By 1921, a new mobilizational elite controlled most of the territory of the former Russian Empire. In the Far East, the borders of the new system would reach those of the Russian Empire in 1922, and Mongolia, and even Xinjiang, would start drifting into the Soviet orbit. The main losses were along the western borderlands, where Finland, the Baltic States, parts of White Russia, Poland, and large parts of Ukraine remained outside the Soviet Union.
Now the Communist Party had to start planning how to build from these vast and diverse territories a modern, socialist society. This chapter will consider the evolving plans and structures of that new elite, which prepared it for the rapid and violent modernization drive of the 1930s. But to understand the real context of Soviet-style modernization, and some of its violent, contradictory, and surrealistic outcomes, it is important to remember how archaic was the environment in which the Communist Party launched its plans for a brave new world.
In the 1920s, many parts of the Russian heartland seemed quite as archaic as the remotest regions of Siberia or Mongolia. In Russian villages, Soviet officials and journalists keen to build a modern socialist society sometimes felt as if they had been transported back through the centuries. Here is a random snapshot of the world they encountered, taken from a newspaper report on medical practices in Tver province in 1925. Anisia Ivanovna of Briuchevo village in Tver province was described by the local paper as a healer (znakhar’), also skilled in witchcraft (koldovstvo) and exorcism (izgnanie besov).
If a husband quarrelled with his wife, if a cow failed to conceive, if a person or an animal fell ill, or if a young man broke up with his girlfriend, people would turn to “Mother Anisiushka” for help. Before they even entered her house, she would greet them with: “You are possessed of the devil! Quickly, say a prayer!” She would raise her skirt over her head, climb up on the oven, or crawl under a table, emerging once the visitor had recited a litany of prayers. Only then did she inquire about the reason for the visit. She would make the visitor drink a cloudy brew that was supposed to exorcise the devil, or she would give him a potion to mix in his tea or feed to his infertile cow. The villagers persisted stubbornly in the belief that there was something “holy” about Anisia, and they would travel fifteen to twenty kilometres to seek out her assistance.1
Such practices and ways of thought were not necessarily typical of Russia's villages by the 1920s. Village life had been touched by modernity in too many ways – by the arrival of Red army units during the Civil War, by primary schools and army recruitment, or by changes in the outlook of village members who worked for wages in nearby towns. But nor were such ways of thinking entirely un-typical, and they may have become more common as trade collapsed during the Civil War, and villages became more self-sufficient. For most peasants, the 1920s meant returning to a more traditional world, after a decade of chaos and war. Like all regions of Inner Eurasia, Russia in this period seemed awkwardly balanced between the Neolithic and modern worlds, between a world of organic energy and traditional religion, and the rapidly emerging world of fossil fuels and modern science.
The astonishing denouement of the late 1920s would end the temporary truce between the modernizing goals of the new Soviet elite and the traditional lifeways of those they ruled. The world of the reindeer herder and the peasant would be turned upside down in the 1930s by the tsunami of Stalinist modernization. But to trace the source of these turbulent changes we must focus on the heartland, and particularly on Moscow, from where the storm of Soviet industrialization would eventually be unleashed.
With a new government, a new ruling elite, victory in a brutal civil war, and a widespread belief that the Soviet Union really was building a brave new world, the 1920s were a decade of heady experimentation in politics, in economics, in art, in theater, in sexual relations. Yet members of the Communist Party never lost the bracing sense of danger they had experienced during the Civil War, as internal and external threats gathered during the 1920s.
In the spring of 1921 the Party faced a crisis as severe as any in the last four years. Victory created new challenges, because the Party could no longer demand sacrifices that had seemed justifiable during the Civil War.
Divisions suppressed during the Civil War broke out within and outside the Party. Revolts erupted in the cities, the countryside, and even in the army. Many Party members wanted to persist with War Communism at any cost. But, once again, Lenin was the realist. Instead of persisting with wartime policies on planning and the market, or adopting Trotsky's plan for militarization of the economy, he forced through a radical shift in policy that conceded many of the demands of peasants, workers, soldiers, and nationalists. By doing so, he kept the Party in power.
These changes, in the spring of 1921, replaced War Communism with what is known as the New Economic Policy (NEP), a strange mix of direct and market-driven mobilizational strategies that would shape Soviet society until 1929. Their introduction initiated a decade-long standoff between the new ruling elite and a still traditional society. That standoff would eventually be resolved in favor of the new ruling elite, because by the late 1920s the Soviet ruling group was as united, as disciplined, as ruthless, and as skillfully led as any ruling elite in Inner Eurasia's past.
The building of a new and highly disciplined ruling elite had begun in the revolutionary underground before 1917, and continued during the Civil War. Leading Party members such as Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii saw the militaristic discipline of the Civil War years as part of the process of building socialism. The Party, they believed, was not just fighting a class war. It was simultaneously building a society that was free of the corrupting and divisive forces of capitalism and the market, and managed by a disciplined, powerful working-class elite that would directly mobilize society's resources. By the end of the war, market forces did indeed count for almost nothing. Inflation had destroyed the monetary system. Banks, factories, railways, and most large and middle-sized enterprises had been nationalized, and were run by government agencies, no longer to make private profits but to build a socialist society. The trade in grain, the single most important commodity in the country, was nationalized (at least in law) and the government tried to control the supply of food to the towns and the army. To many within the Party, it seemed that the Party's discipline and its clear sense of direction had built a rational system of planned resource mobilization and allocation that was replacing the irrationality of the market.
Less idealistic Party members understood that the extreme methods of the Civil War were unsustainable. As we have seen, the economic role of governments had increased in all combatant societies, not because of ideology, but in response to the extreme pressures of fighting the first major war of the fossil fuels era. That required total mobilization. With an end to the fighting, the costs, wastefulness, and inefficiencies of central planning became unsustainable. The revolutionary government had kept armies in the field, but it could no longer supply the cities, the factories, and the villages. By the end of 1920, agricultural production had fallen to 64 percent of the level in 1913, and in 1921 it would fall further, causing a country-wide famine. Industrial production had fallen to 20 percent of the 1913 level, and transportation to just 22 percent, while imports accounted for just 2 percent of the 1913 level and exports for 0.1 percent.2 The economy was breaking down. Fuel shortages left houses unheated, while factories, railways, and farms stopped working, threatening food supplies to the cities. Food shortages drove townspeople back to the villages and the cities were emptied. Petrograd's population shrank from 2.5 million in 1917 to 600,000 in 1920, while the industrial proletariat, the class on which the Communist Party hoped to found a new society, shrank by about a third. Those workers and soldiers who still had ties with their native villages headed back to the countryside, where at least they could grow some food. Between 1 and 2 million members of Russia's former upper classes had emigrated, taking their wealth, their know-how, their capital, and their connections with them, while 7–8 million people had died as a result of fighting, repression, and disease, and another 5 million would die from famine in 1921–1923.3
Black markets, and networks of kinship, connections, and patronage supplied what the government could not provide. That meant that, in order to maintain the structures of War Communism, the government had to put more and more effort into preventing illegal trading. It even tried to prevent the small-scale retail trade of “bagmen”: individuals, many of them desperately poor, who carried sacks of supplies into the towns for sale. By the end of the Civil War, “cordon detachments” of troops lurked outside the major towns and at railway stations, stopping and arresting any they suspected of being small traders, and confiscating the goods they carried, often for their own use.
That such coercive methods of rule could not last became clear as the government began to lose its grip on the countryside, the towns, and eventually the army itself. Despite ferocious punishments for desertion, about half of all draftees deserted between 1918 and 1920.4 They did so because of appalling conditions at the front, and in order to get back to their villages and protect their families and their land. Early in 1921 peasant armies recruited from former soldiers controlled large parts of Tambov province, and there were peasant uprisings in Siberia and the lower Volga provinces. In February 1921, the Cheka claimed there were 118 separate peasant uprisings.5 In the towns, which the Bolsheviks regarded as their natural constituency, strikes began in the winter of 1920–1921, protesting at harsh factory discipline and food shortages. Nominally, food prices had increased almost 8,000 times between 1917 and 1921.6
Then cracks appeared in the army itself. Most shocking was the Kronstadt mutiny in March 1921, because the sailors of Petrograd's Kronstadt naval base had been among the Party's earliest and most loyal supporters. The mutineers, mostly from rural backgrounds, demanded a return to the more democratic Soviet structures of late 1917, the legalization of other socialist parties including the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Anarchists (banned since mid-1918), and an end to restrictions on free trade between the towns and the countryside. Delegates to the tenth Party Congress, which was meeting in Moscow when the mutiny began, boarded trains to Petrograd and took part in crushing the Kronstadt revolt on March 17. This was a brutal but delicate maneuver because many of the soldiers who crushed the revolt supported its aims.
In the spring of 1921, Lenin persuaded the Party to make one more U-turn. The policies introduced at the tenth Party Congress had two main elements: the Party made concessions to society as a whole, but increased discipline at the top. The government gave up its attempt to manage the entire economy and allowed a partial return to market forces, but within the Party it tried to maintain the high levels of elite discipline characteristic of the Civil War years. The New Economic Policy represented a partial demobilization below the level of the Party and government, but a tightening of discipline within the new ruling elite.
Lenin proposed to the tenth Party Congress that it should replace forced grain requisitions with a tax on grain production. That tax, he argued, should be set at a much lower level than the quotas of the Civil War era, and it should be levied progressively, its percentage rising in accordance with the size of peasant farms. These measures were introduced first in the central provinces, but by the end of 1921 they had been extended to the rich grain lands of the periphery, in Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and Siberia.7 In the 1920s as a whole, the average level of rural taxation was probably less than 10 percent of average peasant income, a relatively low level of fiscal mobilization from the countryside.8 At first the new tax was levied in kind, but after the monetary system stabilized in 1924, it was collected in cash.
Such measures could not have worked without freeing up trade, so the cordon detachments were abolished, and peasants and townspeople were allowed to exchange goods at market prices. Capitalism made a modest return. Many small rural enterprises were leased back to private entrepreneurs, often their former owners, who were allowed to employ up to 20 workers and produce goods for profit. Peasants were also allowed to lease land and employ laborers, though under clear limitations. Though the former capitalist classes had been expelled, the market was back and a new class of peasants and petty entrepreneurs or “Nepmen” was invited to open for business.
Despite grumbling within the Party, the changes worked, politically and economically. Open opposition to Soviet rule evaporated within a year, and production revived quickly. By 1926, agricultural production had reached pre-war levels.9 Recovery was particularly rapid in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Industry recovered less rapidly, but much faster than most Soviet experts expected. Even the Soviet Union's small fossil fuels sector grew fast. The war had shown the importance of oil, and by 1928, Soviet oil production exceeded the output of 1913. But, with limited industry of its own, the Soviet government used oil mainly to earn foreign currency so it could buy foreign machinery. By the late 1920s, oil was the most important single earner of foreign currency, and because the Soviet government was less concerned than capitalist oil companies with short-term profits (the Hungarian economist János Kornai would have said its budgets were “soft”), its trading organizations could cut prices ruthlessly to sell Soviet oil.10
Recent calculations suggest that by 1928, Soviet national income stood at about 111 percent of the 1913 level (calculated using 1939 borders), while national income per capita was at about the same level as in 1913.11 Foreign trade recovered more slowly; by 1928 it had approached just 50 percent of the 1913 level.12 There is wide room for error in such calculations, but they justify the conclusion that recovery was largely complete by 1928.
The Party made parallel concessions to nationalism, and these would prove more permanent than its economic concessions, at least in law, if not always in practice. In December 1922, it reincorporated many of the territories of the former Russian Empire within a “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (USSR). The federal structures of the USSR were designed to manage regional nationalisms within the new order. Unlike the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union gave formal recognition to many different national and ethnic groups at different levels, from that of a Union Republic, to many different types of “Autonomous Regions.” In its first incarnation, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics consisted of four republics: Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the recently formed federation of Transcaucasia, which included the Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijan republics. In July 1923, a Soviet Constitution was adopted. Formally this gave all members the right to secede. A unified governmental structure was created, with two federal parliamentary bodies, a Soviet of the Union, elected by the Union-wide Congress of Soviets, and a Soviet of Nationalities, representing different republics and ethnic groups. The Soviets, in turn, established an Executive Committee, which created an all-Union Council of Ministers to rule the USSR, under the watchful eye of the Party. Each republic also had its own government, though the real powers of republican governments were limited.
The Soviet Constitution was formally adopted by the second All-Union Congress of Soviets in January 1924. Later that year, three new republics joined the Union: Moldavia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Below the level of the Union Republics many subordinate ethnic regions were created, with varying degrees of autonomy, such as the Autonomous Republic of Tajikistan, which was initially part of Uzbekistan, but became an independent republic in 1929. Within the Russian Republic, Autonomous Republics and Regions included the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Bashkir, Tatar, Komi, Yakut, Buriat, and Karelian Republics. The Kalmyk Autonomous Region was created in 1920, with lands on the western shores of the Volga between Astrakhan and Volgograd; in 1935 it became an Autonomous Republic.
Many in the Communist Party disliked these federal structures because they saw nationalism as a bourgeois phenomenon that had no place in a socialist republic. However, Lenin and Stalin (the Commissar for Nationalities) insisted during crucial debates in the early 1920s that nationalism was a reality that had to be managed.13 Nationalism, they insisted, could be used to build socialism at the local level, and they were probably right. During the Civil War, Bolshevik sympathy for national movements had helped defuse anti-Bolshevik feeling among non-Russians, and gain support among many who would otherwise have had no sympathy for the Party. Lenin and Stalin also knew that, as long as the Communist Party retained its internal discipline and its monopoly on political power, the federal forms of the Union were unlikely to threaten its cohesion.
For the most part, as Lenin and Stalin had argued, the federal structures of the USSR did defuse nationalist sentiment, without posing a serious threat to the Union until the 1980s, when the unity and the power of the Communist Party itself was breaking down. Once that happened, the USSR's federal structures began to channel resentment at a failing system into nationalist forms, exposing the dangers of the compromises with nationalism made in the 1920s. Soviet federalism had built the idea of nationality into the very foundations of the Soviet political system. Indeed, over time, the structures of the Soviet Union and the policies of the center would create new “etnoses” or ethnic identities, and Soviet cultural and educational policies would provide them with new national languages and historical and cultural traditions.
[B]y the end of the 1920s people who had not really thought in national terms before the First World War found that they now had a national language, a national culture, national histories and national political structures – in short, they had become members of a nation.14
The second component of the NEP was increased elite unity and discipline. At the tenth Party Congress, Lenin insisted that, even as it relaxed its control over society, the Party should not relax its grip on itself, or on what he called, in a precise military metaphor, the “commanding heights” of society. In the expectation of new crises after a temporary lull in the international class war, he insisted that the Party must maintain its steel. When some Party members argued for more democratic procedures as the reward for victory, Lenin introduced a resolution on Party unity that banned all forms of factionalism under the threat of expulsion. Article 7 of the 1921 resolution “On Party Unity” stated that,
In order to ensure strict discipline within the Party and in all Soviet work and to secure the maximum unanimity in removing all factionalism, the Congress authorizes the Central Committee, in cases of breach of discipline or of a revival or toleration of factionalism, to apply all Party penalties, including expulsion.15
Many who voted for the new rules understood their dangers. Karl Radek wrote,
I feel that it can well be turned against us, and nevertheless I support it … Let the Central Committee in a moment of danger take the severest measures against the best Party comrades if it finds this necessary … Let the Central Committee even be mistaken! That is less dangerous than the wavering which is now observable!16
Radek himself would be expelled under the new law in 1927, purged in 1937, and executed in a labor camp in 1939.
The government also kept its hand on the key economic levers, the “commanding heights” of the economy: large industrial enterprises including fuel and metal production, foreign trade, banks, railways, and shipping. Together these sectors accounted for 75 percent of industrial output. And of course the government kept its grip on the army, the police, on educational institutions, and on culture. In 1922 it created Glavlit, the institution through which it would manage literature and the arts.
The decisions taken in the spring of 1921 created the world's first modern mixed economy. Centralized state structures controlled the government itself, the army, banking, foreign trade, heavy industry, the railroads, and large-scale manufacturing, while small-scale industry and the country's small-scale farms were mostly managed by peasants and petty entrepreneurs, whose products were traded on retail markets. The system's future would turn largely on the emerging balance of power between the state and the private sectors, between direct mobilization and market forces. Lenin and his colleagues hoped that this framework would allow the Party's two class allies, the proletariat and the peasantry, to trade with each other, creating a virtuous cycle that would generate rapid economic growth and drive the building of socialism. This was Lenin's version of the smychka, the yoking together of the peasantry and proletariat to build socialism. Lenin's smychka would be symbolized in the hammer and sickle of the Soviet flag. But building socialism would turn out to be much more complex and require a very different kind of smychka, one much closer to that of the Tsarist era.
Introducing the New Economic Policy kept the Party in power and allowed an economic revival. But the Bolsheviks were not content just to retain power. Most Party members were activists. They wanted to build a new society. Many were deeply disillusioned by what they saw as a retreat to capitalism after the dangers and achievements of a civil war fought to build socialism. They hoped to revive the revolutionary élan of the Civil War era, roll back the temporary concessions to capitalism, and start building socialism. The challenge was particularly formidable because, after seven years of war and civil war, Soviet society was in many ways less modern than the society ruled by Nicholas II.
Backwardness was most apparent in the countryside. This was still a peasant society, more so than in 1913 because of the breakdown of markets and supplies, migration back to the villages, and the disappearance of large commercial and noble estates. In 1914, 4 percent of peasant households had more than 13 dessiatins of land and 13 percent were landless. By 1921 the peasantry was more homogeneous. No one controlled more than 13 dessiatins and only about 5 percent of the population was landless.17 Twenty-five million small to middling peasant households now controlled most of the land. In fact, rural society was more archaic than these figures suggest because the revival of the rural commune meant that land redistributions were more frequent in the 1920s than in the late Tsarist period.
The NEP redistributional commune retained the worst features of the prerevolutionary commune. Periodic redistributions reduced incentives to improve land; there were endless disputes about land distributions; strip farming wasted labor time in moving among strips (sometimes more than one hour per day). Compared to these arrangements, prerevolutionary communal agriculture was much more flexible.18
There was little improvement in the technological level of farming. Though 90 percent of all farms now used metal plowshares and mechanical horse-drawn harvesters, and threshers were used on perhaps 50 percent of the land, still, as late as 1928, three quarters of the area under grain was sown by hand, and almost half was harvested with sickles and scythes.19 In the 1920s, yields on peasant farms in the Soviet Union were barely higher than those of medieval England.20
Industrial growth in the 1920s depended mainly on the restoration of pre-war productive capacity, except in a few areas where entirely new technologies appeared, such as electrification and diesel engines. In 1927/8 human and animal energy still accounted for about 70 percent of all energy consumption, whereas the equivalent figures for Germany, the UK, and the USA at the same time were 14 percent, 5 percent, and 10 percent, respectively.21 Soviet society remained largely within the organic energy regime.
What would it mean to build a socialist society in such an environment, and protect it from capitalist aggression? This question was debated in Party committees and meetings throughout the 1920s in what is known to western historians as the “Great Debate.”22 The discussions within the Party are extraordinarily interesting even today because they were carried on with intelligence, intensity, and urgency, and explored some fundamental questions of what came to be known in the West as development economics.
At the risk of extreme over-simplification, this section will summarize those debates, using ideas developed in earlier chapters about mobilizational strategies and their implications. Though contemporaries would not have seen it like this, I will argue that behind these debates there lurked mobilizational alternatives we have seen many times before.
Under traditional strategies of direct mobilization, governments mobilized using political levers, with little concern for efficiency or costs, as long as enough was mobilized to do what had to be done. Mobilization meant exerting pressure, and efficiency was a secondary concern. Under commercial or market strategies of mobilization, governments mobilized indirectly. They created institutional and policy environments that encouraged entrepreneurs to innovate and generate growth, in the expectation that governments would eventually profit from productivity-raising innovations and the increasing wealth of a prosperous capitalist economy. Efficiency did matter in commercial environments, because making profits in competitive markets meant using resources more efficiently than one's rivals. And competitive markets constantly tested efficiency by measuring the opportunity costs, or the costs foregone by making one choice rather than another. Markets were powerful mobilizers because, by encouraging efficient use of resources, they could make resources go further, and they encouraged innovation. The difficulty for governments was that these alternative strategies of mobilization often conflicted with each other. For example, markets could flourish only if governments let them, by surrendering more direct and coercive methods of control over the economy.
In the nineteenth century, a new driver of growth had emerged: the fossil fuels driver. This was the main source of the astonishing power and wealth of modern industrialized societies. Rephrased in the language of these arguments, the question facing the Soviet government in the 1920s was: which combination of drivers should it deploy to build socialism and defend itself against the hostile capitalist powers that surrounded it?
Russia's long and relatively successful experience of direct mobilization helps explain why the Bolsheviks, who were in any case ill-disposed to markets and capitalism, appreciated the possibilities of more direct, state-led strategies of mobilization. As we have seen, the extreme pressures of wartime, in which mobilization was generally more important than efficient mobilization, also encouraged direct mobilization of resources. Though conventional economic wisdom suggested that industrialization was unlikely without flourishing markets, in practice direct mobilization turned out to work surprisingly well with the fossil fuels driver. Once the technologies needed to exploit fossil fuels were available, it turned out that they could be mobilized and deployed effectively by either direct mobilization or through markets, particularly in countries like the Soviet Union, which had vast potential reserves of fossil fuels and other modern resources.
None of this was obvious in the 1920s. Instead, many Party members feared that technological backwardness would sabotage the socialist project. Marx had insisted that socialism could not be built without high levels of productivity. Yet the Bolsheviks had launched the October Revolution in peasant Russia, in the hope that Russia's backwardness would prove irrelevant after a worldwide revolution that would create new and highly industrialized socialist allies, perhaps in Germany or even in a socialist USA. The converse of this argument was that without an international revolution a socialist Russia was unlikely to survive. In the middle of the October uprising, Trotsky said to the second Congress of Soviets, “If the rising of the peoples of Europe does not crush imperialism, we will be crushed … that is unquestionable.”23 After the failure of the German revolution in 1923, world revolution seemed to have been postponed indefinitely. The Soviet government would have to either abandon the socialist project or try to build socialism under conditions that Marx would surely have deemed impossible.
Every debate in the 1920s turned on this dilemma. Party members rejected the idea of abandoning socialism with little argument. The Civil War had toughened the Party, and its members were unwilling to surrender the fruits of a bitter victory. That left the question of what a socialist government should do while waiting for a world revolution that seemed further and further away.
In general terms, the answer was perfectly clear. If Russia lacked the economic and technological preconditions for building a viable socialism, its government would have to start creating them. The needs of defense pointed in the same direction. Both Marxism and common sense predicted that more powerful capitalist rivals would eventually pressure the new communist state to compromise with or surrender to the capitalist world system. To survive such pressures, the Soviet government would have to build up the heavy industrial base needed to support a modern defense establishment. Politics pointed the same way. To the extent that the Party's power depended on the proletariat, it made sense to undertake a program of industrialization that would increase the number of industrial workers. Somehow, the Soviet government would have to deploy modern fossil fuels-based technologies, and it would have to do so fast.
Above all, it was necessary to build a strong army. Mikhail Frunze, who replaced Trotsky as Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs in January 1925, argued aggressively for rearmament, and even for a remilitarization of society after the partial demobilization of the early 1920s. In “The Front and the Rear in a Future War,” published in 1925, he argued that the task was
to strengthen general work on preparing the country for defense; to organize the country while still at peace to quickly, easily, and painlessly switch to military rails. The path to this goal lies in mastering in peacetime the difficult path to militarizing the work of the whole civil apparatus … [a task he believed would be made easier by] the state character of the fundamental branches of our industry.24
Frunze died in October 1925, to be replaced by Stalin's close ally, Marshal Voroshilov. But most of the Soviet Union's military leaders shared Frunze's belief that military strength required rapid industrialization.
Soviet leaders understood as well as their Tsarist predecessors that, in a highly competitive world, survival meant industrialization. However, while the Tsarist government had cautiously explored a capitalist route to industrial development, the Soviet government ruled out such a path for ideological reasons. But what alternatives were there? Was there a strategy of rapid industrialization that was also compatible with socialism? Was there a strategy that could avoid the class exploitation that communists saw as capitalism's besetting sin?
Within the Party, two broad answers emerged during the Great Debate of the mid-1920s.25 The succession struggle that followed Lenin's death in January 1924 polarized discussion and made the debates seem clearer and sharper than they were in reality. But for the historian, this polarization has the advantage of clarifying the main positions in this fundamental debate about the future of the Soviet Union.
The first position came to be associated, loosely, with the name of Bukharin. In retrospect, it would be described as the “right-wing” strategy. Its defenders argued that NEP itself offered a path to socialist industrialization. The rapid growth rates of the early 1920s lent plausibility to their argument. As long as a socialist government held the commanding heights of Soviet society (including the most important position of all, the government itself), it could exploit the dynamism of market forces, but turn them to the advantage of socialist rather than capitalist development. The government could encourage peasants and small entrepreneurs to produce surpluses and trade them with the industrial sectors controlled by the state, at prices controlled by and advantageous to the state. Peasants and petty entrepreneurs would use the money they earned to purchase consumer goods produced by the state. Using the many powerful economic levers available to it, the socialist state could ensure that the terms of trade favored the socialist sector, whose profits would then be plowed back not into the conspicuous consumption of capitalists, but into socialist investment for the benefit of society as a whole.
The NEP strategy had many attractions. It required no new upheavals. It was compatible with the Leninist smychka, as it depended on sustained exchanges between peasants and proletarians. And compromise with capitalism at home might allow a truce with foreign capitalism, during which the Soviet government could purchase much needed foreign technology and expertise.
But could the NEP strategy work? Opponents, such as the economist Preobrazhenskii, pointed to serious difficulties. First, this was a strategy for slow growth, because the pace of growth would be dictated by the most backward economic sector: peasant agriculture. The NEP strategy meant developing at the leisurely pace of “the peasant's nag,” as Bukharin once put it in a phrase that would haunt him later. Few Party members found this prospect attractive or inspiring. Second, the NEP strategy gave excessive power to the peasantry, the more backward class within the smychka. If they did not like the prices the government offered for peasant produce, they could surely refuse to market grain, as they had during World War I. In this way, a dissatisfied peasantry could starve the towns and slow economic growth. Third, the strategy threatened to hand the economic initiative to a new class of petty capitalists or rich peasants, the “kulaks” or “tight-fists.” Bukharin gave rhetorical ammunition to his opponents when he encouraged peasants to “get rich.” As petty capitalists flourished, would not foreign capitalists gain increasing influence, turning Russia once again into an economic colony of the capitalist world as it sought foreign loans and technologies? Didn't this mean surrendering all that the Party had fought for during the Civil War? Finally, Bukharin's strategy favored consumer goods over producer goods, so it offered little prospect of a rapid buildup of heavy industry and armaments production. It threatened to leave the Soviet Union militarily vulnerable for decades.
As Gregory argues, there is plenty of evidence that markets did indeed control the terms of trade during NEP, despite the government's grip on the commanding heights. “The two main indicators of market-resource allocation were the absence of an organized system of planning and the setting of most prices by markets.”26 The government encouraged the formation of large trusts, which allowed some degree of monopoly pricing for industrial goods. Yet during the so-called “scissors crisis” of 1923 (so-called because industrial prices rose while agrarian prices fell, creating a scissors-shaped graph), even the government had felt obliged to tweak prices in favor of the peasantry, to ensure that exchanges continued between city and countryside. Private markets determined most retail prices, limiting the government's control of the economy in general and reducing its mobilizational power.27
Perhaps most damaging of all was Preobrazhenskii's argument that the rapid growth rates of the early 1920s could not continue. Recovery after the Civil War was cheap because it meant bringing back into production plant and farmland that already existed. But further growth would mean building new factories and modernizing farms. That would require much more investment than could be supplied from the profits generated through the slow growth of consumer industries. Where would those funds come from?
To many, these criticisms seemed fatal. Yet what alternative was there to the NEP strategy of industrialization?
Opponents of the NEP strategy were in a hurry. Industrial development had to be rapid for ideological as well as military reasons. As long as Soviet society hovered in the socioeconomic anteroom of NEP, the door to capitalism would remain ajar. The alternative, which came to be known as the “left-wing” strategy, was to push on more forcefully towards industrialization, particularly in heavy industry and armaments. As for funding, Preobrazhenskii admitted with disarming honesty that socialist industrialization, like capitalist industrialization, would be an exploitative process, requiring the exaction of “tributes.” Lacking colonies of its own (a claim that might not have impressed the citizens of Central Asia or the Caucasus), Preobrazhenskii argued that Russia would have to find these tributes from its own, predominantly rural population. It would have to embark on what Preobrazhenskii called (in a deliberate echo of Marx's “Primitive Accumulation of Capital”) “primitive socialist accumulation.” Translated, that meant taxing the peasantry hard, a mobilizational strategy familiar to all Tsarist governments. In effect, it meant direct mobilization of labor and resources on a scale massive enough to pay for the technologies, the mines, the factories, the infrastructure, and the fossil fuels needed to build a modern fossil fuels-driven economy.
How could a socialist government exact resources from the peasantry? Within the structures of the NEP, the simplest way was to adjust the price differential between industrial and rural goods. That meant lowering the price that the government – already a monopoly purchaser of grain – paid for rural produce. But the strategy also implied a harsher attitude to richer peasants and entrepreneurs, and a systematic favoring of the socialist industrial sector. Preobrazhenskii argued that resources mobilized through such methods could pay for a rapid buildup of heavy industry and defense industries, and for the large amounts of equipment and technology that would have to be purchased from abroad. The rulers of Muscovy would have found much that was familiar in such arguments. But the left-wing strategy also had a distinctively ideological component, for it was argued that a powerful defense sector would enable the government to encourage and even support socialist revolution elsewhere, in order to break out of its international isolation.
In its own way, the anti-NEP strategy was as risky as the NEP strategy. Above all, it threatened to break the socialist smychka by antagonizing the 80 percent of Soviet citizens who were peasants. The peasant uprisings of 1921 had shown the risks all too vividly. Faced with lower prices for their produce, peasants might rebel, or just refuse to market their surpluses. That would threaten grain shortage in the towns and a breakdown of internal trade. Something like this had already happened during World War I, and again in the “scissors crisis” of 1923, when grain supplies to the towns fell short of requirements, and the government had to back down and pay more for peasant-produced grain and produce. To put it more generally, the left-wing strategy seemed to require more mobilizational pressure than the government had been willing or able to apply in the early 1920s. Could the government exert such pressure, even if it was willing to try? That was a political rather than an economic question.
At the beginning of NEP, the government's weakness in the countryside seemed self-evident. The decline had begun under the Tsarist government, whose abandonment of redemption payments demonstrated its declining fiscal power. In 1913, taxes and rents probably accounted for about 10 percent of peasant farm incomes, whereas in the early nineteenth century they may have accounted for nearly 50 percent. A decade later, under the new mobilizational regime of the NEP, there were no rents, and taxes accounted for only about 5 percent of peasant farm incomes. Another measure of Soviet fiscal weakness and peasant prosperity is that peasants were consuming more of their produce and marketing less. In the mid-1920s, peasants marketed only 16–17 percent of what they produced, in comparison with the 22–25 percent they had sent to market before 1914.28 From the government's point of view, falling grain procurements measured a decline in its mobilizational power over the most important resources of a largely agrarian economy: those produced in the villages. One consequence was that foreign trade, which had been dominated before the war by grain exports that generated much foreign revenue, did not recover to pre-war levels. In the 1920s grain exports were just 25 percent of the pre-war level.29 The Soviet government had a weaker grip on the grain harvest than its Tsarist predecessor, while the re-ruralization that had taken place during seven years of war and civil war meant that rural resources now made up a larger proportion of economic output than before the war. It seemed that the Soviet government lacked the mobilizational power needed to carry through the left-wing strategy of industrialization.
In the late 1920s, a combination of economic changes, panics about foreign threats, and changes within the Party itself steered the Party towards a violent and coercive resolution of these complex challenges.
As long as growth rates seemed satisfactory, the Bukharinite strategy remained official government policy. But by 1926, as production approached pre-war levels, signs appeared of the slowdown in industrial growth that Preobrazhenskii had predicted. In 1926 and 1927 more and more Party members began to doubt whether the NEP strategy could fund rapid industrialization.
International events intensified the pressure. In May 1927, a diplomatic crisis with Britain showed how quickly the Soviet Union might find itself at war with its capitalist opponents. The government began planning more seriously for industrial growth. Gosplan, the state planning body created in 1921 to take over control of the economy from Vesenkha, had been tinkering with economic plans since the early 1920s. In 1927, the government committed to an ambitious five-year plan, to be launched in 1928. It also embarked on several large and expensive prestige projects including a massive hydroelectric scheme on the Dnieper river, and completion of the Turksib railway linking Siberia with Central Asia through Semirechie. These commitments were made before the government knew how to fund them.
As the government's ambitions soared, the problem of funding became more urgent. As a first step, the government reduced the prices it paid for grain procurements in 1927, and raised taxes on private trade and the activities of wealthier peasants, the kulaks. Bukharin opposed these changes, warning that peasants would stop marketing surplus produce as they had during World War I. Early figures on the marketing of the 1927 harvest seemed to prove him right. By January 1928, peasants had put only 300 million poods of grain on the market, in contrast to the 428 million poods marketed by January 1927.30 Bukharin argued that the government would have to back down and raise the price it offered for grain to avoid starving the towns.
But Stalin, by now the most powerful figure in the Party, pushed back. He was convinced there was fat in the peasant economy, which could be squeezed out with increased fiscal and even political pressure. And he was not entirely wrong. Siberian peasants in particular had prospered in the 1920s and a French visitor to the region reported being told by local peasants that, “in 1926, 1927 and 1928 we had so much grain, so much bread, that we did not know what to do with them.” So Stalin insisted on low government procurement prices. And, as Oleg Khlevniuk argues, he had learned from Lenin (whose death mask he kept in his office) the tactic of using extreme policies to weaken moderates.31
In January 1928, Stalin took the Trans-Siberian railway to Siberia and the Altai region, where harvests had been particularly good, and harried local officials into collecting the grain quotas despite resistance. Taxes on kulaks were raised sharply in April.32 Party activists were ordered to use criminal sanctions against hoarders if necessary. In July 1928, Stalin even talked of exacting tribute, using the medieval term “dan’.” He added, with disarming frankness,
The matter of which I am speaking is an unpleasant one. But we would not be Bolsheviks if we glossed over this fact and closed our eyes to this, that without an additional tax on the peasantry, unfortunately, our industry and our country cannot make do in the meantime.33
In a private letter, Bukharin complained that Stalin was returning to the “military-feudal exploitation” of a Chinggis Khan.34 This was more than an interesting analogy. Marx's labor theory of value implied that in capitalist societies, profits do not arise from equal exchanges, as argued in conventional economics. Instead, they represent a sort of tribute, or dan’ in Stalin's phrase. Capitalist profits represent the veiled form that tribute-taking assumes in capitalist societies.35 As Preobrazhenskii had argued, socialist societies, too, would have to take resources through “primitive socialist accumulation.” The difference was that those resources would be used not to benefit the rich but for society as a whole. These arguments, traceable, ultimately, to Marx's labor theory of value, would provide, for many, a theoretical justification for the harshness of Stalinist rule.
In mid-1928, Party officials, many of whom had taken part in the grain requisitioning campaigns of the Civil War, understood the signals, as did peasants: the forcible methods of War Communism were back in fashion. Not even Preobrazhenskii had envisaged such a decisive turn from market mobilization to direct mobilization. By mid-1928, there were reports of 150 peasant revolts, and many minor incidents.36 Nevertheless, the campaigns of early 1928 did the job. The government got the grain procurements it needed, and its increasingly ambitious plans for industrialization were protected, as it avoided spending precious hard currency on grain imports. These successes encouraged the government to press ahead with rapid industrialization, confident that it could squeeze the necessary grain from the peasantry with increased mobilizational pressure. If the government could keep its nerve. …
The question now was one of group cohesion, and it was one that Chinggis Khan and Peter the Great would have understood perfectly: did the government and Party have sufficient unity, discipline, and nerve to maintain the intense pressure needed to pump enough resources from the countryside to fund rapid industrialization?
By mid-1928 it was clear that the procurements crisis of the previous year would be repeated, perhaps on a larger scale. A drought in Ukraine and the North Caucasus reduced output just as the industrialization drive was gaining momentum. However, the harvest was good in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Volga region, so the government once again concentrated its efforts on these regions. By early 1929, local officials had found that their task was eased if they could involve local peasants in the campaign, so they began to use “social pressure.” This meant organizing commune meetings at which poorer peasants were encouraged to help collect punitive grain taxes from their richer neighbors. In March 1929, the government returned to the imposition of set requisitioning quotas in Siberia, as in the Civil War, by exerting intensified “social pressure.” In an allusion to his regional tour of the previous year, Stalin described this approach as the “Urals-Siberian method.”
These shifts were made possible by changes in the political balance of power and in the attitudes, methods, and ideology of many Party members. Stalin, who now dominated the Party, had found that however much the peasantry and some Party members complained, more direct forms of pressure could sweat cheap grain from the villages. By late in 1929, Stalin and his allies were ready to face the full consequences of a decisive turn away from the market towards direct mobilization. This decision laid the foundations for a new social order dominated by a highly centralized and well-disciplined elite group capable of exerting colossal mobilizational pressure. Before we examine the revolution from above launched in late 1929, we must describe the changing political configurations that made this revolution possible.
In 1921 the Party was far too weak to take on the peasantry. By 1928 its new leader, Stalin, was willing to gamble that the Party could win such a contest. What had changed in just seven years? The crucial changes were in the structures and culture of the new Soviet elite, which by 1929 had acquired the unity, the discipline, and the ruthlessness needed to take on the peasantry. The changes owed something to Bolshevik traditions of unity and discipline, which had been tempered during the Civil War; something to the political skills and ruthlessness of Stalin as he emerged as the Party's new leader; and something to Russia's ancient traditions of elite discipline and solidarity.
Almost a decade of stability meant that government institutions such as the police and army were better organized than in 1921 and had more permanent and experienced cadres. Most sectors of the economy had recovered to 1913 levels of production, and the government had established its legitimacy and capacity to rule. However, the most important changes took place within the new Communist ruling elite.
The unity and determination of the Bolshevik party owed much to the ideas, the prestige, and the political skills of its founder, Lenin. By the end of the Civil War, the Party already had a distinctive tradition of militaristic Party discipline and strong central leadership. The Bolshevik understanding of democratic centralism was that once decisions had been taken collectively by the Party, they were to be treated like military orders. The militarization of the Party during the Civil War made such methods seem acceptable, necessary, and even normal to most Party members and officials. By 1921 they had become as habitual as the command structures of the Petrine army and bureaucracy.
Changes in Party composition also affected cohesion and discipline. By the tenth Party Congress in March 1921 the Party had almost 750,000 members, most recruited during the Civil War. That was more than enough to swamp the 25,000 pre-revolutionary members. Most new members, like fifteenth-century pomeshchiki, were less educated and more disciplined and militarized than the Party's leaders, the argumentative intellectuals who had dominated the pre-war Party. Now the Party had to keep track of its swelling numbers. Until his death in March 1919, Yakov Sverdlov handled organizational issues. After his death, the Party created new administrative structures including an Organization Bureau and a Secretariat attached to the Central Committee to keep track (like the Muscovite pomestnyi prikaz) of membership and appointments. At about the same time, the Politburo was created as the executive committee of the Central Committee, a Soviet equivalent of the Muscovite boyar Duma.
Lenin's prestige and political skills were sufficient to maintain a high level of unity while he was alive. But after his death, in January 1924, no one had the same stature, and internal Party structures acquired increasing importance in maintaining unity. For a time, the struggle to succeed Lenin threatened to split the Party. Conflicts began as early as May 1922 after Lenin's first stroke. Everyone understood that the next leader would probably come from the Politburo, each of whose members had their own “fiefdoms”: followers and institutions and even policy areas in which they were particularly influential.
Trotsky was the most visible and charismatic member of the Politburo. But his visibility proved a liability, because it ensured that his main rivals would unite against him. So, too, did his neglect of the task of building intra-Party alliances, and the fact that he had joined the Bolshevik party late, in July 1917. Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, all members of the Party since its foundation in 1903, formed a triumvirate that blocked Trotsky's ascension. With Lenin gone, votes in the key Party bodies, the Central Committee and the annual Party Congresses, decided all fundamental issues. Trotsky did not command enough votes, and was removed from the Commissariat of War in 1925. After that, there could be no return. He was exiled to Almaty in 1928, expelled to Turkey in 1929, and finally murdered by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940.
With Trotsky gone, the struggle was now between rival clientele and patronage groups within the Party that fought for power as viciously as boyar families during the minority of Tsar Ivan IV. Here, Stalin had critical advantages that were not obvious to his rivals until it was too late. The first was that, unlike Trotsky, he did not appear the most obvious contender for the leadership, and made every effort to avoid provoking alliances against himself. In the early 1920s he was conciliatory, unspectacular, reasonable, despite the reputation he had acquired during the Civil War as a tough and, if necessary, brutal can-do politician. Lying low was necessary in part because, as Lenin lay dying at the end of 1922, he demanded Stalin's removal. “Stalin,” he wrote, “is too rude, and this shortcoming, though quite tolerable in our midst and in relations among us communists, becomes intolerable in the position of General Secretary.” We cannot know whether the assessment was personal (Stalin had indeed been rude to Lenin's wife, Krupskaia), or reflected a more considered judgment on Stalin as a potential leader.
Stalin's second advantage was his control of the Party Secretariat, the Soviet equivalent of the Muscovite pomestnyi prikaz, an organization whose clerical functions hid its growing influence over Party members. Its powers of allocation and appointment gave it influence over professional Party workers at all levels. It acquired extensive patronage over the nationwide network of provincial Party secretaries, who, like Muscovite voevodas and Tsarist governors, were the backbone of regional political structures. Party secretaries in turn acquired immense power over rank-and-file members. Indeed, it is helpful to think of two distinct layers of government. The central government took general policy decisions. However, at the provincial level regional party secretaries were the real bosses, controlling and sometimes stifling the implementation of central government orders, often in close collaboration with local leaders of the secret police and heads of major enterprises, and government and economic departments.
In the early 1920s, in a peculiarly Soviet version of double-entry bookkeeping, Party officials at the center and in the provinces began drawing up lists of key positions in all areas of government, and parallel lists of officials suitable for appointment to these positions. These lists, the nomenklatura, would provide the best guide to the dominant figures in the Soviet ruling group throughout Soviet history. Like the Petrine Table of Ranks, they listed those positions and individuals that members of the ruling group regarded as important. These mechanisms gave the Secretariat and the professionals of the Party machine (the apparat) increasing control over appointments, whether in the Party, the ministries, the police, or in education and the arts, as Party members subject to the discipline of the apparat began to dominate influential positions throughout Soviet society. In this way, the Party apparat, with the Secretariat at its head, and regional Party secretaries as its links to the provinces, emerged as the hidden backbone of the Soviet political system.
These mechanisms gave the Secretariat great power over the rank and file of the Party. Trotsky, a strong supporter of Party unity and discipline during the Civil War, began to criticize these developments as early as October 1923, when he could already sense the ground shifting under his own feet.
Even during the harshest days of war communism, the system of appointments within the party was not practiced on one-tenth the scale it is now. The practice of appointing secretaries of province committees is now the rule. This creates for the secretaries a position that is essentially independent of the local organizations. In the event that opposition, criticism, or protests occur, the secretary, with the help of the center, can simply have the opponent transferred … Organized from the top down, the secretarial apparatus has, in an increasingly autonomous fashion, been gathering “all the strings into its own hands.” …
There has been created a very broad layer of party workers, belonging to the apparatus of the state or the party, who have totally renounced the idea of holding their own political opinions or at least of openly expressing such opinions, as if they believe that the secretarial hierarchy is the proper apparatus for forming party opinions and making party decisions. Beneath this layer that refrains from having its own opinions lies the broad layer of party masses before whom every decision stands in the form of a summons or command.37
The Secretariat gave Stalin forms of political leverage that even Lenin had not wielded, an instrument with which to control the careers of Party officials throughout the ruling elite. In fact, it gave him the sort of personal influence that Chinggis Khan had wielded over his keshig or Timur over his uymaq. If Kamenev could influence the career of officials in the Moscow Party apparatus, or Zinoviev that of officials in Petrograd, the city called Leningrad after Lenin's death, Stalin could influence the careers of a vast network of Party officials, whatever government agency they worked in and whatever personal fiefdoms they belonged to, whether they worked in the Party machine, the army, the police, regional or republican government, or the expanding apparatus of the various commissariats. By the late 1920s, anyone with ambition had to reckon with the Secretariat, which presided over and allocated positions within the nomenklatura. The Party Secretariat was rapidly becoming the most significant source of patronage in all areas of Soviet life.
As Trotsky noted, the mood and culture of the Party was also changing. By the 1920s, the Party already administered much of the wealth of the largest country in the world. Those who joined in the 1920s were no longer joining a tiny, embattled, and impoverished underground party. They were joining a vast political network that controlled a huge and powerful mobilizational machine. By 1930 the Party had almost 1.7 million members. Most were from the working classes, mainly from the proletariat, their average age was low, and so were their average educational qualifications. Such people, particularly those who had joined during the Civil War, expected to obey and to give orders, unlike the pre-revolutionary members who expected to debate and to argue. This changing balance within the Party would allow Stalin to use lesser Party officials against his rivals in the leadership as Ivan IV had used the oprichniki against rivals in the boyar elite.
Of course, the patronage power available to the Secretariat had to be wielded with subtlety, and Stalin proved extremely skillful at using the power at his disposal without overreaching. He was the quintessential numbers politician, very good at counting votes, with a long memory for favors, slights, and errors, very good at maneuvering so as to end up on the right side in most internal Party debates, and ruthless in exploiting Party room victories. He also had the patience for careful networking that more charismatic politicians such as Trotsky despised.
Sheila Fitzpatrick has identified another crucial aspect of Stalin's mobilizational strategies.38 In the 1920s, as the Party recruited many former Tsarist officers into the army, and bourgeois economists and technicians into its ministries and enterprises, Stalin and others argued that it was dangerous to rely too much on non-Party experts from middle-class backgrounds, because they were unlikely to have genuine enthusiasm for the socialist project. The “Shakhty” affair of 1928 reflected these fears, which were widespread within the Party. It began with accusations of “wrecking” against Tsarist-era engineers and managers, and ended with the arrest and sometimes execution of thousands of the country's best managers and engineers for treachery or sabotage.39
Stalin argued that such dangers made it vital to train a new, working-class elite of “Red experts,” people who would support the building of socialism because of their class background, but who could also bring valuable technological skills to the task. Between 1928 and 1932 the Party drafted more than 100,000 ambitious and talented young working-class Party loyalists into institutes and schools, to take crash courses in industrial and commercial skills. In the late 1930s, this generation, the so-called vydvizhentsy (those “brought forward”) moved to positions at the very top of the system, replacing the many “bourgeois” experts or Lenin-era Party members killed or imprisoned during the Stalinist purges. They were so young that they would remain at the top for much of the rest of the Soviet Union's 70-year history. They were Stalin's equivalent of the talented outsiders that had formed the disciplined core of the political systems of Chinggis Khan, of Timur, of Ivan IV, and of Peter I.
Policy mattered too. After Lenin's death, Stalin effectively presented himself as the defender and heir of Lenin's legacy and a loyal follower of “Leninism,” and he would present all his policy initiatives as fulfillments of Lenin's legacy. His lecture series, “Foundations of Leninism,” given at Sverdlovsk University four months after Lenin's death, helped create the notion of Leninism as a distinct and coherent body of ideas, of which Stalin was the guardian.
Stalin also supported policies that had broad appeal within the Party. These began with his commitment to the idea of “Socialism in One Country,” which revived the Utopian enthusiasm that the Party had generated during the Civil War for the project of building a new society. Despite the complex discussions about whether socialism could be built without a world revolution, to many Party members there was no alternative to building socialism even in an isolated Soviet Union. If the Party was not to stand still, and if it was to defend itself against hostile capitalist powers, it would have to industrialize rapidly, and for most Party members, industrialization meant building socialism.
By 1928, Stalin held most of the threads of a vast network of political influence within and beyond the Party. He was also identified with a forceful mobilizational strategy that appealed to most Party members and promised to fulfill the goals of what was now being called “Leninism.” He offered a clear and inspiring way out of the dilemmas of the 1920s by insisting that Soviet Russia could build socialism on its own, without relying on market forces or waiting for an international revolution. It simply had to return to the forceful methods that had worked during the Civil War. This approach appealed particularly to praktiki within the Party, to those impatient with dialectical subtleties who wanted to get on with the job. His resistance to demands for greater democracy within the Party earned him the support of provincial Party secretaries, for it shielded them from excessive scrutiny. His forceful approach to the peasantry increased the influence of the secret police and earned him support within the police apparatus. And he had largely succeeded in presenting himself as the representative of true Leninism. During the conflicts of the 1920s, these many forms of influence ensured that Stalin was almost always on the right side of crucial votes in the Party Congresses or Central Committee. By the late 1920s he wielded more power than any other Party leader.
By 1927 Stalin had the power and the following needed to insist on his own solutions to the procurements crisis, despite the objections of Bukharin, by now his only serious rival. By the end of 1928, Bukharin and the so-called “Rightists” had been defeated, along with the fiscal conservatism that they represented. Stalin began to look like the true heir to Lenin, and his plans for massive expenditure on industrial and military mobilization now counted as the Party's “General Line.”
The lavish press coverage of Stalin's 50th birthday, on December 21, 1929, was a foretaste of the future. But the turn to collectivization and rapid industrialization that Stalin launched at the end of 1929 was also a way of mobilizing enthusiasm from below for a project that was dangerous and full of difficulties and challenges, though heroic in its scale and capable of generating new forms of patriotic pride. In November 1929, Stalin wrote in the Party newspaper, Pravda (“The Truth”),
We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization – to socialism, leaving behind the age-old “Russian” backwardness. We are becoming a country of metal, an automobilized country, a tractorized country. And when we have put the USSR on an automobile, and the muzhik on a tractor, let the esteemed capitalists, who boast of their “civilization,” try to overtake us. We shall see which countries may then be “classified” as backward and which as advanced.40