And yet both agriculture and industry were altogether too chaotic to be described without reservation as being integrated within ‘a planned economy’. For example, the Five-Year Plan of 1928–33 was drawn up six months after it was said to have been inaugurated (and the Plan was said to be completed a year before it was meant to end). Rough commands were of a more practical importance than carefully-elaborated planning; and the commands were based on guesses, prejudices and whims. At best the officials of Gosplan could rectify the worst mistakes before too much damage was done. But huge human suffering occurred before any particular experiment was halted on the grounds of being dyseconomic.
‘Class struggle’ was intensified through a governmental assault upon the so-called kulaks. It was laid down that the collective farms should be formed exclusively from poor and middling peasant households. Kulaks stood to lose most from collectivization in material terms; they tended also to be more assertive than average. At least, this is how Stalin saw things. He set up a Politburo commission to investigate how to decapitate kulak resistance. Its proposals were accepted by him and incorporated in a Sovnarkom decree of February 1930. Kulaks were to be disbarred from joining collective farms and divided into three categories. Those in category one were to be dispatched to forced-labour settlements or shot. Category two comprised households deemed more hostile to the government; these were to go to distant provinces. Category three consisted of the least ‘dangerous’ households, which were allowed to stay in their native district but on a smaller patch of land. Between five and seven million persons were treated as belonging to kulak families.14
The decree could not be fulfilled without magnifying violence. The Red Army and the OGPU were insufficient in themselves and anyway the Politburo could not depend on the implicit obedience of their officers of rural origins.15 And so tough young lads from the factories, militia and the party went out to the villages to enforce the establishment of collective farms. About 25,000 of them rallied to the Politburo’s summons. Before they set out from the towns, these ‘25,000-ers’ were told that the kulaks were responsible for organizing a ‘grain strike’ against the towns. They were not issued with detailed instructions as to how to distinguish the rich, middling and poor peasants from each other. Nor were they given limits on their use of violence. The Politburo set targets for grain collection, for collectivization and for de-kulakization, and did not mind how these targets were hit.
But when they arrived in the villages, the ‘25,000-ers’ saw for themselves that many hostile peasants were far from being rich. The central party apparatus imaginatively introduced a special category of ‘sub-kulaks’ who were poor but yet opposed the government.16 Sub-kulaks were to be treated as if they were kulaks. Consequently Stalin’s collectivizing mayhem, involving executions and deportations, was never confined to the better-off households. The slightest resistance to the authorities was met with punitive violence. With monumental insincerity he wrote an article for Pravda in March 1930, ‘Dizzy with Success’, in which he called local functionaries to task for abusing their authority. But this was a temporizing posture. For Stalin, the priority remained mass collectivization. By the time of the harvest of 1931, collective farms held practically all the land traditionally given over to cereal crops. Stalin and the Politburo had won the agrarian war.
The price was awful. Probably four to five million people perished in 1932–3 from ‘de-kulakization’ and from grain seizures.17 The dead and the dying were piled on to carts by the urban detachments and pitched into common graves without further ceremony. Pits were dug on the outskirts of villages for the purpose. Child survivors, their stomachs swollen through hunger, gnawed grass and tree-bark and begged for crusts. Human beings were not the only casualties. While the government’s policies were killing peasants, peasants were killing their livestock: they had decided that they would rather eat their cattle and horses than let them be expropriated by the collective farms. Even some of Stalin’s colleagues blanched when they saw the effects with their own eyes. For instance, Ordzhonikidze was aghast at the behaviour of officials in eastern Ukraine;18 but he felt no need to criticize mass compulsory collectivization as general policy.
Collectivization was a rural nightmare. It is true that the average harvest in 1928–30 was good.19 But this was chiefly the product of excellent weather conditions. It certainly did not result from improved agricultural management; for often the collective farm chairmen were rural ne’er-do-wells or inexpert party loyalists from the towns. Nor did the state fulfil its promise to supply the countryside with 100,000 tractors by the end of the Five-Year Plan. Only half of these were built,20 and most of them were used inefficiently through lack of experienced drivers and mechanics.
With the exception of 1930, mass collectivization meant that not until the mid-1950s did agriculture regain the level of output achieved in the last years before the Great War. Conditions in the countryside were so dire that the state had to pump additional resources into the country in order to maintain the new agrarian order. Increased investment in tractors was not the only cost incurred. Revenues had to be diverted not only to agronomists, surveyors and farm chairmen but also to soldiers, policemen and informers. Moreover, ‘machine-tractor stations’ had to be built from 1929 to provide equipment and personnel for the introduction of technology (as well as to provide yet another agency to control the peasantry). Otherwise the rickety structure of authority would have collapsed. No powerful state has inflicted such grievous economic damage on itself in peacetime.
Yet Stalin could draw up a balance sheet that, from his standpoint, was favourable. From collectivization he acquired a reservoir of terrified peasants who would supply him with cheap industrial labour. To some extent, too, he secured his ability to export Soviet raw materials in order to pay for imports of industrial machinery (although problems arose with foreign trade in 1931–2). Above all, he put an end to the recurrent crises faced by the state in relation to urban food supplies as the state’s grain collections rose from 10.8 million tons in 1928–9 to 22.8 million tons in 1931–2.21 After collectivization it was the countryside, not the towns, which went hungry if the harvest was bad.
Stalin was still more delighted with the record of industry. The large factories and mines had been governmentally-owned since 1917–19, but the number of such enterprises rose steeply after 1928. Thirty-eight per cent of industrial capital stock by the end of 1934 was located in factories built in the previous half-dozen years.22 Simultaneously the smaller manufacturing firms – most of which had been in private hands during the NEP – were closed down. The First Five-Year Plan was meant to end in September 1933; in fact its completion was announced in December 1932. Mines and factories were claimed to have doubled their production since 1928. This was exaggeration. Yet even sceptical estimates put the annual expansion in industrial output at ten per cent between 1928 and 1941; and the production of capital goods probably grew at twice the rate of consumer goods during the Five-Year Plan.23 The USSR had at last been pointed decisively towards the goal of a fully industrialized society.
Stalin the Man of Steel boasted that he had introduced ‘socialism’ to the villages. The nature of a collective farm was ill-defined; no Bolshevik before 1917 – not even Lenin – had explained exactly what such farms should be like. There was much practical experimentation with them after 1917: at one end of the range there were farms that required their employees to take decisions collectively and share land, housing, equipment and income equally, regardless of personal input of labour; at the other end it was possible to find arrangements allowing peasant households to form a co-operative and yet keep their land, housing and equipment separately from each other and to make their own separate profits.
The idea of peasants taking most of their own decisions was anathema to Stalin. The government, he insisted, should own the land, appoint the farm chairmen and set the grain-delivery quotas. His ideal organization was the sovkhoz. This was a collective farm run on the same pr
inciples as a state-owned factory. Local authorities marked out the land for each sovkhoz and hired peasants for fixed wages. Such a type of farming was thought eminently suitable for the grain-growing expanses in Ukraine and southern Russia. Yet Stalin recognized that most peasants were ill-disposed to becoming wage labourers, and he yielded to the extent of permitting most farms to be of the kolkhoz type. In a kolkhoz the members were rewarded by results. If the quotas were not met, the farm was not paid. Furthermore, each peasant was paid a fraction of the farm wage-fund strictly in accordance with the number of ‘labour days’ he or she had contributed to the farming year.
And so the kolkhoz was defined as occupying a lower level of socialist attainment than the sovkhoz. In the long run the official expectation was that all kolkhozes would be turned into sovkhozes in Soviet agriculture; but still the kolkhoz, despite its traces of private self-interest, was treated as a socialist organizational form.
In reality, most kolkhozniki, as the kolkhoz members were known, could no more make a profit in the early 1930s than fly to Mars. Rural society did not submit without a struggle and 700,000 peasants were involved in disturbances at the beginning of 1930.24 But the resistance was confined to a particular village or group of villages. Fewer large revolts broke out in Russia than in areas where non-Russians were in the majority: Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, Ukraine and parts of Siberia. Yet the official authorities had advantages in their struggle against the peasants which had been lacking in 1920–22.25 In the collectivization campaign from the late 1920s it was the authorities who went on the offensive, and they had greatly superior organization and fire-power. Peasants were taken by surprise and counted themselves lucky if they were still alive by the mid-1930s. Battered into submission, they could only try to make the best of things under the new order imposed by the Soviet state.
An entire way of life, too, was being pummelled out of existence. The peasant household was no longer the basic social unit recognized by the authorities. Grain quotas were imposed on the collective farm as a whole, and peasants were given their instructions as individuals rather than as members of households.
Industrial workers were fortunate by comparison. Except during the famine of 1932–3, their consumption of calories was as great as it had been under the NEP. But although conditions were better in the towns than in the countryside, they were still very hard. The quality of the diet worsened and food rationing had to be introduced in all towns and cities: average calory levels were maintained only because more bread and potatoes were eaten while consumption of meat fell by two thirds. Meanwhile wages for blue-collar jobs fell in real terms by a half in the course of the Five-Year Plan.26 Of course, this is not the whole story. The men and women who had served their factory apprenticeship in the 1920s were encouraged to take evening classes and secure professional posts. Consequently many existing workers obtained material betterment through promotion. About one and a half million managers and administrators in 1930–33 had recently been elevated from manual occupations.27
This was also one of the reasons why the working class endured the Five-Year Plan’s rigours without the violent resistance offered by peasant communities. Another was that most of the newcomers to industry, being mainly rural young men who filled the unskilled occupations, had neither the time nor the inclination to strike for higher wages; and the OGPU was efficient at detecting and suppressing such dissent as it arose. Go-slows, walk-outs and even occasional demonstrations took place, but these were easily contained.
Of course, Stalin and OGPU chief Yagoda left nothing to chance. The OGPU scoured its files for potential political opponents still at large. Former Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were hunted out even though their parties had barely existed since the 1922 show-trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. But whereas Lenin had trumped up charges against genuinely existing parties, Stalin invented parties out of the air. A show-trial of the imaginary ‘Industrial Party’ was staged in November 1930. The defendants were prepared for their judicial roles by an OGPU torturer; they were mainly persons who had worked for the Soviet regime but had previously been industrialists, high-ranking civil servants or prominent Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. In 1931 a trial of the fictitious ‘Union Bureau’ of the Menshevik party was organized. Trials were held in the major cities of Russia and the other Soviet republics. Newspapers were stuffed with stories of professional malefactors caught, arraigned and sentenced.
Stalin glorified the changes in the political environment by declaring that the party had ‘re-formed its own ranks in battle order’. Administrators with ‘suspect’ class origins or political opinions were sacked from their jobs. Workers were hallooed into denouncing any superiors who obstructed the implementation of the Five-Year Plan. A witch-hunt atmosphere was concocted. For Stalin used the party as a weapon to terrify all opposition to his economic policies. He needed to operate through an institution that could be trusted to maintain political fidelity, organizational solidity and ideological rectitude while the Soviet state in general was being transformed and reinforced. In the late 1920s only the party could fulfil this function.
But the party, too, needed to be made dependable. Expulsions started in May 1929, resulting in a loss of eleven per cent of the membership. A recruitment campaign began at the same time, and the party expanded its number of members from 1.3 million in 1928 to 2.2 million in 1931.28 Party secretaries at the various local levels were the Politburo’s local chief executives. Republican party leaders were handpicked by the Politburo for this role; and in the RSFSR Stalin constructed a regional tier in the party’s organizational hierarchy which brought together groups of provinces under the reinforced control of a single regional committee.29 Thus the Mid-Volga Regional Committee oversaw collectivization across an agricultural region the size of the entire United Kingdom. Party secretaries had been virtually the unchallengeable economic bosses in the localities since the middle of the Civil War. But there was also a large difference. In the 1920s private agriculture, commerce and industry had been widespread; under the Five-Year Plan only a few corners of non-state economic activity survived.
Yet still the central leadership could not regard the party with equanimity. The picture of over-fulfilled economic plans painted by the newspapers involved much distortion. And where there was indeed over-fulfilment, as in steel production, its quality was often too poor for use in manufacturing. Wastage occurred on a huge scale and the problem of uncoordinated production was ubiquitous. The statistics themselves were fiddled not only by a central party machine wishing to fool the world but also by local functionaries wanting to trick the central party machine. Deceit was deeply embedded in the mode of industrial and agricultural management.
It has been asserted that shoddy, unusable goods were so high a proportion of output that official claims for increases in output were typically double the reality. If the increase in output has been exaggerated, then perhaps Stalin’s forced-rate industrialization and forcible mass collectivization were not indispensable to the transformation of Russia into a military power capable of defeating Hitler in the Second World War. An extrapolation of the NEP’s economic growth rate into the 1930s even suggests that a Bukharinist leadership would have attained an equal industrial capacity. This is not the end of the debate; for as the First Five-Year Plan continued, Stalin diverted investment increasingly towards the defence sub-sector. Nearly six per cent of such capital was dedicated to the Red Army’s requirements: this was higher than the combined total for agricultural machines, tractors, cars, buses and lorries.30 It was easier for Stalin to bring this about than it would have been for Bukharin who wanted peasant aspirations to be taken into account.
Yet Bukharin would have ruled a less traumatized society, and been more able to count on popular goodwill. Bukharin’s perceptiveness in foreign policy might also have helped him. Stalin’s guesses about Europe were very faulty. In the German elections of 1932 the communists were instructed to campaign mostly agai
nst the social-democrats: Hitler’s Nazis were to be ignored. There were comrades from Berlin such as Franz Neumann who questioned Stalin’s judgement. But Stalin calmly replied: ‘Don’t you think, Neumann, that if the nationalists come to power in Germany, they’ll be so completely preoccupied with the West that we’ll be able to build up socialism in peace?’31 Stalin’s judgement did not lack perceptiveness: he correctly anticipated that Hitler would stir up a deal of trouble for the Allies who had imposed the Treaty of Versailles – and since the end of the Great War it had been Britain and France, not Germany, which had caused greatest trouble to Soviet political leaders.
Yet when due allowance is made, his comment underestimated the profound danger of Nazism to the USSR and to Europe as a whole. It also displayed the influence of Leninist thinking. Lenin, too, had asserted that the German extreme right might serve the purpose of smashing up the post-Versailles order;32 he had also stressed that Soviet diplomacy should be based on the principle of evading entanglement in inter-capitalist wars. The playing of one capitalist power against another was an enduring feature of Soviet foreign policy.33 This does not mean that Lenin would have been as casual as Stalin about Adolf Hitler. Yet as socialism was misbuilt in the USSR, silence was enforced by the Politburo about the risks being taken with the country’s security.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 23
