The People’s Economic Achievements Exhibition in northern Moscow is Russia’s answer to Disney World, but without the rides. Founded by Stalin in 1935, it was laid out on the grandest of scales – the site is bigger than Victorian London’s Great Exhibition; bigger than Monaco, in fact. I first came here as a child with my parents in the 1960s when the VDNKh, as it was known, was at the height of its glory. Proud guides showed us foreigners around the extravagantly decorated pavilions showcasing the achievements of Soviet industry and technology: Engineering, Astronautics, Atomic Energy, Radio-electronics, and another 78 of them for good measure. The broad vistas were crammed with visitors. The towering entrance arch, visible for miles, was crowned with the most famous statue of the Stalin era: the monumental Worker and Peasant (1937), holding aloft their gleaming hammer and sickle in a soaring gesture of confidence in the future.
By the 1990s, however, the pavilions were empty, the plaster falling from the walls; and the 80-foot statue lay in pieces on the ground. Huge sections of its outer skin – steel fingers, muscular arms and naked breasts – had fallen away, its inner skeleton on view to the world, like the bones of a decaying dinosaur. The 6-foot-high letters that spelt out ‘CCCP’ – ‘USSR’ – for all to see and admire were dumped forlornly behind the parapet of the roof. Only in the last two years has the site been tidied up and restored to something like its original condition. The VDNKh makes a neat, if depressing, metaphor for the rise and fall of the vast industrialisation programme the Soviet Union embarked on from the late 1920s, and intended this place to commemorate and glorify. By 1928, Russia had overcome the immediate threats of civil war and foreign invasion. The revolution had been consolidated, and the USSR was gaining grudging recognition from the international community. But its economy was in a mess. While Lenin’s New Economic Policy had encouraged small traders and revived some branches of production, heavy industry had regressed. The large-scale strategic sectors – manufacturing, iron and steel, machine and shipbuilding, electrification, mining and armaments – had not recovered from the chaos of the collapse of tsarism and the depredations of the First World War. The Soviet Union’s weakness made it vulnerable, and the need for radical measures was becoming ever more apparent.
In 1928, Stalin announced the first Five Year Plan for industrialisation, describing it as a new revolution from above (initiated by the party leadership), just as vital as 1917. Industrialisation was a central theme in his speeches for the next four years. It was, he warned, a matter of national survival:
The history of Russia is1 one of continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans, by Turkish beys, the Swedish lords, the Polish and Lithuanian nobles and by the British and French capitalists. The reason they beat her was her backwardness, her military, cultural, political, agricultural and industrial backwardness … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this distance in ten years … Either we do it, or they will crush us!
The rhetoric surrounding the drive for industrialisation was couched in the terminology of a military campaign. The fears of Russian vulnerability, the spectre of powerful enemies at the gates, were centuries old, and Stalin’s appeal tapped into them to mobilise the nation in the face of overwhelming odds.
Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want this, you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time. You must adopt a truly Bolshevik pace in building up its socialist system of economy. There is no other way. That is why Lenin said on the eve of the October Revolution: ‘Either we overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries, or we perish!’
The ultimate test of that prediction would come soon enough, with the Nazi invasion of 1941; and the outcome of that terrible reckoning would provide at least a partial justification of Stalin’s methods in the intervening years.
The destruction of the civil war had reduced industrial output to a mere 13 per cent of its pre-war level – Trotsky admitted ‘we have destroyed the country to defeat the Whites2’ – and the anti-Communist blockade by the Western powers was strangling Moscow’s access to trade and investment. So industrialisation would have to be financed by heroic sacrifices on the part of the workers, and by the ruthless confiscation of wealth from the former privileged classes. During the first Five Year Plan, real wages fell dramatically. A continuous working week was introduced. Millions of prisoners from the labour camps, and members of the Komsomol (the Young Communist organisation) were used as unpaid labour. The Five Year Plans, with their rigid system of central control and economic planning, set impossibly high targets and punitive timetables in every sector of industry. Yet the Soviet people rose to the challenge.
The first two Plans, between 1928 and 1937, achieved genuinely impressive results, with the emphasis on heavy industry. The Soviet Union became the world’s second largest industrial producer, behind only the United States. Output doubled and gigantic new industrial centres were built almost from nothing. The River Dnieper was harnessed by a hydroelectric dam, fuelling plants that employed half a million people. The 140-mile Belomor Canal, linking the White Sea to the Baltic, was built by slave labour, at the cost of 9,000 lives. The lightning-fast construction of the gargantuan blast furnaces of Magnitogorsk in the Urals inspired a novel about the world record for pouring concrete, a feature film, and the iconic music – Vremya Vperyod (Time Go Faster) – that would introduce Soviet television news bulletins right up to 1991.
The surging energy of those years, the frantic drive to modernise Soviet industry, made machines and technology favoured subjects for the nation’s culture. Music like Alexander Mosolov’s driving, pounding overture The Iron Foundry (1926), with its splendid socialist bombast, all jagged rhythms and musical onomatopoeia, reflected the urgency of the industrialisation campaign. Novels such as Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (1925) and Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Forged (1936) became best sellers. With no experience of modern industry, Russia was forced to recruit Western specialists to help build the thousands of tractors and tools needed to mechanise agriculture through collectivisation. But when targets were not met, they quickly became convenient scapegoats – branded ‘wreckers’ and saboteurs – whose well-publicised trials reminded the people that foreigners were still the enemy. In March 1933, five British engineers from the electrical contractor Metropolitan-Vickers were arrested on charges that they had used their cover as businessmen to spy on the USSR. After intensive interrogation by the Cheka secret police (now known by the acronym OGPU), one of the men, Leslie Charles Thornton, signed a remarkably detailed confession:
All our spying operations3 on U.S.S.R. territory are directed by the British Intelligence Service, through their agent, C.S. Richards, who occupies the position of Managing Director of the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Export Company, Ltd. Spying operations on U.S.S.R. territory were directed by representatives of the above-mentioned British firm, who are contractors, by official agreements, to the Soviet Government, for the supply of turbines and electrical equipment and the furnishing of technical aid agreement. British personnel were gradually drawn into the spying organisation after their arrival on U.S.S.R. territory and instructed as to the information required.
The trial of the five men met with a furious reaction from Britain. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin declared that the accused were innocent, and MPs demanded the breaking off of commercial and diplomatic relations with Moscow. The British press was unanimous in condemning the Russians for torturing confessions out of their prisoners. ‘This is an ordeal4 conducted in the name of justice,’ the Observer declared, ‘but bearing no resemblance to any judicial proceedings that civilisation knows.’ The Soviet prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, making the first of what would be many high-profile appearances in Stalin’s political trials, was described by the Daily Express as a ‘carroty-haired, red-faced Russian [who] spat insults … and pounded the table’. And The Times fretted, ‘Great anxiety is felt as to what is happening to [the prisoners] in prison between the sittings of the court. Those long acquainted with Chekist methods think their lives are in danger.’
The response from Moscow was to publish declarations from all the Britons declaring that they had never been treated with greater politeness and courtesy. Allan Monkhouse’s statement was positively gushing:
They were extraordinarily5 nice to me and exceedingly reasonable in their questioning. My examiners seemed first-rate men who knew their job. The OGPU prison is the last word in efficiency, entirely clean, orderly and well organised. This is the first time that I have ever been arrested, but I have visited English prisons and can attest that the OGPU quarters are much superior. The OGPU officials showed every concern for my comfort …
But the accused engineers withdrew their ‘confessions’ in court. London threatened a trade embargo and the case ended with three of the men being deported and two others given short jail sentences.
For native Soviet workers, the bullying was much worse. Breaches of work discipline could be punished by death, or the withdrawal of ration cards, which sometimes meant the same thing. Workers who criticised the pace or the purpose of industrialisation schemes – driven by distant bureaucrats in Moscow with no understanding of the reality on the ground – were labelled ideologically unsound. Relentless purges instilled constant anxiety – a great motivating factor, as the playwright Alexander Afinogenov pointed out in 1932 in his remarkably outspoken play Fear:
We live in an era of great fear6 … The overriding motivation for 80 per cent of Soviet citizens is fear … the workers are called the masters of the country now, but their mind is afraid: the manual labourer develops a persecution complex, constantly striving to catch up and do better, gasping for breath in the endless race for production.
Unlike the Metropolitan-Vickers case, show trials of Soviet citizens rarely ended with token sentences. In the so-called Shakhty trial of March 1928, 53 coalmine managers whose pits had failed to meet the party’s production targets were accused of deliberately sabotaging the Soviet economy. They were alleged to have conspired with ‘class enemies’ inside the USSR7 and hostile governments abroad to undermine the country’s progress towards socialism, a charge that was classed as treason and subject to the death penalty. On 13 April, Stalin told the politburo that ‘this counter-revolutionary group of bourgeois “experts” [the defendants] carried out their work for five years, receiving instructions from the anti-Soviet organisations of international capital … For five years this counter-revolutionary group of “experts” was engaged in sabotaging our industry, causing boiler explosions, wrecking turbines and so on. And all this time we were oblivious to everything …
The reason the authorities were oblivious to the defendants’ sabotage was almost certainly because it did not exist; the failure to meet production quotas was most likely the result of incompetence and outdated equipment. But the state needed scapegoats for its economic failings and it needed high-profile punishments pour encourager les autres. Five of the Shakhty defendants were executed and 44 others sent to the Gulag. The new crime of ‘economic wrecking’ was added to the Soviet penal code as part of Article 58 (Counter-revolutionary activity), punishable by death for the offender and ten years in jail for his relatives.
Two years later, another show trial was deemed to be necessary, and this time leading Soviet economists and engineers were put in the dock. They were charged with belonging to a shadowy ‘Industrial Party’ backed by the governments of France and Britain for the purpose of overthrowing the Soviet regime. The defendants were said to have plotted to sabotage industry and communications in strategic areas in order to pave the way for an invasion by foreign forces. Again, five were sentenced to death and the rest sent to the camps. The following month, Stalin told the Congress of Socialist Industry that they must draw the correct lessons from the ‘prolific growth of wrecking activities’ in the country: ‘The underlying cause8 of wrecking activities is the class struggle,’ he told the conference. ‘The class enemy furiously resists the socialist offensive … We must remain vigilant in the battle against capitalism.’
To help keep the people striving to fulfil the Five Year Plans, Soviet propaganda created a new national mythology. Its heroes were the workers themselves, and they were celebrated in literature, art and music. Trotsky boasted9 that the New Soviet Man would ‘point out places for mountains and for passes, change the course of rivers and lay down rules for the ocean’. Almost immediately, a popular song hit the streets, picking up on Trotsky’s words, deifying the working man:
Ships sail and bridges rise10 aloft.
You alone made the buildings,
You change the rivers’ course
This is not the work of god,
But the work of you alone …
There is no higher power than the working man.
The unmistakable message was that workers must live up to the godlike image that had been created for them. By the mid 1930s, the focus was on a new breed of superheroes, the shock brigades, who would lead the charge of industrial expansion. The semi-official bard of the revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky, was again on hand to give them a resounding launch:
Onwards, shock brigades11!
From workshops to factories!
Today the revolutionary fights
On the barricades of industry!
Puff out our collective chest …
And deep into the Russian darkness
Hammer in the lights
Like nails …
Pour out electric power
Like a river.
Keep up, keep up!
Outpace the Five Year Plan!
Onwards, with no rest days;
Onwards, with a giant’s steps.
The Five Year Plan
Complete in four!
Now socialism will rise,
Genuine, real, alive.
‘March of the Shock Brigades’ is Soviet agitprop at its best – in Russian it is marvellously inventive poetry with a powerful, intoxicating message. With the state urging the people to fulfil the Five Year Plans in four years – and then even in three – the concept of ‘socialist competition’ drove factory to race against factory; worker against worker. In August 1935, Alexei Stakhanov, a coalminer in the Donbass region, mined 102 tons of coal in a single shift, vastly more than his 7-ton quota. The following month, he mined a staggering 227 tons. A public holiday was named in his honour; films and songs lauded him as the new breed of worker hero. Stakhanov was promoted to manage a coalmine and then to help run the industry as a state official and member of the Soviet parliament. In December, his exploits earned him a place on the cover of Time magazine.
The Soviet authorities used his example to encourage others to exceed work quotas and break production records. ‘Stakhanovite’ workers were rewarded with better pay, apartments and holidays; some were given the untold luxury of a car. In reality, many of their achievements were embellished or even made up. It seems that while Stakhanov did indeed mine the remarkable amounts of coal claimed by the authorities, he was assisted during his shift by a team of other miners and newly introduced extraction machinery. But his feats and those of other record breakers allowed Stalin to raise production targets for everyone else and to denounce those who criticised the breakneck pace of industrialisation. The Stakhanovites were paraded at mass gatherings and lauded personally by Stalin. At a Kremlin banquet in May 1938 in honour of the ‘miracle’ of Stakhanovism, he could hardly restrain his enthusiasm:
Here, sitting at this table12, are Comrades Stakhanov and Papanin. They have no scientific degrees, but who does not know that in their work in industry Stakhanov and the Stakhanovites have upset the existing standards, which were established by well-known scientists and technologists, have shown that they were antiquated, and have introduced new standards that conform to the requirements of real science and technology? There you see what so-called miracles can still be performed! … I give you a toast to Lenin and Leninism! To Stakhanov and the Stakhanovites!
Tatiana Fyodorova was a member of the Komsomol and grew up idolising the workers of the shock brigades. She became a Stakhanovite worker herself when her team set a record for tunnel construction in building the Moscow metro. Her speech of thanks in 1932 reflected the energy and enthusiasm the movement inspired:
We live so well13, our hearts are so joyful, in no other country are there such happy young people as us, we’re the happiest young people, and on behalf of all young people I want to thank our party and our dear comrade Stalin for this joy that we have.
Tatiana Fyodorova was personally congratulated by Stalin. Even 60 years later, after all the revelations of the iniquities of the Stalinist system, she continued to express her admiration for the ideals of Stakhanovism and the man who created it:
Stalin set a task, build this or build that … and thanks to the fact that people trusted him and this enthusiasm of young people, it was possible. Remember this was a country where people were illiterate, were in virtual darkness, wore birch-bark shoes. Even now I think it’s something out of a fairy tale. How was it possible in one of the most difficult times to raise these great construction sites? It was only possible through the unity of the people, and the love of the people for their idol. Because for us Stalin was an idol.
The Five Year Plans continued, remarkably, until 1986. The first thing I saw plastered on the street walls when I visited Moscow as a child was Lenin’s exhortation that ‘Communism is socialism plus the electrification of the whole country!’ By then, the dead hand of centralised planning had plunged the Soviet economy into crisis. But even as early as 1934, when the party’s so-called ‘Congress of the Victors’ met to celebrate the achievements of collectivisation and industrialisation, the reality behind the myth was tarnished.
The lot of the ordinary Soviet worker was far from the glamorous life of the Stakhanovites. Jobs and labour were abundant, but wages low. Crash industrialisation had doubled the urban population and cities were straining at the seams. Little new housing was being built, so the state squeezed workers into smaller and smaller spaces. Members of the former bourgeoisie, the so-called ‘non-people’, were evicted to make way for the workers. To maximise space, a system of communal living was introduced, with several families billeted in one apartment, sharing kitchens, bathrooms and even bedrooms. The kommunalka concept echoed the Bolshevik rejection of ‘bourgeois’ values such as private property and the nuclear family. In practice it was a nightmare. Feuds broke out between residents, property was stolen and murders committed. With police informers everywhere, people felt spied on in their own homes. Mistrust was rife; tensions rose. Workers on big industrial projects were forced to live in tents.
As a further measure of control, the party introduced internal passports in 1932, listing the bearer’s ethnic origin, employment and social status. A new system of compulsory residence permits – the so-called propiska – made it hard to change address or move to desirable cities like Moscow and Leningrad (as Petrograd was now known). And all the while, as the average city dweller struggled, Communist Party officials in the nomenklatura accumulated privileges, from dachas to cars, fancy goods and food. Popular resentment was bubbling beneath the surface. Stalin’s drive for industrialisation had modernised the national economy at the cost of widespread misery for the Soviet people. It provoked both admiration and furious condemnation, often split on generational lines. The British diplomat Gareth Jones summed up the clash in an article he wrote for the London Evening Standard in March 1933:
A few days ago14 I stood in a worker’s cottage outside Moscow. A father and a son, the father a skilled worker in a Moscow factory and the son a member of the Young Communist League [Komsomol], stood glaring at one another. The father, trembling with excitement, lost control of himself and shouted at his Communist son: ‘It is terrible now. We workers are starving. Disease is carrying away numbers of us workers and the little food there is is uneatable. That is what you have done to our Mother Russia.’ The son cried back: ‘But look at the giants of industry which we have built. Look at the new tractor works. Look at the Dneprostroy [a giant dam]. That construction has been worth suffering for.’ ‘Construction indeed!’ was the father’s reply: ‘What’s the use of construction when you’ve destroyed all that’s best in Russia?’