Five-Year Plans and the Congress of Victors

We are 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or they will crush us.

 

Joseph Stalin, February 1931

 

The aim of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan, launched in 1928, was to achieve industrial and military self-sufficiency. The Plan did indeed produce impressive results, especially in heavy industry, and saw the birth of new industrial cities. Within a decade, the Soviet Union had surpassed all international competition in terms of industrial development, with the exception of the US. Proceeds were fed into the military and further industry at the expense of necessities and consumer goods, and so ordinary households felt no benefit from Stalin’s successes.

 

 

The First Five-Year Plan

 

Every factory and enterprise was allocated targets, and individual directors went to every length to not only meet them, but to exceed them. They cut corners with the welfare of their workers: health and safety was of the lowest priority. Machines broke from misuse, accounts were falsified, and hijacking competitor’s consignments was routine practice. Punishment for these misdemeanours was nothing compared to the failure of not meeting their targets which could cost them their livelihoods or, if accused of purposefully ‘wrecking’ or sabotaging their enterprises, their freedom or even their lives.

 

Alexi Stakhanov, the record-breaking miner, at work

 

Workers who overachieved were exulted. The miner Alexi Stakhanov became a household name when, in September 1935, during the Second Five-Year Plan, he mined fourteen times his allocated quota of coal in a single six-hour shift. He was held up and paraded as the model of Soviet efficiency and even adorned the cover of Time magazine. Workers everywhere were encouraged to follow his lead and become ‘Stakhanovites’. It later emerged that Stakhanov had considerable help in achieving his feat but nonetheless Stakhanovites were well rewarded. Their success intensified the pressure for directors to exceed their targets by considerable margins.

 

Work on the White Sea Canal, 1932

 

By 1935, a million citizens were residing in Stalin’s forced labour camps, gulags. 100,000 gulag inmates were set to work on building the White Sea Canal, a 140-mile stretch of canal linking Leningrad and the White Sea to the north. Working in brutal conditions with a mortality rate of almost 10 per cent, its completion in August 1933, four months ahead of schedule, was heralded as a feat of Soviet ingenuity and engineering. It was rarely mentioned that at 11-ft deep it was unusable by all but the smallest of boats.

 

 

Congress of Victors

 

The Seventeenth Party Congress, held in the Kremlin between 26 January and 10 February 1934, was hailed as the Congress of Victors, such was the Stalin’s apparent satisfaction at the illusory successes achieved by collectivisation and the First Five-Year Plan. Since dubbed ‘the Congress of the Condemned’ – of its 1,996 delegates, 1,108 (56 per cent) would be arrested within three years and, of those, a third executed. The Congress proved to be the highpoint in the career of rising Bolshevik star, Sergei Kirov. Kirov, the dashing forty-seven-year-old boss of Leningrad and Stalin favourite, spoke gushingly of the Party’s achievements and life in Stalin’s Soviet Union: ‘Our successes are truly tremendous. The devil knows – to put it humanly, one wants just to live and live.’

 

Sergei Kirov, c.1919

 

Many within the Party viewed Kirov as a potentially more humane and moderate party leader and several of them approached him during the congress urging him to replace Stalin. Kirov refused to be drawn in and even made the fatal error of reporting the conversation to his boss.

On the last day of the Congress, voting delegates had their say on the composition of the new Central Committee. Delegates had to cross out the names of those they were voting against. Kirov attracted only three negative votes, while Stalin had at least one hundred and, according to some sources, up to 300. The voting slips were anonymous so Stalin had no idea who had voted against him but it fed his paranoia that he was surrounded by traitors.

A year earlier, Kirov had successfully opposed Stalin on the issue of Martemyan Ryutin, a former Party colleague. Ryutin had written a series of pamphlets, ‘Ryutin’s Platform’, condemning Stalin’s collectivisation and fast-paced industrialisation; and urged the removal of the ‘grave digger of the Revolution and Russia’. Kamenev and Zinoviev were among its readers. Ryutin was arrested and Stalin demanded the death penalty but Kirov held that an ‘Old Bolshevik’, one of Lenin’s earliest followers, should not be executed. Stalin was not yet in the position where his every word was acted upon without question and Ryutin was spared. Eventually as ever, his will was done. Ryutin, after five years’ imprisonment, was shot in 1937 and Kirov would soon be dead. Kamenev and Zinoviev who failed to report Ryutin were again expelled from the party and exiled east.