine breaking to strikes to political organization.117 what was novel, however, was that these workers faced suppression not from a nascent class of industrialists and owners of private capital but from the guarantors of an ostensible workers’ state that proved willing to marshal all available coercive methods to drive through economic restructuring.

In the context of revolutionary Belorussia, the politicized language of ethnicity proved critical to the process of economic restructuring. The brunt of this campaign fell on Jewish labor because Jewish labor coalesced in industries that faced the most intensive pressures to rationalize and intensify production. In the face of such pressures, Jewish laborers responded in the way that they had responded to similar pressures throughout the pre- and postrevolutionary periods. They grumbled, held meetings, criticized their bosses, organized themselves, and pushed for reforms that would meet their economic demands. The Party and state ultimately responded by rejecting economic grievances outright. In denying the legitimacy of worker complaints, they increasingly attributed recalcitrance to the nature of the recalcitrant workers themselves. workers spoke to the state in the language of class and structure. The state responded by attributing grievances to malignant and ethnically dubious political agents.

Antisemitic sentiments, as well as interethnic animosity, undoubtedly played a role in shaping responses to opposition. Indeed, viewed exclusively from the realm of culture and “discourse,” the conflation of opposition and Jewish ethnicity appears to be a purely political reaction to Soviet

116 NARB f. 4-P, op. 5, d. 656, ll. 118–25. 117 See, most notably, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963); Joan Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); and william H. Sewell, Work and Revolution: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

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nationality policies. To view tensions between Jews and non-Jews through the lens of “nationality” alone is, however, to overlook a crucial, underlying reality. Ethnicity and nationality became problematic because of existing social pressures. Throughout Belorussia, the fundamental tensions that gave rise to opposition were primarily economic and social tensions: they arose from conflicts over wages, the pace of industrialization, and the desirability of implementing new regimes of labor and productivity. The fact that Jews constituted the overwhelming majority of workers in these industries remained largely incidental until the terms of political discussion shifted and the fact of nationality came to be taken as the cause of political intransigence. Nationality was neither a constant nor an ever-primary structuring reality. Economic crisis catalyzed nationality and intensified ethnic division.

The peculiar case of Trotskyism in Belorussia invites broader conclusions concerning political language and economic crisis in postrevolutionary Soviet society. That political discourse became more absolute, more totalizing, more “Manichean” on the eve of the Stalin revolution is hardly to be disputed. The arrival of Stalinism as a full-blown political project announced itself with the rhetorical offensive against the kulak, the speculator, the wrecker, and the Trotskyist. The construction of enemies was at the core of the culture and ideology of Stalinism. Yet the process of constructing enemies—intimate, distant, or imagined—was structured everywhere by the dynamics of economic and structural crisis that made Stalinism itself a social and political possibility.

Dept. of HistoryCity University of New York—Baruch CollegeNew York, NY 10010 [email protected]

The Politics of Crisis: Economy, Ethnicity, and Trotskyism in Belorussia

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