France also voiced concerns in this regard in the context of Germany's expected membership in the League of Nations. Third Period In 1928, the 9th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International and its 6th Congress in Moscow favored Stalin's program over the line pursued by Comintern Secretary General Nikolay Bukharin. Unlike Bukharin, Stalin believed that a deep crisis in western capitalism was imminent, and he denounced the cooperation of international communist parties with social democratic movements, labelling them as social fascists, and insisted on a far stricter subordination of international communist parties to the Comintern, that is, to Soviet leadership. This was known as the Third Period. The policy of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) under Ernst Thälmann was altered accordingly. The relatively independent KPD of the early 1920s almost completely subordinated itself to the Soviet Union. Stalin's order that the German Communist party must never again vote with the Social Democrats coincided with his agreement, in December 1928, with what was termed the 'Union of Industrialists'. Under this agreement the Union of Industrialists agreed to provide the Soviet Union with an up-to-date armaments industry and the industrial base to support it, on two conditions: Firstly, they required paying in hard currency or in goods, not in Soviet roubles. Stalin desperately wanted their weapons, including anti-aircraft guns, howitzers, anti-tank guns, machine guns etc., but he was critically short of money. As Russia had been a major wheat exporter before the First World War, he decided to expel his recalcitrant kulak peasant farmers to the wastes of Siberia and create huge collective farms on their land like the 50,000 hectare farm that Krupp had created in the North Caucasus. Thus, in 1930 and 1931, a huge deluge of Soviet wheat at slave labour prices flooded unsuspecting world markets, where surpluses already prevailed, thereby causing poverty and distress to North American farmers. However, Stalin secured the precious foreign currency to pay for German armaments. Yet the Union of Industrialists were not only interested in cash for their weapons, they wanted a political concession. They feared the arrival of socialism in Germany and were irate at the KPD and Social Democrats objecting to providing funds for the development of new armored cruisers. Stalin would have had no compunction about ordering the German Communists to change sides if it suited his purpose. He had negotiated with the German armaments makers