The Red Flag: A History of Communism
Page 22
Kravchenko recognized that he was one of a minority. He was a typical activist in the new Stalinist order. From working-class origins (his father had taken part in the 1905 revolution) and educated under the new regime, he was determined to bring modernity to his country. He was precisely the sort of person Stalin intended to occupy the vanguard of his new revolution. Stalin saw socialism as a something that would be spread from the ‘advanced elements’ to the ‘backward’ by a committed, quasi-military force. But post-revolutionary socialism was also intimately linked with industrialization. With his slogan ‘There are no fortresses in the world that working people, the Bolsheviks, cannot capture’, he deliberately transferred the radical Communism of the revolution to the industrial front.43 Industrialization was a semi-military campaign, designed to defend the USSR against aggressive imperialists. As Stalin declared with a certain prescience in 1931, ‘We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must close this gap in ten years. Either we achieve this, or they will do us in.’44
The First Five-Year Plan was drawn up in 1928, and marked the beginning of the end of the market economy. But the term ‘plan’, with its scientific connotations, is misleading. Whilst it certainly bristled with figures and targets, they had often been plucked out of thin air by Stalin himself and were impractically ambitious.45 They are better seen as appeals for heroic effort. Stalin was encouraged in his ambitions by Marxist economists, who applied Engels’ curious notions of dialectical materialism to economics: utopian plans, they claimed, were entirely feasible because Marxism had proved that revolutionary ‘leaps’ forward were a verifiable natural phenomenon and therefore equally applied to the economy.46 The old ‘bourgeois’ science, they insisted, had been discredited; a new ‘proletarian’ science, which took account of the will-power of the masses, would replace it. This, then, was a militarized ‘command’ economy based on theorized wishful thinking, not a genuinely planned one.
The Stalinists’ first objective was to render the party and the state suitable instruments for their socialist offensive. Officials had to be loyal and true believers; any ‘rightist’ sceptics were to be removed. In practice, this meant purges, usually on the basis of class background. The Shakhty trial of ‘saboteur’ engineers in 1928 was designed to show how dangerous the bourgeois specialists were, and many were sacked or arrested.
However, the Stalinists hoped that their ‘revolution’ would be popular, and the next stage was for the suitably purged and re-energized party to mobilize the working class and poor peasantry. The sober bourgeois disciplines that Lenin had been so eager to impart under NEP were scrapped; the populist militarism of the civil-war era returned. Regular work was replaced by ‘storming’ (shturmovshchina) – working intensively to fulfil plans, usually at the last minute. The party organized ‘shock work’ brigades in which workers took ‘revolutionary vows’ to achieve production records. Money, partly because there was so little, partly because it violated ideological principles, was not much of an incentive. In many factories production ‘communes’ were created, where wages were shared equally, echoing the artel of old. Self-sacrifice and the achievement of socialism were to be reward enough.47
Workers, however, were given some incentives, even if they were not straightforwardly material ones: higher status, upward mobility and the opportunity to vent their fury against unpopular bosses. Stalin explicitly declared that his ‘Great Break’ would not just be an economic revolution but also a social one. Denunciations of bourgeois specialists were encouraged by the party, and detachments of reliable workers were sent out from factories to root out bourgeois and bureaucratic attitudes in government. The obedient and committed (as long as they were ‘workers’) had much to gain from these purges, for the regime was committed to replacing the bourgeoisie with a new proletarian ‘red’ intelligentsia. Indeed, this was an age of social mobility.48 Many of the Communists who came to rule the Soviet Union in its years of senescence, the so-called ‘Brezhnev generation’, retained an unflinching loyalty to the regime precisely because they had benefited so much from education and promotion during the 1930s.
The regime, however, was not content to target the bourgeois specialists; it also had its sights on the supposedly ‘bureaucratic’ Communist managers – the Shramms of the factory – whom it believed had become too close to the specialists. Stalin inaugurated a nationwide campaign of ‘self-criticism’ and ‘democracy’, which entailed bosses submitting themselves to popular criticism. In part, this was intended to put pressure on sceptical specialists and managers to fulfil the state’s ambitious targets. But there was also another motive: if workers were to ‘feel that they were the masters’ of the country, as Stalin put it, they would be more committed to a self-consciously revolutionary regime, and therefore to their work.49 This was not a return to the workers’ control of 1917, but even so, some workers, organized by the local party ‘cell’, were given more influence over the production process, whilst the bosses and specialists were the targets of criticism and could easily fall victim to charges of ‘sabotage’. As Kravchenko, who edited a factory newspaper at the time, remembered, ‘self-criticism’ was certainly manipulated, but was not mere rhetoric:
Within the limits of the party line, we enjoyed considerable freedom of speech in the factory paper… Nothing that might throw a shadow of doubt on industrialisation, on the policy of the Party, could see print. Attacks on the factory administration, trade-union functionaries and Party officials, exposés of specific faults in production or management, were allowed, and this created the illusion that the paper expressed public opinion.50
These strategies of mobilization had mixed success. Some do seem to have been enthusiastic shock-workers. They approved of the party’s revolutionary rhetoric, hated the old managers and specialists, and could expect privileges and favours from the regime. John Scott, a twenty-year-old American who went to work at the massive Magnitogorsk metallurgical complex in the Urals in 1931, remembered the war-like atmosphere and the spirit of self-sacrifice that it encouraged:
In 1940, Winston Churchill told the British people that they could expect nothing but blood, sweat, and tears. The country was at war. The British people did not like it, but most of them accepted it.
Ever since 1931 or thereabouts the Soviet Union has been at war… In Magnitogorsk I was precipitated into a battle… Tens of thousands of people were enduring the most intense hardships in order to build blast furnaces, and many of them did it willingly, with boundless enthusiasm, which infected me from the day of my arrival.51
Many others, however, saw the campaigns as a drive to force people to work harder for less pay.52 Stalin had hoped to finance industrialization by squeezing the peasantry; in reality it was workers who paid the real price, because the other half of the ‘Great Break’ – the collectivization of agriculture – was such an utter catastrophe. Workers were labouring harder for much less money: between 1928 and 1933 their real wages fell by more than a half.53
If the Bolshevik vanguard had some limited success in mobilizing the factories, its attempts to transform the countryside ran into almost universal opposition. This was hardly surprising, as collectivization amounted to a wholesale assault on the peasantry’s values and traditional way of life. It had, of course, long been Marxist doctrine that the smallholder peasant was ‘petty-bourgeois’, and that farms should ultimately be run like socialist factories. It was commonly believed that bigger was better; and collective farms made for greater efficiency through mechanization. But collectivization also became entwined with the party’s need to resolve the grain crisis. Collective farms, controlled by the party, allowed the regime to impose its power on the countryside and force reluctant peasants to produce, and relinquish, their grain for the cities.
Collectivization involved seizing land from ‘kulaks’, and this category swiftly expanded to include anybody who resisted joining the collective. The fate of the kulaks varied: some were imprisoned in the expanding prison
system (Gulag); others were given poor land; others were deported to towns to work in factories or on construction projects; many died on their journey to their place of exile. Unsurprisingly, the process of collectivization soon assumed the form of a new civil war – between the Bolsheviks and the peasantry. Some peasants, the young, poor, or former Red Army soldiers, saw advantages in supporting the campaign, but the vast majority were opposed. And as local party and Komsomol bodies began to falter from the end of 1929, the regime was forced to send out tens of thousands of urban worker-activists to bolster the collectivization campaign, a manoeuvre reminiscent of the Jacobin Revolutionary Armies’ expeditions to seize grain. These volunteers were convinced that they were on the right side of history, bringing modernity to the benighted masses. A member of a later detachment, Lev Kopelev, remembered their terrifying certainty:
I was convinced that we were warriors on an invisible front, fighting against kulak sabotage for the grain which was needed by the country, by the five-year plan. Above all, for the grain, but also for the souls of these peasants who were mired in lack of political consciousness, in ignorance, who succumbed to enemy agitation, who did not understand the great truth of Communism…54
Campaigns against religion were a central part of this ‘war’ for the ‘souls’ of the peasantry. After a period of harsh persecution during the civil war, the regime had established an uneasy modus vivendi with the Orthodox Church by the mid-1920s. However, with the ‘Great Break’ came a renewed assault. In 1929 all church activities apart from religious services were banned – from charitable work to church processions – but more violent attacks were also commonplace. Enthusiastic Komsomols and activists from the League of the Militant Godless engaged in acts of iconoclasm and vandalism, whilst church bells were melted down and valuables confiscated.55
Such campaigns only reinforced the conviction of most peasants that collectivization was a satanic assault on a moral, Christian way of life. One rumour, circulating in the North Caucasus in 1929, presented an apocalyptic prediction of the future under the collective farm:
In the collective farm… [they] will close all the churches, not allow prayer, dead people will be cremated, the christening of children will be forbidden, invalids and the elderly will be killed, there won’t be any husbands or wives, all will sleep under a one-hundred-metre blanket. Beautiful men and women will be taken and brought to one place to produce beautiful people… The collective farm – this is beasts in a single shed, people in a single barrack.56
Rebellions were widespread and women were often in their vanguard, aware that they would not be subject to the sort of immediate repression their menfolk would suffer. So, in January 1930 in Belogolovoe, a village in the Western region, eight Communist activists arrived at the church to take away the bell and were attacked by a group of local women, who beat them up and stopped them from continuing their work.57
The Bolsheviks were bound to win the war of collectivization through brute force, but they lost the peace. Profound resentment of the collective system remained. Peasants, who had been used to organizing work themselves, allocating land through a council of heads of households, were now obliged to obey the command of state officials. Although they were paid for their labour in principle, in practice wages came from whatever was left after all dues were paid to the state. With neither money nor autonomy as incentives to work, they responded to their masters’ demands with resentful foot-dragging. Kravchenko, then a member of a grain detachment, was shocked by the ‘appalling state of neglect and confusion’ on the farm he visited, and ordered the farm’s president to assemble the board:
In half an hour the men and women theoretically in charge of the collective were in the yard. The look on their faces was not encouraging. It seemed to say: ‘Here’s another meddler… what can we do but listen?’
‘Well, how are you getting along, collective farmers?’ I began, eager to be friendly. ‘So-so… Still alive, as you see,’ one of them said in a surly voice.
‘No rich, no poor, nothing but paupers,’ another added. I pretended that the irony was over my head.58
Stalin’s response was much more vindictive. Determined to maintain industrialization, which required grain exports and food for workers, he ordered that extremely high grain targets be set in 1931 and 1932, despite poor weather. Between 1932 and 1933 he launched a savage attack on allegedly ‘enemy’ groups within the peasantry, who were waging a ‘silent war against Soviet power’. Through all this upheaval, Stalin insisted on taking grain from the countryside, even if it was the seed grain for the following year, and families hiding food were punished severely. The result was famine. A letter from a peasant in the Volga region in 1932 to the authorities revealed the despair and devastation in the countryside:
In the autumn of 1930 the land was all ploughed and the following spring sown, and the harvest OK, a good one. The time came to gather the grain, the collective farm workers reaped the harvest without any hitches… but it came time to deliver to the state and all the grain was taken away… And at the present time collective farm workers with small children are perishing from hunger. They don’t eat sometimes for a week and don’t see a piece of bread for several days. People have begun to swell up with hunger… And all the males have departed, despite the fact that in the near future the spring planting is coming.59
Stalin’s callous pursuit of industrialization at the cost of immense suffering led to a devastating famine, in which an estimated 4–5 million died.60 This was one of the most destructive events in Soviet history, and one of the first of many disasters caused by the dogmatic agrarian policies of Communist regimes.
The regime was faced with a serious crisis. Food was running out in the cities and strikes were breaking out. The harsh exploitation of the peasantry was partly responsible for the shortages, but so was the wastefulness of the new command system as a whole.
During the early years of the Stalin era, a group of journalists working for Krokodil (The Crocodile) – an officially sanctioned satirical magazine – came up with an inspired hoax. After securing clearance from the secret police (the OGPU, the Cheka’s successor) and Stalin’s economic trouble-shooter, Lazar Kaganovich, they created a fictitious industrial organization, which they called ‘The All-Union Trust for the Exploitation of Meteoric Materials’. They then set about furnishing it with essential items: they tricked the State Rubber Stamp Trust into issuing them with a stamp, and printed impressive stationery, complete with a fake list of directors drawn from comic characters in Russian literature. Suitably stamped letters were sent out to various industrial organizations raising the exciting prospect of a new source of special, high-quality metals – meteorites. The All-Union Trust for the Exploitation of Meteoric Materials, the letter claimed, had established, scientifically, that meteorites would fall in various locations in Central Asia. They knew, they claimed, precisely when and where they would land and could supply the ensuing detritus to favoured partners in Soviet industry. Industrial officials throughout the USSR took the bait. Letters of interest flooded in. The Furniture Trust offered office refurbishment in exchange for the precious metals; the State Phonographic Trust proposed phonographs and records to entertain the expeditionary parties as they travelled through the Central Asian wilderness to recover the meteoric material. Armed with these and more substantial offers, they were granted a large credit by the State Bank. But they went a step too far when they approached the Deputy Commissar for Heavy Industry for help in constructing a factory to process the metals. The Deputy Commissar, less credulous than most, smelt a rat and locked them in his office. Eventually the OGPU were summoned, and they, in the spirit of the hoax, made a show of pretending to arrest the meteoric entrepreneurs. Much to the hoaxers’ chagrin, however, Kaganovich’s sense of humour did not stretch to allowing them to publish the story – it would have been too humiliating for the Soviet Union’s industrial elite. Instead the officials’ punishment was limited to ridicule within the confines of
the corridors of power.61
This story, told by a Krokodil cartoonist to Zara Witkin, an American engineer working in Moscow at the time, reveals much about the nature of the economic system created in the early Stalinist period. The command economy might best be described as a ‘hungry state’ – its appetite for resources, whether raw materials, labour, or industrial goods, was limitless.62 The logic of this system explains why the industrial officials were so easy to dupe. Charged with fulfilling wildly ambitious plans to produce heavy industrial goods, they were blithely unconcerned about costs and practicality, because they simply could not go bust. Profit and loss were immaterial. As long as there was a chance that the meteoric materials were as good as promised, they had little reason to hold back. The ravenous industrial economy swallowed everything that came within reach; it is no surprise that it salivated at the prospect of the meteoric metals.
The First Five-Year Plan built some of the great industrial behemoths of the Soviet economy, such as the metal plants in Magnitogorsk in the Urals and Kuznetsk in Siberia. According to official figures, output doubled in many parts of heavy industry. However, this was achieved at enormous cost. The unrealistic targets, the ‘storming’ labour methods, and the deployment of semi-trained workers and engineers created shortages, waste and chaos. ‘Self-criticism’ and ‘class struggle’ were also damaging practices which soon escaped party control. In Leningrad (the renamed St Petersburg/Petrograd) as many as 61 per cent of shock-worker brigades were electing their managers, and bosses complained that workers were refusing to obey them.63 The Plan was declared to have been achieved after four years, but in reality 40 per cent of plan targets were unfulfilled.64