ABSTRACT
26 January 1934. With great fanfare, the Seventeenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the “Congress of Victors,” has convened in Moscow to celebrate the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan and the first year of the Second in the Building of Socialism. Joseph Stalin opens the proceedings with a three-hour speech in his typical style, at once boastful and pedantic, to review the advances that the Soviet Union has made during the past five years under his leadership:
The USSR has become radically transformed and has cast off the integument of backwardness and medievalism. From an agrarian country it has become an industrial country. From a country of small individual agriculture it has become a country of collective, large-scale mechanized agriculture. From an ignorant, illiterate and uncultured country it has become—or rather it is becoming—a literate and cultured country…. It goes without saying that this enormous progress could take place only on the basis of the successful building of socialism…. The present congress is taking place under the flag of the complete victory of Leninism. … The Party today is united as it has never been before. 1
Not a word in all this about the millions of famine victims who have perished in the preceding two years, or about the additional millions banished to ultimate death in the Gulag. Nor is there a hint of the terror that lies in store for his own followers three years hence, though Stalin warns, “We have defeated the enemies of the Party,” i.e. the Trotskyist and Bukharinist opposition groups, “but remnants of their ideology still live in the minds of individual members…, their counterrevolutionary program of restoring capitalism in the USSR.” 2