From 1928 Stalin and his associates undertook a series of actions that drastically rearranged and reinforced the compound of the Soviet order. Lenin’s basic elements were maintained: the single-party state, the single official ideology, the manipulation of legality and the state’s economic dominance. In this basic respect Stalin’s group was justified in claiming to be championing the Leninist cause.
Yet certain other elements were greatly altered and these became the object of dispute. Compromises with national and cultural aspirations had existed since 1917, and there had been relaxations of religious policy from the early 1920s: Stalin brusquely reversed this approach. Moreover, he crudified politics and hyper-centralized administrative institutions. Yet this was still a compound bearing the handiwork of Lenin’s communist party – and in economics, indeed, he strengthened the state’s existing dominance: legal private enterprise above the level of highly-restricted individual production and commerce practically ceased. Stalin’s enemies in the party contended that a rupture with Leninism had occurred and that a new system of Stalinism had been established. Official spokesmen, inveterate liars though they were, were nearer to the truth in this matter when they talked of the development of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’. Such a term asserted continuity while affirming that Stalin had changed the balance and composition of the elements of the Soviet compound.
The fracturing of the NEP began not in Moscow but in the provinces – and at the time there were few signs that anything was afoot. Nor did it start with foreign policy or factional struggles or industrializing schemes. The origins can be traced to a journey to the Urals and Siberia taken by Stalin in January 1928.He was travelling there on behalf of the Central Committee in order to identify what could be done about the fall-off in grain shipments to the towns. None of his colleagues had any idea of his true intentions.
Once he was beyond the scrutiny of his central party colleagues, Stalin brashly issued fresh instructions for the collection of cereal crops in the region. In many ways he was re-instituting the methods of War Communism as peasants were called to village gatherings and ordered to deliver their stocks of grain to the state authorities. The policy of grain requisitioning was replicated later in 1928 across the USSR. Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev, Andrei Zhdanov, Stanislav Kosior and Stalin’s newly-discovered supporter in mid-Siberia, Sergei Syrtsov, were instructed to lead campaigns in the major agricultural regions. Over the next two years the New Economic Policy was piece by piece destroyed. In agriculture it was replaced by a system of collective farms. In industry it gave way to a Five-Year Plan which assigned both credit and production targets to factories, mines and construction sites. Private commercial firms vanished. Force was applied extensively. Kulaks were repressed, managers were persecuted, wages were lowered.
Planning as a concept acquired a great vogue around the world. The instability of capitalism after the Great War had an impact upon the attitudes of many people in the West, especially when the foundations of the global financial system were shaken by the Great Depression in autumn 1929. Mass unemployment afflicted all capitalist countries. There was a slump in trade and production across Europe. Bankrupt financiers leapt out of the windows of New York skyscrapers.
Central state direction of economic development gained in favour as politicians and journalists reported that the Soviet Union was avoiding the financial catastrophe that was engulfing the Western economies. Outside the global communist movement there continued to be abhorrence for the USSR; but the use of authoritarian measures to effect an exit from crisis acquired broader respectability. Dictatorship was not uncommon in inter-war Europe. Benito Mussolini, an ex-socialist, had seized power in Rome in 1922 for his National Fascist Party, and right-wing dictatorships were established in countries such as Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. In Germany, too, democracy was under threat in the 1920s from a Nazi party which – like the German Communist Party – did not disguise its contempt for due legal process. Confidence in the old – and not so old – ways of conducting politics was widely being eroded.
Yet Stalin, while talking of the virtues of planning, did not have detailed projects in mind when changing policy in 1928–32. If he had a Grand Plan, he kept it strictly to himself. Nevertheless he was not behaving at random: his activities occurred within the framework of his prejudices and ambition; and there was an internal logic to the step-by-step choices that he made.
Stalin attracted much support from fellow communist leaders. The use of force on ‘kulaks’ was welcomed as an end of ideological compromise: Stalin seemed to be fulfilling the commitments of the October Revolution and ending the frustrations of the NEP. In particular, several central politicians warmed to his initiative: Central Committee Secretaries Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich; Supreme Council of the National Economy Chairman Valeryan Kuibyshev; and Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate Chairman Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Their enthusiasm for Stalin was replicated in many local party bodies. Favour was also shown by low-level functionaries in the OGPU, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, the Komsomol and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Personnel in those institutions with an interest in increasing their control over society were in the forefront of his supporters. In Stalin they found a Politburo leader who gave them the opportunity they had been seeking.
Certain economists, too, backed his case. S. G. Strumilin argued that it did not matter if the setting of economic targets was not based on the normal extrapolation of statistics; his demand was always for the party to aim at achieving the impossible. This ‘teleological’ school of economic planning signified a determination to make the data fit any desired objective. Supporters such as Strumilin treated Stalin’s programme like a priceless photographic film waiting to be exposed to the light by their eager professional chemistry.
Stalin’s actions appalled his ally Nikolai Bukharin. The NEP had entered a critical phase by the winter of 1927–8; but whereas Bukharin wished to assure peasants that the party aimed to foster their immediate interests, Stalin had lost patience. Ostensibly Bukharin was in a strong position. The list of communist party luminaries who supported the NEP was impressive: Aleksei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Chairman of Sovnarkom; Mikhail Tomski, Chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions; Nikolai Uglanov, Moscow City Party First Secretary. The fact that Bukharin, Rykov and Tomski also belonged to the Politburo meant that they could press their opinions at the summit of the political system. Moreover, they had privileged access to the media of public communication. Through the pages of Pravda, which Bukharin edited, they affirmed to their readers that the NEP had not been abandoned.
Stalin dared not contradict this. The NEP was closely associated with the name of Lenin, and Stalin always saw the point of identifying his policies as a continuation of Lenin’s intentions. Even in later years, when the NEP had been completely jettisoned, Stalin went on claiming that his new measures were merely an incremental development of the NEP.
His sensitivity had been acute upon his return from the Urals and Siberia; for he knew that he could not yet count on being able to convince the central party leadership that his requisitioning campaign should be extended to the rest of the country. In January 1928 he had already been contemplating the rapid collectivization of Soviet agriculture as the sole means of preventing the recurrent crises in food supplies.1 But he was still unclear how he might achieve this; and his need at the time was to withstand criticisms by Bukharin and his friends. The Politburo met in April 1928 to discuss the results of the requisitioning campaign. Bukharin was unsettled by the violence; but he, too, was reticent in public. Having just seen off the United Opposition, he did not wish to reveal any divisions in the ascendant party leadership. Thus although the Politburo condemned ‘excesses’ of local grain-seizing authorities, the resolution did not appear in the newspapers and did not mention the main culprit, Stalin, by name.
For some weeks it seemed to many who were not privy to the balance of authority in the Politburo that Bukharin was getting the upper hand. The July 1928 Central Committee plenum debated the party’s attitude to the agrarian crisis, and Bukharin proposed that conciliatory measures were overdue. The plenum decided to raise prices paid by governmental agencies for grain. The hope was to revive the willingness of rural inhabitants to trade their surpluses of wheat and other cereal crops. The restoration of voluntary trade between countryside and town seemed to have become the central party’s goal yet again. But the plenum’s decision had little impact on the availability of food supplies and tensions in the Politburo did not abate. In September a frantic Bukharin published ‘Notes of an Economist’, an article which summarized the arguments for the party to abide by the NEP. The impression was given that official policy had reverted to its earlier position and that the emergency situation would shortly be brought to an end.2
In reality, Stalin and Bukharin were barely on speaking terms and Stalin had in no way become reconciled to rehabilitating the NEP. Bukharin was accustomed to standing up for his opinions. As a young Marxist in 1915, he had argued against Lenin on socialist political strategy. In 1918 he had led the Left Communists against signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In 1920–21 he had criticized not only Trotski but also Lenin in the ‘trade union controversy’; and he had held his ground when Lenin had subsequently continued to attack his views on philosophy and culture.
He was intellectually inquisitive and rejected the conventional Bolshevik assumption that only Marxists could contribute to knowledge about history and politics. He lectured at the Institute of Red Professors, and brought on a group of young Bolshevik philosophers as his protégés. His mind had a cultural sophistication; he loved poetry and novels and was a talented painter in oils: he would always come back from his summertime trips to the mountains with freshly-finished canvases. He also liked a bit of levity in his life: he did cartwheels on a Paris pavement in order to impress a new wife.3 Bukharin identified himself with the country’s youth, often wearing the red necktie sported by teenage adherents of the Komsomol. Born in 1888 to a schoolmaster’s family, he was nearly a decade younger than Stalin. As Lenin once remarked, he was ‘the golden boy’ of the Bolshevik party. Even oppositionists found it hard to dislike him.
Bukharin was no saint. In the 1920s he had shown his nasty side in internal party polemics about the NEP. In the universities, moreover, he imperturbably ruined the career of many non-communist academics. But he also had more than his fair share of naïvety. In particular, he had been taken in by Stalin’s gruff charm. They appeared to get on famously together, and Bukharin did much to make Stalin respectable again after the brouhaha over Lenin’s testament. By 1928 it was too late for Bukharin to admit to Kamenev and Zinoviev that they had been right – however belatedly, even in their case – about Stalin’s personal degeneracy.
This was not a politician who had the insight or skills to defeat Stalin. By the last months of 1928 the spat between them was resumed when the results of Bukharin’s defence of the NEP became apparent. The increase in prices offered by the state for agricultural produce failed to induce the peasantry to return to the market on the desired scale. At the Central Committee plenum in November, Stalin went back on to the offensive and demanded a comprehensive policy of requisitioning. From the Urals and Siberia there also came a proposal that the grain supplies should be seized mainly from the kulaks. This would be done, it was suggested, by local authorities calling a meeting of all peasants within a given locality and invoking them to indicate which of the richer households were hoarding grain. The poorer households were simultaneously to be enabled to have a share of the cereal stocks discovered during the campaign. This process, which became known as ‘the Urals-Siberian method’, was applied across the USSR from the winter of 1928–9.4
Every action by Stalin put Bukharin at a disadvantage; for the struggle between them was not confined to the problem of grain supplies. In March 1928, at Stalin’s instigation, it had been announced that a counter-revolutionary plot had been discovered among the technical staff at the Shakhty coal-mine in the Don Basin. The trial was a judicial travesty. Stalin took a close, direct part in decisions about the engineers.5 His ulterior purpose was easy to guess. He was grasping the opportunity to use Shakhty as a means of intimidating every economist, manager or even party official who objected to the raising of tempos of industrial growth. This was a feature of his modus operandi. Although his own basic thinking was unoriginal, he could quickly evaluate and utilize the ideas of others: Stalin knew what he liked when he saw it, and his supporters quickly learned the kind of thing that appealed to him.
It ought to be noted that he also added his own little flourishes. The Shakhty engineers were physically abused by the OGPU, forced to memorize false self-incriminations and paraded in a show-trial in May and June 1928. Five of the accused were shot; most of the rest were sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment. The Shakhty trial stirred up industrial policy as crudely as Stalin’s visit to the Urals and Siberia had done to agricultural policy. Experts in Gosplan were harassed into planning for breakneck economic growth; and factory and mining managers were intimidated into trying to put all Gosplan’s projects into effect. Otherwise they faced being sacked and even arrested.
A campaign of industrialization was being undertaken that went beyond the ambitions of the defeated United Opposition. By midsummer 1928, Stalin was telling the central party leadership that industry’s growth required that a ‘tribute’ should be exacted from agriculture. Factories were to be built with the revenues from the countryside. Yet most of the expansion, he declared, would be financed not by rural taxation but by a further massive campaign of rationalization of industrial production. Thus the ‘optimal’ version of the Plan sanctioned by the Fifth USSR Congress of Soviets in May 1929 anticipated a rise by only thirty-two per cent in the number of workers and employees in industry whereas labour productivity was expected to rise by 110 per cent. Stalin was supported robustly by Molotov, Kuibyshev and Ordzhonikidze in the press and at party gatherings. Their prognosis was outlandish (although it may possibly have been intended sincerely); but it allowed them to predict that the average real wages of the working class would rise by seventy per cent.6
This placed Bukharin in the unenviable position of arguing against an economic policy purporting to guarantee an improvement in the standard of living of the urban poor. Stalin’s belligerence increased. At the joint meeting of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in January 1929 he upbraided Bukharin for his objections and accused him of factionalism. The last Politburo leader to be found guilty of this, Trotski, was deported from the country in the same month. Bukharin was placed in serious political danger as the charge was levelled that he and Rykov and Tomski headed a Right Deviation from the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
‘Deviation’ was a significant term, implying that Bukharin’s group was too ill-organized to merit being called an Opposition.7 But Bukharin did not give up. At the next Central Committee meeting, in April 1929, he attacked the pace of industrialization being imposed by Stalin; he also castigated the resumption of violent requisitioning of agricultural produce. Stalin counter-attacked immediately: ‘None of your côterie is a Marxist: they’re fraudsters. Not one of you has got an understanding of Lenin.’ Bukharin retorted: ‘What, are you the only one with such an understanding?’8 But the mood of the majority of Central Committee members was against the ‘Rightists’, and the industrial quotas and the grain seizures were approved. Across the country the active supporters of Bukharin, few as they were, were dismissed from their posts. In Moscow, Nikolai Uglanov was replaced by Molotov as City Party Committee secretary. The NEP became virtually irretrievable.
Stalin was roused by the response to his reorientation of policy. The Urals Regional Committee, for instance, commissioned the making of a ceremonial sword: on one side of the blade was inscribed ‘Chop the Right Deviation’, on the other ‘Chop the Left Deviation’; and on the butt were the words: ‘Beat Every Conciliator’. This was the language Stalin liked to hear. His career would be ruined unless the Five-Year Plan was successful, and he was determined that there should be no shilly-shallying. Stalin put the matter vividly in 1931: ‘To lower the tempos means to lag behind. And laggards are beaten. But we don’t want to be beaten. No, we don’t want it! The history of old Russia consisted, amongst other things, in her being beaten continually for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian nobles. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. She was beaten by all of them for her backwardness.’9
The economic transformation, in Stalin’s opinion, could not be accomplished unless the USSR stayed clear of military entanglements abroad. His Five-Year Plan was premised on the Kremlin’s need to purchase up-to-date machinery from these powers. It would obviously be difficult to induce foreign governments and business companies to enter into commercial deals if there remained any suspicion that the Red Army might be about to try again to spread revolution on the points of its bayonets.
The ascendant party leaders assumed that Soviet grain exports would pay for the machinery imports; but there was a further slump in global cereal prices in 1929: the result was that although over twice as much grain was shipped abroad in 1930 than in 1926–7, the revenue from such sales rose by only six per cent.10 Since gold exports were not enough to bridge the gap, short-term credits had to be raised to finance the Five-Year Plan. Banks and businesses in the West were only too eager to sign deals with the USSR after the Great Depression of autumn. Up-to-date machinery was imported, especially from the USA and Germany. Contracts were signed, too, for large foreign firms to supply expertise to assist with the construction of new Soviet enterprises. The American Ford car company, the greatest symbol of world capitalism, signed a deal to help to build a gigantic automotive works in Nizhni Novgorod.11
Stalin hardly needed to be nudged towards allaying Western fears about Soviet international intentions. Under the NEP he had made a name for himself with the slogan of ‘Socialism in One Country’. Repeatedly he had suggested that the USSR should avoid involvement in capitalist countries’ affairs while building a socialist society and economy at home. Foreign policy during the Five-Year Plan was made subordinate to domestic policy more firmly than ever.
Bukharin came to agree with Trotski that Stalin had abandoned the objective of European socialist revolution. The unequivocality of this judgement was incorrect. In 1928, most communists grew to believe in the imminent collapse of capitalism. Stalin went along with them so long as nothing was done to endanger the USSR’s security. The German Communist Party contained many leaders who wanted to break with the policy of a ‘united front’ with other socialist parties in Germany, and in the first year of the Five-Year Plan it was hard to dissuade these leaders from thinking revolutionary thoughts. Under a certain amount of pressure from the German communist leadership, the Comintern at the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928 laid down that an instruction was given that the parties such as the German Social-Democrats and the British Labour Party should be treated as communism’s main political adversaries. Thus the Comintern took ‘a turn to the left’.12 The European political far right, including Hitler’s Nazis, was largely to be disregarded. The task for the German Communist Party was to build up its strength separately so that it might seize power at some future date.
Among Stalin’s several motives in supporting the international turn to the left was a wish to cause maximum discomfort to Bukharin, who was closely identified as the NEP’s advocate at home and abroad. Throughout 1928–9 Bukharin was humiliated by being forced to condemn ‘rightist’ policies among the various member parties of Comintern. This was of considerable help to Stalin in the imposition of the Five-Year Plan at home. Bukharin was no longer the ascendant star of official world communism.
Constantly the Politburo quickened the projected pace of industrialization. Cheap labour was made available by peasants fleeing the villages. They came for work and for ration-cards, and their arrival permitted a lowering of the wages of labourers; for the commitment to raising wages was soon found unrealistic. In spring 1929 Stalin, seeking still cheaper labour, appointed a Central Committee commission under N. Yanson to explore opportunities for convicts to work on projects in the USSR’s less hospitable regions. The prisons were already crammed with peasants who had resisted being pushed into collective farms: Yanson recommended their transfer to the forced-labour camps subject to the OGPU.13 Among the first results was the formation of the ‘Dalstroi’ trust in the Far East which ran the notorious gold mines of Kolyma.
The Politburo also resolved the question as to how to handle those peasants who remained in the countryside. After two successive winters of grain seizures, the peasants would not voluntarily maintain their sown area. Bolsheviks already believed that collective farms, with large production units and electrically-powered machinery, were the solution to agrarian backwardness. Thus the Politburo majority, against Bukharin’s counsel, came to the opinion that compulsory collectivization should be initiated (although the fiction was maintained in public that coercion would not be used). To Molotov was entrusted the job of explaining this to the Central Committee in November 1929. Bukharin was sacked from the Politburo at the same meeting and, in the following month, Stalin’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated with extravagant eulogies in the mass media. By January 1930 the Politburo was insisting that a quarter of the sown area should be held by collective farms within two years. An agricultural revolution was heralded.
And yet both agriculture and industry were altogether too chaotic to be described without reservation as being integrated within ‘a planned economy’. For example, the Five-Year Plan of 1928–33 was drawn up six months after it was said to have been inaugurated (and the Plan was said to be completed a year before it was meant to end). Rough commands were of a more practical importance than carefully-elaborated planning; and the commands were based on guesses, prejudices and whims. At best the officials of Gosplan could rectify the worst mistakes before too much damage was done. But huge human suffering occurred before any particular experiment was halted on the grounds of being dyseconomic.
‘Class struggle’ was intensified through a governmental assault upon the so-called kulaks. It was laid down that the collective farms should be formed exclusively from poor and middling peasant households. Kulaks stood to lose most from collectivization in material terms; they tended also to be more assertive than average. At least, this is how Stalin saw things. He set up a Politburo commission to investigate how to decapitate kulak resistance. Its proposals were accepted by him and incorporated in a Sovnarkom decree of February 1930. Kulaks were to be disbarred from joining collective farms and divided into three categories. Those in category one were to be dispatched to forced-labour settlements or shot. Category two comprised households deemed more hostile to the government; these were to go to distant provinces. Category three consisted of the least ‘dangerous’ households, which were allowed to stay in their native district but on a smaller patch of land. Between five and seven million persons were treated as belonging to kulak families.14
The decree could not be fulfilled without magnifying violence. The Red Army and the OGPU were insufficient in themselves and anyway the Politburo could not depend on the implicit obedience of their officers of rural origins.15 And so tough young lads from the factories, militia and the party went out to the villages to enforce the establishment of collective farms. About 25,000 of them rallied to the Politburo’s summons. Before they set out from the towns, these ‘25,000-ers’ were told that the kulaks were responsible for organizing a ‘grain strike’ against the towns. They were not issued with detailed instructions as to how to distinguish the rich, middling and poor peasants from each other. Nor were they given limits on their use of violence. The Politburo set targets for grain collection, for collectivization and for de-kulakization, and did not mind how these targets were hit.
But when they arrived in the villages, the ‘25,000-ers’ saw for themselves that many hostile peasants were far from being rich. The central party apparatus imaginatively introduced a special category of ‘sub-kulaks’ who were poor but yet opposed the government.16 Sub-kulaks were to be treated as if they were kulaks. Consequently Stalin’s collectivizing mayhem, involving executions and deportations, was never confined to the better-off households. The slightest resistance to the authorities was met with punitive violence. With monumental insincerity he wrote an article for Pravda in March 1930, ‘Dizzy with Success’, in which he called local functionaries to task for abusing their authority. But this was a temporizing posture. For Stalin, the priority remained mass collectivization. By the time of the harvest of 1931, collective farms held practically all the land traditionally given over to cereal crops. Stalin and the Politburo had won the agrarian war.
The price was awful. Probably four to five million people perished in 1932–3 from ‘de-kulakization’ and from grain seizures.17 The dead and the dying were piled on to carts by the urban detachments and pitched into common graves without further ceremony. Pits were dug on the outskirts of villages for the purpose. Child survivors, their stomachs swollen through hunger, gnawed grass and tree-bark and begged for crusts. Human beings were not the only casualties. While the government’s policies were killing peasants, peasants were killing their livestock: they had decided that they would rather eat their cattle and horses than let them be expropriated by the collective farms. Even some of Stalin’s colleagues blanched when they saw the effects with their own eyes. For instance, Ordzhonikidze was aghast at the behaviour of officials in eastern Ukraine;18 but he felt no need to criticize mass compulsory collectivization as general policy.
Collectivization was a rural nightmare. It is true that the average harvest in 1928–30 was good.19 But this was chiefly the product of excellent weather conditions. It certainly did not result from improved agricultural management; for often the collective farm chairmen were rural ne’er-do-wells or inexpert party loyalists from the towns. Nor did the state fulfil its promise to supply the countryside with 100,000 tractors by the end of the Five-Year Plan. Only half of these were built,20 and most of them were used inefficiently through lack of experienced drivers and mechanics.
With the exception of 1930, mass collectivization meant that not until the mid-1950s did agriculture regain the level of output achieved in the last years before the Great War. Conditions in the countryside were so dire that the state had to pump additional resources into the country in order to maintain the new agrarian order. Increased investment in tractors was not the only cost incurred. Revenues had to be diverted not only to agronomists, surveyors and farm chairmen but also to soldiers, policemen and informers. Moreover, ‘machine-tractor stations’ had to be built from 1929 to provide equipment and personnel for the introduction of technology (as well as to provide yet another agency to control the peasantry). Otherwise the rickety structure of authority would have collapsed. No major state has inflicted such grievous economic damage on itself in peacetime.
Yet Stalin could draw up a balance sheet that, from his standpoint, was favourable. From collectivization he acquired a reservoir of terrified peasants who would supply him with cheap industrial labour. To some extent, too, he secured his ability to export Soviet raw materials in order to pay for imports of industrial machinery (although problems arose with foreign trade in 1931–2). Above all, he put an end to the recurrent crises faced by the state in relation to urban food supplies as the state’s grain collections rose from 10.8 million tons in 1928–9 to 22.8 million tons in 1931–2.21 After collectivization it was the countryside, not the towns, which went hungry if the harvest was bad.
Stalin was still more delighted with the record of industry. The large factories and mines had been governmentally-owned since 1917–19, but the number of such enterprises rose steeply after 1928. Thirty-eight per cent of industrial capital stock by the end of 1934 was located in factories built in the previous half-dozen years.22 Simultaneously the smaller manufacturing firms – most of which had been in private hands during the NEP – were closed down. The First Five-Year Plan was meant to end in September 1933; in fact its completion was announced in December 1932. Mines and factories were claimed to have doubled their production since 1928. This was exaggeration. Yet even sceptical estimates put the annual expansion in industrial output at ten per cent between 1928 and 1941; and the production of capital goods probably grew at twice the rate of consumer goods during the Five-Year Plan.23 The USSR had at last been pointed decisively towards the goal of a fully industrialized society.
Stalin the Man of Steel boasted that he had introduced ‘socialism’ to the villages. The nature of a collective farm was ill-defined; no Bolshevik before 1917 – not even Lenin – had explained exactly what such farms should be like. There was much practical experimentation with them after 1917: at one end of the range there were farms that required their employees to take decisions collectively and share land, housing, equipment and income equally, regardless of personal input of labour; at the other end it was possible to find arrangements allowing peasant households to form a co-operative and yet keep their land, housing and equipment separately from each other and to make their own separate profits.
The idea of peasants taking most of their own decisions was anathema to Stalin. The government, he insisted, should own the land, appoint the farm chairmen and set the grain-delivery quotas. His ideal organization was the sovkhoz. This was a collective farm run on the same principles as a state-owned factory. Local authorities marked out the land for each sovkhoz and hired peasants for fixed wages. Such a type of farming was thought eminently suitable for the grain-growing expanses in Ukraine and southern Russia. Yet Stalin recognized that most peasants were ill-disposed to becoming wage labourers, and he yielded to the extent of permitting most farms to be of the kolkhoz type. In a kolkhoz the members were rewarded by results. If the quotas were not met, the farm was not paid. Furthermore, each peasant was paid a fraction of the farm wage-fund strictly in accordance with the number of ‘labour days’ he or she had contributed to the farming year.
And so the kolkhoz was defined as occupying a lower level of socialist attainment than the sovkhoz. In the long run the official expectation was that all kolkhozes would be turned into sovkhozes in Soviet agriculture; but still the kolkhoz, despite its traces of private self-interest, was treated as a socialist organizational form.
In reality, most kolkhozniki, as the kolkhoz members were known, could no more make a profit in the early 1930s than fly to Mars. Rural society did not submit without a struggle and 700,000 peasants were involved in disturbances at the beginning of 1930.24 But the resistance was confined to a particular village or group of villages. Fewer large revolts broke out in Russia than in areas where non-Russians were in the majority: Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, Ukraine and parts of Siberia. Yet the official authorities had advantages in their struggle against the peasants which had been lacking in 1920–22.25 In the collectivization campaign from the late 1920s it was the authorities who went on the offensive, and they had greatly superior organization and fire-power. Peasants were taken by surprise and counted themselves lucky if they were still alive by the mid-1930s. Battered into submission, they could only try to make the best of things under the new order imposed by the Soviet state.
An entire way of life, too, was being pummelled out of existence. The peasant household was no longer the basic social unit recognized by the authorities. Grain quotas were imposed on the collective farm as a whole, and peasants were given their instructions as individuals rather than as members of households.
Industrial workers were fortunate by comparison. Except during the famine of 1932–3, their consumption of calories was as great as it had been under the NEP. But although conditions were better in the towns than in the countryside, they were still very hard. The quality of the diet worsened and food rationing had to be introduced in all towns and cities: average calory levels were maintained only because more bread and potatoes were eaten while consumption of meat fell by two thirds. Meanwhile wages for blue-collar jobs fell in real terms by a half in the course of the Five-Year Plan.26 Of course, this is not the whole story. The men and women who had served their factory apprenticeship in the 1920s were encouraged to take evening classes and secure professional posts. Consequently many existing workers obtained material betterment through promotion. About one and a half million managers and administrators in 1930–33 had recently been elevated from manual occupations.27
This was also one of the reasons why the working class endured the Five-Year Plan’s rigours without the violent resistance offered by peasant communities. Another was that most of the newcomers to industry, being mainly rural young men who filled the unskilled occupations, had neither the time nor the inclination to strike for higher wages; and the OGPU was efficient at detecting and suppressing such dissent as it arose. Go-slows, walk-outs and even occasional demonstrations took place, but these were easily contained.
Of course, Stalin and OGPU chief Yagoda left nothing to chance. The OGPU scoured its files for potential political opponents still at large. Former Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were hunted out even though their parties had barely existed since the 1922 show-trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. But whereas Lenin had trumped up charges against genuinely existing parties, Stalin invented parties out of the air. A show-trial of the imaginary ‘Industrial Party’ was staged in November 1930. The defendants were prepared for their judicial roles by an OGPU torturer; they were mainly persons who had worked for the Soviet regime but had previously been industrialists, high-ranking civil servants or prominent Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. In 1931 a trial of the fictitious ‘Union Bureau’ of the Menshevik party was organized. Trials were held in the major cities of Russia and the other Soviet republics. Newspapers were stuffed with stories of professional malefactors caught, arraigned and sentenced.
Stalin glorified the changes in the political environment by declaring that the party had ‘re-formed its own ranks in battle order’. Administrators with ‘suspect’ class origins or political opinions were sacked from their jobs. Workers were hallooed into denouncing any superiors who obstructed the implementation of the Five-Year Plan. A witch-hunt atmosphere was concocted. For Stalin used the party as a weapon to terrify all opposition to his economic policies. He needed to operate through an institution that could be trusted to maintain political fidelity, organizational solidity and ideological rectitude while the Soviet state in general was being transformed and reinforced. In the late 1920s only the party could fulfil this function.
But the party, too, needed to be made dependable. Expulsions started in May 1929, resulting in a loss of eleven per cent of the membership. A recruitment campaign began at the same time, and the party expanded its number of members from 1.3 million in 1928 to 2.2 million in 1931.28 Party secretaries at the various local levels were the Politburo’s local chief executives. Republican party leaders were handpicked by the Politburo for this role; and in the RSFSR Stalin constructed a regional tier in the party’s organizational hierarchy which brought together groups of provinces under the reinforced control of a single regional committee.29 Thus the Mid-Volga Regional Committee oversaw collectivization across an agricultural region the size of the entire United Kingdom. Party secretaries had been virtually the unchallengeable economic bosses in the localities since the middle of the Civil War. But there was also a large difference. In the 1920s private agriculture, commerce and industry had been widespread; under the Five-Year Plan only a few corners of non-state economic activity survived.
Yet still the central leadership could not regard the party with equanimity. The picture of over-fulfilled economic plans painted by the newspapers involved much distortion. And where there was indeed over-fulfilment, as in steel production, its quality was often too poor for use in manufacturing. Wastage occurred on a huge scale and the problem of uncoordinated production was ubiquitous. The statistics themselves were fiddled not only by a central party machine wishing to fool the world but also by local functionaries wanting to trick the central party machine. Deceit was deeply embedded in the mode of industrial and agricultural management.
It has been asserted that shoddy, unusable goods were so high a proportion of output that official claims for increases in output were typically double the reality. If the increase in output has been exaggerated, then perhaps Stalin’s forced-rate industrialization and forcible mass collectivization were not indispensable to the transformation of Russia into a military power capable of defeating Hitler in the Second World War. An extrapolation of the NEP’s economic growth rate into the 1930s even suggests that a Bukharinist leadership would have attained an equal industrial capacity. This is not the end of the debate; for as the First Five-Year Plan continued, Stalin diverted investment increasingly towards the defence sub-sector. Nearly six per cent of such capital was dedicated to the Red Army’s requirements: this was higher than the combined total for agricultural machines, tractors, cars, buses and lorries.30 It was easier for Stalin to bring this about than it would have been for Bukharin who wanted peasant aspirations to be taken into account.
Yet Bukharin would have ruled a less traumatized society, and been more able to count on popular goodwill. Bukharin’s perceptiveness in foreign policy might also have helped him. Stalin’s guesses about Europe were very faulty. In the German elections of 1932 the communists were instructed to campaign mostly against the social-democrats: Hitler’s Nazis were to be ignored. There were comrades from Berlin such as Franz Neumann who questioned Stalin’s judgement. But Stalin calmly replied: ‘Don’t you think, Neumann, that if the nationalists come to power in Germany, they’ll be so completely preoccupied with the West that we’ll be able to build up socialism in peace?’31 Stalin’s judgement did not lack perceptiveness: he correctly anticipated that Hitler would stir up a deal of trouble for the Allies who had imposed the Treaty of Versailles – and since the end of the Great War it had been Britain and France, not Germany, which had caused greatest trouble to Soviet political leaders.
Yet when due allowance is made, his comment underestimated the profound danger of Nazism to the USSR and to Europe as a whole. It also displayed the influence of Leninist thinking. Lenin, too, had asserted that the German extreme right might serve the purpose of smashing up the post-Versailles order;32 he had also stressed that Soviet diplomacy should be based on the principle of evading entanglement in inter-capitalist wars. The playing of one capitalist power against another was an enduring feature of Soviet foreign policy.33 This does not mean that Lenin would have been as casual as Stalin about Adolf Hitler. Yet as socialism was misbuilt in the USSR, silence was enforced by the Politburo about the risks being taken with the country’s security.
Stalin had tried to root out every possible challenge to both domestic and foreign policies. His suspicions were not without foundation. Many party and state functionaries had supported his rupture with the NEP without anticipating the exact policies and their consequences. Most of them had not bargained for famine, terror and Stalin’s growing personal dictatorship. Small groupings therefore came together to discuss alternative policies. Beso Lominadze and Sergei Syrtsov, one-time supporters of Stalin, expressed their disgruntlement to each other in autumn 1929.An informer denounced them and they were expelled from the Central Committee.34 In 1932 another group was formed by Mikhail Ryutin, who sought Stalin’s removal from power; and yet another group coalesced under A. P. Smirnov, Nikolai Eismont and V. N. Tolmachev. Both groups were detected by the OGPU and arrested; but their existence at a time when the punishments for ‘factionalism’ were increasing in severity showed how restive the party had become.
Then there were the oppositionist leaders waiting for a chance to return to the Politburo: Kamenev and Zinoviev had publicly recanted and been allowed to return to the party in 1928; Bukharin had avoided expulsion from the party by publicly accepting official party policy in November 1929. Their professions of loyalty convinced no one, and Trotski wasted no time in publishing his Bulletin of the Opposition from abroad and in initiating a secret correspondence with several disaffected communist officials.35 All these disgraced former leaders knew that they could count on many existing party functionaries, activists and rank-and-file members to support them if ever an opportunity arose.
They might also be able to appeal to the persons who had walked out on the party or had been expelled: there were about 1,500,000 such individuals by 1937.36 In addition, the Socialist-Revolutionaries had possessed a million members in 1917, the Mensheviks a quarter of a million. Dozens of other parties in Russia and the borderlands had also existed. Huge sections of the population had always hated the entire Bolshevik party. Whole social strata were embittered: priests, shopkeepers, gentry, mullahs, industrialists, traders and ‘bourgeois specialists’. Among these ‘former people’ (byvshie lyudi), as the Bolsheviks brusquely described persons of influence before the October Revolution, hatred of Bolshevism was strong. Many peasants and workers had felt the same. And Stalin had made countless new enemies for the party. Collectivization, de-kulakization, urban show-trials and the forced-labour penal system had wrought suffering as great as had occurred in the Civil War.
Stalin had engineered a second revolution; he had completed the groundwork of an economic transformation. But his victory was not yet totally secure. For Stalin, the realization of the First Five-Year Plan could only be the first victory in the long campaign for his personal dictatorship and his construction of a mighty industrial state.