Russia
Page 35
The system aimed to accommodate the aspirations of the ‘nationalities’, and to a large extent it succeeded. It ensured that a larger proportion of each group would get official jobs and that most of the subject population would be administered by people of their own kind. It also provided a stimulus to national self-expression in most forms of art. Furthermore, the loyalty of the provincial nationality elites was fostered by a series of institutional links which strengthened personal connections with Moscow. Not only the Party itself but professional, academic and artistic associations networked across the Union, promoting links between the great metropolis, Moscow, and the peripheries. Recognition by the centre became a point of pride, and access to the Union’s capital, where privilege shops gave access to goods unobtainable elsewhere, was much sought after.
Aspects of the nationalities policy showed that, though the Soviet regime, shaped in the crucible of pitiless warfare, had inflicted great cruelties and that dogmatism, dragooning and repression were fast becoming entrenched in its culture, the infant Union also possessed a kindlier and more constructive face. This was largely because the Bolsheviks had been constrained to co-opt proponents of the progressive agenda. Hence the government’s enlightened attitudes to women and minorities, its enthusiasm for literacy and education, and, in part, its campaigns against the obscurantism of the Church and all religions. It also encouraged talent — and never more so than when it found someone who conformed to a Soviet ideal and had been neglected by the old regime.
Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, for example, had good proletarian credentials. He came from mixed Russian, Polish and Tatar stock, was a modest schoolteacher in Kaluga, and was handicapped by deafness. He was also a genius in the field of aerodynamics and a visionary who helped make space travel possible. Ignored by the scientific establishment, he had built Russia’s first wind tunnel at his own expense, and in 1899 he had published a key paper on atmospheric pressure on surfaces, also at his own expense. Once the Soviet regime was in power, however, his research was funded, he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences, and allotted a life pension. The physicist Kapitsa, the economist Kondratev, the writer Maxim Gorky and the composer Sergei Prokofiev were among other luminaries who shone in this early Soviet period.
The New Economic Policy stabilized a country careening out of control, and the basic indicators of demographic strength and economic growth flickered and began to rise. Indeed, the population in the period 1922—7 grew at the phenomenal rate of 2 per cent a year. This was chiefly due to a decline in the death rate. Winnowed by the hardships of the tragic years, the population had been growing hardier. 14 National income was also creeping up. In 1925—6 it reached 75.7 rubles per head of population — 75 per cent of what it had been in 1913. Yet, of a total population of 150 millions, almost 82 per cent lived and worked in the countryside. A brilliant future, Communist or not, could not be built on such a basis. In proportion to population, Russia’s national income was less than a fifth of Britain’s and less than an eighth of that of the United States. 15 And by 1928 a serious economic and social crisis was looming. It led the Party to resort to military methods again, and worse.
The crisis was linked to the onset of the world depression but stemmed from serious inadequacies in Soviet economic arrangements. Industry was failing to produce goods the peasants were interested in buying. The peasants therefore saved themselves the labour of sowing so much land for the next harvest. The result was a dearth of grain not only for export, but also for the cities and hence industry. The state reacted with what since the war had become a traditional remedy: requisitioning grain from the peasants. The recurring problem arose from a failure to match supply and demand, but there were more fundamental inadequacies in the management of the economy, the approach to which was often too simplistic for so complex an undertaking. As Kondratev himself explained in a paper requested by one of the new leader’s, Stalin’s, closest associates, Viacheslav Molotov:
The planned management of our national economy is one of the main aims. But planned management … requires good plans. In practice, when we draw up the plans we very often misunderstand the problems and opportunities involved. This is why our planning is so full of enthusiasm, why it wastes too much energy, why it is so isolated from economic policy in practice, and why it produces [unpleasant] surprises. 16
Idealism and enthusiasm by themselves could not direct the economy efficiently. Indeed, they sometimes combined to undermine it. Meanwhile the urban labour force needed for industry, though increasing, was still less than it had been in 1916. 17
In 1926 agricultural production showed a welcome increase, but in 1927 it declined quite sharply. 18 The recurring problem of peasant production undermined Stalin’s faith in the free-market prescription of the New Economic Policy and, together with problems experienced in getting industry launched, built up momentum for a root-and-branch solution. This took shape in 1928—9. It involved the forced collectivization of peasant farming. Huge collective farms were the closest the Communists would go to replicating the highly productive great estates of the pre-revolutionary era without compromising their ideology. Peasants, including the richer ones, known as kulaks, whom Stolypin had encouraged, would no doubt object, but they would have to be suppressed. Collectives, with their economies of scale, would release a mass of surplus rural labour for industry, especially if industry could equip them with tractors and other farming machinery. The workless peasants would be directed to urban centres to serve as grist to the wheels of industry. Capital was essential, of course, and this was scarcer in Russia than it had ever been. What little surplus the budget could scrape up would have go to foreign companies willing to provide essential technical expertise in turbine construction and the like. The bulk of the capital would have to be found by squeezing resources out of the population at large, by forcing them to produce significantly more value than they consumed. They would be paid largely in promises.
Propaganda would stoke up enthusiasm, especially among the young, and raise peoples’ eyes above the bleak immediate prospects to a rosy future in which all needs would be met and grand projects realized. Force would also be needed, not only to coerce the peasants, but also to find labour for essential projects in unpleasant places — but opponents of the governments’ schemes and social misfits could be put to useful work for nothing.
As the programme was climbing into top gear, in February 1931, Stalin made a powerful speech invoking Russian patriotism. The old Russia, he said, had been beaten by the Mongols, defeated by the Turks and Swedes, occupied by the gentlemen of Poland-Lithuania, worsted by French and British capitalists and by the Japanese. They had done down Russia because Russia had been afflicted by backwardness —
military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political, industrial and agricultural backwardness. They beat… [us] because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. Such is the law of the exploiter — to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism …
We are fifty or a hundred years behind the developed countries. We must catch up that distance in ten years … Or we shall be crushed. 19
Retrospect credits Stalin with prescience. The Soviet Union was indeed to face a life-and-death crisis ten years later, but he had in mind the hostility of the world in general. He could hardly have foreseen the triumph of Hitler so early in 1931. Other, gentler, means to the desired end might well have worked, but force was quicker. Stalin was in a hurry.
Both the achievements and the costs of Stalin’s revolution are reflected in the census data. Painstaking research into the demographic history of Russia in the 1930s concludes that by 1937 the urban population had increased by 70 per cent, and by substantially more than that in the industrializing areas of Siberia. This reflected a strategic plan to shift the centre of economic gravity towards the east. On the other hand the rural population had shrunk by 3.4 million souls. 20 The number of ethnic Russians rose, although even their numbers fell in 193
3, as did the Tatar, Azerbaydzhani and Circassian populations. The Ukrainian and Kazakh populations fell more sharply. By 1937 there were 29 per cent fewer Kazakhs than there had been in 1926, and 15 per cent fewer Ukrainians. The Kazakh losses are attributed to collectivization and cross-frontier migration; the loss of 5 million Ukrainians is also blamed on collectivization, and to a dreadful famine of 1931-2 which was associated with it. 21
The massive mortality has been ascribed to genocide, but the charge is unfounded. 22 True, the regime disliked political nationalists, and in 1931 it shot a former premier of the puppet regime set up by the Germans in 1917 and then some Ukrainian Communists suspected of nationalist leanings. 23But Ukrainians were by no means the only nationality to suffer, and it was not Ukrainians but kulaks and anyone who stood in its way whom the regime targeted. Nor was the famine as such man-made, as has been alleged. The regime had no interest in dead peasants and starving subjects. It wanted live and active workers. Rather than being deliberately induced, the famine was the consequence of mistaken policy, ruthlessly implemented.
Kulak opposition to collectivization had been anticipated, and was confronted by force. Peasants — by no means all of them kulaks — slaughtered their livestock rather than let the collectives have them, precipitating a meat shortage that was to last for decades. They and anyone else who impeded the imposition of the programme were carted off in droves to detention camps. Worse still were the grain-procurement quotas and the punitive ways in which they were enforced. Peasants had long been used to hiding grain from requisitioning squads, but things had reached such a point where there was virtually nothing left to hide; and the quotas demanded were set unrealistically high. The impetus to what turned out to be a major human disaster was the regime’s attitude.
It was interested in industry-building, in infrastructural development and in resettlement. It was not interested in agriculture except as a means of dredging up resources to realize its ambitions. Peasants not prepared to work under direction in a collective should find jobs in towns. If they opposed the new system in any way they should be arrested and forced to work on government projects. But the combination of ideology, bureaucracy and enthusiasm created havoc in Ukraine. The Communist agronomist who had initiated the tractor-station programme described the consequences of the policy to create gigantic collective farms:
The policy … was implemented in an exceptionally bureaucratic and senseless manner. Collective farms of 55 to 100 hectares were suddenly transformed, without adequate technical preparation, into collectives covering tens of thousands of hectares … In some cases, ‘to simplify matters’, a whole region containing hundreds of villages was to declared to be a single collective. All boundaries between village lands were eliminated; and the entire expanse … [was] divided into farms of several thousand hectares each — without any regard to where the villages were actually situated. [Hence] cattle and agricultural machinery were scattered about over scores of kilometres. 24
Many of the planners, as well as those charged with implementation, were raw recruits to their allotted specialisms. Furthermore, behind them loomed authority demanding results. In these circumstances, what enthusiasm could not achieve desperation often did. Inevitably things went wrong, but scapegoats were readily found to take the blame. Hundreds of thousands of peasant families were uprooted from their ancestral villages along with various others who had run foul of authority. Many of them were transported to distant and unpleasant places which were short of labour. As chaos mounted, reports arrived in the Kremlin of a growing death toll, and of crowds of destitute and starving peasants clogging the roads. In 1932 the cities were also on the brink of starvation. The worst year of all was 1933, when it has been calculated that deaths exceeded births by almost 6 million. 25 Then the crisis turned. The chaos subsided; conditions began to ease. Meanwhile a combination of censorship, propaganda and clever public relations muted concern about what had happened and diverted attention from where responsibility lay
The mood of urban Russia in the 1930s was surprisingly optimistic. The focus was on youth and hope and the building of a socialist paradise. Living conditions verged on the impossible. There were huge shortages and lengthy waiting-lines outside the shops. Many goods that were obtainable were shoddy. Only the black market, patronage networks and protektsiia, the deployment of friendships and favours, made life tolerable for many people. But for the young migrants there was hope and a sense of purpose. Mundane labour suddenly became heroic. A burly miner called Stakhanov, who cut more coal in a shift than others, was lauded like an heroic knight of old. It became possible for young people to rise, to exercise authority, to wield power. They were building a new and better world. As in Mussolini’s Italy, there was a sense of creating a new kind of man - in this case Homo sovieticus. 26
The results were visible, tangible. Impressive new buildings were rising, new cities in process of creation, new infrastructure under construction. In Moscow, new brick-and-concrete blocks of worker housing replaced ramshackle wooden building in the suburbs, overshadowing neglected monasteries and churches. A handsome underground-railway system was excavated beneath the city, equipped with deep, fast escalators and stations like palaces with their marble halls and striking statuary — palaces for the people. Across the continent new cities rose up with vast industrial plants. New canals were being cut, dams constructed, rivers diverted, and ‘palaces of culture’ erected in towns and even villages for the entertainment and instruction of the people. On dozens of different sites across the vast terrain, virgin lands were turned into swarming ants’-nests of activity as the regime mobilized the population to meet the overambitious targets that would at last realize the country’s immense potential. On one site just east of the Urals the whole amazing process could be observed in little —
a strange combination of soaring ambition, driving energy, faltering and sometimes highly defective execution, large-scale building, hard and primitive living conditions, idealism and ruthlessness.
Magnitogorsk at first conveys a confused series of impressions: heaps of bricks, timber, sand, earth and other building material, thrown about in characteristically Russian disorderly fashion; long lines of low wooden barracks for the construction labourers; towering new industrial structures, with belching smokestacks … The town is a product of ultramodern industrialization, yet … one’s first impression is that of an Asiatic city. 27
Never before had so many resources and so much human energy been concentrated to realize impossibly ambitious plans in so short a time. The achievement was great; so was the human cost. The labour for big projects in the wilderness was found from the twin offspring of revolution: the enthusiastic believers and the sullen hordes of the oppressed. The cheerleaders of the enthusiasts were the Young Communists, who, in the words of an American observer at Magnitogorsk, were
always ready to fling themselves into the breach if some part of the building were lagging, willing to work under the hardest material conditions without reckoning hours … [But] at the other end of the scale were the unfortunate kulaks … who, after being stripped of their possessions, were sent here, sometimes with their families, to work for the success of a system that is based on their ruin.
The working day was long, wages low, rations minimal, the barrack-type housing primitive and sometimes miles away from the site. It was ‘the same story at the Chehabinsk tractor plant, at the Berezniki chemical works, at the Dnieprostroi hydroelectric power plant’ and, for that matter at the heavy-machine-building plant at Sverdlovsk, the iron and coal complex at Kuznetsk in central Siberia, the agricultural-machine factory at Rostov-on-Don, the motor-vehicle plant at Nizhnii-Novgorod. 28
At the same time an 8o-mile canal was being cut to link Moscow directly to the Volga; others were cut across the Kola Peninsula to Murmansk in the far north, and to connect Lake Onega (and hence Moscow) with the White Sea. This last project, where conditions were among the harshest, was built by political prisoners, enemies of th
e regime. The Gulag system, which had its origins in the penal colonies of tsarist Russia, was much expanded; the camps were more rigorously run than their forerunners, and the death rate in the worst of them was very high. The largest lay north and east of Yakutsk, near the Kolyma goldfields. 29
The first Five Year Plan, introduced in 1929, did not quite meet its ambitious targets, but its purpose was ultimately achieved. Modern industries were built. Moreover, the new factories and steel plants could be used to make tanks and various other types of military hardware — and much of this capability was well out of reach of potential enemies to the east as well as the west. Even though consultants had occasionally been hired from the West, and some contracts were even let to Western companies, the operation was inefficient by Western standards — sometimes highly inefficient — but the regime could use media manipulation to assign blame for these failings and encourage improvement.
In the last months of 1930 the newspapers announced the execution of dozens of economists, engineers and other specialists. Arraigning real or supposed opponents of Stalin’s rule on trumped-up charges of ‘wrecking’ was found to be an effective way of explaining failures and attributing blame to others than the leadership. Such travesties of justice also served a psychological need of the public - that of identifying ‘the sinful’, the supposed authors of all their woes. As the pace of construction heated up and more shortcomings came to light the ‘show trial’was used more frequently, along with the Party purge.
In a series of trials in the later 1930s, prominent Party men including economic planners were tried publicly and executed, some for transparently false economic as well as political ‘crimes’ such as plotting to market butter containing broken glass. A public ever eager to see those in authority diminished was heartened by the spectacle, but the victims included scapegoats for the failures of industrialization. Ukrainians were not disappointed to see most of the provincial Party leaders fall. And as the purges cut wider they created huge possibilities for promotion. In 1938 the armed services were purged. Perhaps because of his long-standing acquaintance with German generals under military co-operation agreements, Tukhachevskii, the Chief of Staff, was shot, along with most of the senior commanders. Their replacements were raw and, on the whole, less able.