a visa. In March 1928, when the Central Committee discussed the food crisis - to which Stalin reacted later in the year by sending shock troops into the villages to collect grain by force - Sokolnikov made a speech in which, while admitting that he had been wrong in the past, he stuck to his earlier beliefs by arguing that the way to get peasants to sell their produce was to raise the price of grain. However, after the introduction of the First five-year plan, he defended the principle that it was possible and necessary for the state to intervene and plan economic output. He wrote: In July 1928, Sokolnikov and Bukharin were returning to the Kremlin from a Central Committee plenum when they encountered Kamenev, and Bukharin talked indiscreetly about the gathering opposition to Stalin within the Politburo. In February 1929, Sokolnikov was formally rebuked by the Politburo for being present during this conversation, after a transcript had been published abroad. He was removed from his post in Gosplan. From 1929 to 1932, Sokolnikov was the Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom, where the newly elected Labour government had extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR. Speaking very little English, he had limited contacts with leading British politicians. Beatrice Webb who invited Sokolnikov and his wife to her home and introduced him to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden noted in her diary: “We are the only ‘Cabinet’ members who have consorted with them. The Hendersons do not ‘know them’ socially, nor the PM." In 1932, Sokolnikov was recalled to Moscow (and replaced by Ivan Maisky, who spoke fluent English) and appointed Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Arrest and execution The British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had met Sokolnikov in the United Kingdom, visited his Moscow flat just before the start of the Great Purge. He wrote later: Sokolnikov was arrested on 26 July 1936. He was sufficiently broken under interrogation, either through torture or more probably through threats to harm his young wife and daughter, that he not only incriminated himself, but was made to confront Bukharin, in Lazar Kaganovich's office, and accuse him of being part of a conspiracy to restore capitalism in the USSR. Bukharin shouted at him "Have you lost your reason?" - but Sokolnikov, whose face was "pale but not tortured" stuck to his story. In January 1937, he was a defendant at