ABSTRACT
The expansion of the five-year plans, however, had brought to the fore in the Politburo a body of support for Tukhachevskiy that Stalin could not disregard; and without which, one thinks, Tukhachevskiy would not have been elected to the Central Committee or have risked approaching Stalin as he did. In November 1930, Kuybyshev and Ordzhonikidze, Tukhachevskiy’s longest-standing patrons in the party, had, between them, assumed control of the whole economy. Kuybyshev had become chairman of Gosplan (the state planning commission), which was responsible for developing and supervising the five-year plans, and concurrently deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense. Ordzhonikidze had become chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, the vast bureaucracy that supervised economic institutions, and concurrently the People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry. He was the last Politburo member left who could talk to Stalin man-to-man. According to Budennyy, the RMCU had tired of hearing him demand, ‘Speed up the tempo.’ His favorite target in the RMCU had been Budennyy, whom he had twitted about how he would look after the cavalry was gone sitting on top of a tank with his mustache bristling and his saber drawn.2 Kirov, who had collaborated with Ordzhonikidze and Kuybyshev during the Civil War and as a leading member of Stalin’s team in the struggles against the various oppositions, had in four years transformed himself from a purger into a popular figure in Leningrad of the type then known in the United States as a ‘booster’. He saw in industrialization an
opportunity to restore Leningrad to its former stature as the most advanced city in Russia. With Kuybyshev and Ordzhonikidze, he shared an ebullient faith in the ability of socialism to accomplish anything. For him, the sort of technological reconstruction Tukhachevskiy advocated engendered no misgivings and held great promise for the Navy. In May 1930, he had become a member of the Leningrad Military District’s RMC, thereby acquiring a partnership with Tukhachevskiy and a direct voice in all matters affecting the district or its relationship with the people’s commissariat.
