Stalin in 1929 was determined to alter the USSR’s economic structures and practices. Gosplan was put under a political clamp and told to produce ever more ambitious versions of the First Five-Year Plan. The Politburo resolved that targets should be hit inside four rather than five years, and the officials of Gosplan were commanded to carry out the gigantic task of amending schemes involving the country’s industry, agriculture, transport and commerce. Warnings by experts against hyper-optimism were ignored. Whole new cities such as Magnitogorsk were constructed. Digging began of the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Engineering plants in Moscow and Leningrad were expanded; new mines were sunk in Ukraine, the Urals and the Kuznets Basin. Peasants in their millions were attracted into the expanding labour force. Skilled workers became managers. Factories were put on to a seven-day working week. American and German technology was bought with revenues which accrued from the rise in grain exports. Foreign firms were contracted to establish new plants and help train Soviet personnel. Educational facilities were expanded. Youth was promoted. A vast economic transformation was put in hand.
Industrial wages were meant to rise by about a half, but the skyrocketing of food prices discounted any such gain, especially after the introduction of bread rationing in early 1929. Housing construction lagged far behind the needs of the expanded urban population. Having aimed to build a hundred thousand tractors, security considerations turned the Politburo and Gosplan towards raising the proportion of the budget devoted to armaments. The needs of consumers were also downgraded as the requirements for coal, iron, steel and machinery were increased.1
Having forcibly extracted grain from the hands of the peasantry since January 1928, the Politburo ignored Bukharin’s call for a reversion to the New Economic Policy and began to designate his ideas as a Right Deviation from Marxist–Leninist principles. In 1929 it resolved upon the mass collectivisation of agriculture. There had been many sorts of collective farms in the 1920s. Stalin selected two types to be introduced. The ‘higher’ type was the sovkhoz, whose land was owned by the state and whose workers were simply the rural equivalent of the hired factory labour force. The other type was the kolkhoz. This stood for ‘collective farm’ in Russian; the difference from the sovkhoz was that kolkhozes formally rented the land from the state and agreed to deliver a fixed quota of the harvest to the state. Whereas sovkhoz workers were paid a regular wage, workers on a kolkhoz were paid according to the number of days they contributed to the farm. The real difference was minimal for peasants. The Politburo’s policy as publicly announced was that entrance to either type of collective farm should be on a voluntary basis. Local party committees were ordered to conduct propaganda to encourage the phenomenon. Once Bukharin had been ejected from the Politburo in November 1929, Stalin stiffened the campaign.2
The Politburo repeatedly raised the tempo of implementation. The process quickened even in summer as the authorities strove to procure the required grain from the villages at prices resented by the peasants. An article by Stalin on 7 November, the anniversary of the October Revolution, contended that many rural households saw the advantage of collective farms without the need for the state to compel them; and it drew a contrast with the proposals of the United Opposition.3 A Politburo commission was established to work out implementation. The purpose was to prioritise the setting up of collective farms in the lower Volga region (which was famously fertile). Russia’s Far North was to be the last region to undergo total collectivisation in 1933. It was a short schedule but it became shorter. Central and local cadres who argued for a delay were firmly overruled. Instructions were kept confidential and vague; and party and governmental functionaries, concerned that they might be judged lacking in obedience, set about imposing total collectivisation with immediate effect.4
In July 1929 it stayed official policy that terror should be avoided and that kulaks as well as the majority of the peasantry ought to be enlisted in the collective farms. Stalin, however, wanted none of this. In December 1929 he announced that kulaks should be banned from becoming collective farm workers. His words were blunt:5
Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes and sovkhozes . . . Now dekulakisation is being undertaken by the masses of the poor and middling peasant masses themselves, who are realising total collectivisation. Now dekulakisation in the areas of total collectivisation is not just a simple administrative measure. Now dekulakisation is an integral part of the creation and development of collective farms. When the head is cut off, no one wastes tears on the hair.
On 30 January 1930 the Politburo chillingly approved the liquidation of kulaks as a class. A Central Committee directive was sent out in February. Three kulak categories were designated. The first consisted of individuals to be sent to concentration camps, the second to distant parts of the USSR and the third to other parts of their province. The Politburo called for religious bodies to be simultaneously targeted.6 The OGPU was managed in the same way as the economy. Quotas were assigned to regions for dekulakisation, and destinations in the north Urals and Kazakhstan were prescribed. The Politburo handed down the schedule for operations.7
Stalin, like other Bolsheviks, detested the kulaks. He seems to have sensed that the peasantry would not join the sovkhozes and kolkhozes unless they were afraid of the consequences of resistance. Repression of a sizeable minority would bring this about – and anyway he probably genuinely believed that the kulaks would seriously disrupt the operation of collective farms. Over 320,000 households were subjected to dekulakisation by July 1930. The violence was immense. The superior force of the authorities, aided by the suddenness of the campaign, prevailed. A whole way of rural life was being swept into oblivion.8
Already in 1927 the Politburo had sanctioned the use of forced labour to expand the mining of gold. This initiative was translated in the following year to timber hewing.9 Stalin gave rulings on the use of concentration camps not just for the social rehabilitation of prisoners but also for what they could contribute to the gross domestic product in regions where free labour could not easily be found. He had never been reluctant to contemplate such camps as a central component of communist party rule; and he did not flinch from ordering arrests and ordering OGPU chief Vladimir Menzhinski to create the permanent organisational framework. Among the victims were categories of persons whom he feared and resented. Members of outlawed political parties were high on the list. Stalin also had ‘bourgeois nationalists’, priests and private traders in his sights as well as recalcitrant economic experts. His method was a continuation of the techniques developed at Shakhty. Leading individuals and groups in ‘anti-Soviet’ categories were put on show trial. The objective was to intimidate all their followers and sympathisers into giving up thoughts of opposition in case they too might be arrested.
A succession of such trials occurred in 1929–30. These involved much political inventiveness with Stalin supplying the main momentum. Historians Sergei Platonov and Yevgeni Tarle were arrested and included in the so-called Academy of Sciences Affair which led to the condemnation of the non-existent All-People’s Union for the Struggle for Russia’s Regeneration in July 1929.10 The fictitious Industrial Party, including the engineer Leonid Ramzin, was brought to court in November 1930. The Labouring Peasant Party, also non-existent, was arraigned in December 1930; the main defendants were the economists Alexander Chayanov and Nikolai Kondratev.11 The so-called Union Bureau of the Mensheviks was tried in February and March 1931 with Nikolai Sukhanov as the leading defendant.12 Outside the RSFSR there were trials of nationalists. Many of them had until recently been figures of the political establishment. But wherever Stalin and his associates caught a whiff of nationalism they resorted to judicial procedures. Ukraine, Belorussia and the Caucasus, north and south, were subjected to similar proceedings. Torture, outlandish charges and learned-by-rote confessions became the norm. Hundreds of defendants were either shot or sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment.13
Stalin’s strategy was to bring about a massive increase in political control as his general revolutionary assault was reinforced. His zeal to subjugate all strata of ‘specialists’ was heightened. Industrial managers, lawyers, teachers and military officers fell foul of him. The Red Army narrowly escaped a trial of its commanders but the interrogations alone, which involved Stalin in person, were enough to scare the living daylights out of the officer corps. Individual generals, though, were persecuted. Like the Red Army, the Russian Orthodox Church – as well as the other Christian denominations and indeed Islam, Judaism and Buddhism – escaped a show trial. But this did not mean that repression was withheld. Attacks on religious leaders became so frequent and systematic that the League of the Militant Godless expected belief in deities to be eradicable within a few years. Persecution was extreme, and only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church’s priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941.14
Meanwhile promotions of newly trained workers and peasants took place as the administrative stratum was widened. Volunteer collectivisers were found among young workers. Armed and indoctrinated, these so-called ‘25,000-ers’ set out for the villages to deal with the ‘class enemy’.15 Recruitment to the party expanded. By 1931 it had 1,369,406 full members.16 Literacy and numeracy spread. There was a reprise of revolutionary spirit as the regime gave out the message that socialism was being created in the USSR while abroad capitalism was entering its final crisis. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 made this a plausible message at the time. Unconditional enthusiasts for the Politburo’s policies existed everywhere. Even many who detested the violence and vilification were willing to believe that a new and better world was being created. In the party there was relief that action at last was being taken. Bukharin’s group had so little organised support that it did not merit the name of the Right Opposition. The end of the NEP was welcomed. Local party secretaries became mini-Stalins making all the fundamental decisions across the range of public policy – and the fact that nearly all the economy was somehow or other taken into the hands of the state meant that their powers had never been greater.17
While promoting industrialisation and collectivisation, Stalin did not overlook the fact that he ruled a former empire. In a speech to a conference of industrial functionaries on 4 February 1931 he declared: ‘In the past we didn’t have and couldn’t have a fatherland. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, the people – and we – have a fatherland and we will protect its independence.’18 Patriotism was making its way back on to the list of official priorities. While society was being split asunder by policy initiatives from the late 1920s, Stalin recognised that some cement was needed to keep the people of the USSR together.
The range of changed policies was large, and in every case Stalin’s intervening hand was felt. Even on the ‘philosophical front’ he was active. On 9 December he visited the Institute of Red Professors. Several of the academics, including Abram Deborin, were known as supporters of Bukharin. Stalin demanded greater militancy from his own followers in the party cell at the institute: ‘Everything written here by you is correct; the problem is that not everything has yet been said. In the critical part it’s possible to say much more. You’ve given the correct evaluation here but it’s too soft and unsatisfactory.’ Then he added: ‘Do you have the forces? Will you be able to cope? If you have the forces, you need to do some beating.’19 Stalin was determined to crack the nut of intellectual resistance to his policies. He spoke of Deborin’s group:20
They occupy the dominant positions in philosophy, in natural science and in several fine questions of politics. You’ve got to be able to grasp this. On questions of natural science the Devil knows what they’re doing; they are writing about Weismannism, etc., etc. – and this is all presented as Marxism.
It’s necessary to scatter them and dig over all this dung which has accumulated in philosophy and natural science.
Stalin treated the philosophers in the party cell as troops to be deployed in a campaign against the enemy.
The motif was manifest: ‘What sort of Marxism is this which separates philosophy from politics, theory from practice?’21 Stalin was somewhat incoherent. Elsewhere in his commentary he accused Bukharin and Deborin of cloaking their politics in philosophical argumentation. But he was not worried by his contradictions. He wanted cultural life cleared of every trace of opposition to his policies. Narrowness, rigidity and ritualism were to be introduced. Lenin was to be raised as the unchallengeable totemic figure in the campaign. His Materialism and Empiriocriticism, that crude work on epistemology which Stalin had dismissed when it appeared in 1909, would be elevated to the status of a philosophical classic and all philosophers would have to take its postulates as axiomatic.22
Yet even Stalin could not totally ignore the huge disruptions to agriculture caused by his policies. Forewarned of the fate awaiting them, peasant communities in Ukraine, the north Caucasus, south Russia and central Asia took up arms. The urban squads of collectivisers were met with violent opposition. The Red Army, despite early official concerns about the loyalty of its conscripts, successfully suppressed such risings; and nowhere did the rebels manage to organise themselves across a broad territory as they had at the end of the Civil War. But the imposition of collective farms led to deep resentment. Antagonism to the authorities was ineradicable and the millions of peasants who were forced to give up their property and customs withdrew co-operation. Productivity fell away. A system proposed as the permanent solution to the problems of the rural economic sector might have yielded more grain for the towns but this was happening at the point of a rifle, and the perils of continuing mass collectivisation at the current rate became obvious.23
Several in Stalin’s entourage witnessed on the trips around the country the appalling consequences of this policy. (They did this without calling for a reversal of the general line: they were not Bukharinists.) Stalin was unbudgeable from the general line of agrarian policy. The most he would concede was that local implementation had been excessive and that officials in the provinces had misunderstood central policy. On 2 March 1930 Pravda printed an article by him, ‘Dizzy with Success’, which castigated over-zealous collectivisers:24
It follows that the task of the party is to consolidate the achieved successes and to use them in a planned fashion for further movement forward.
But the successes have their dark side, especially when they are achieved ‘easily’ and, so to speak, through the mode of ‘unexpectedness’.
He deceitfully insisted that it had always been his intention that collectivisation should be conducted on the voluntary principle. By then the proportion of the USSR’s agricultural households herded into collective farms had risen to about 55 per cent.25 Stalin maintained that local party officials were guilty of ‘excesses’ and ‘distortions’. Unlike the United Opposition, he declared the central party leadership had not intended to impose collectivisation by force and by decrees.
‘Dizzy with Success’ involved gargantuan hypocrisy. Although he was primarily culpable for the recent acceleration, Stalin did not admit blame. For a whole year he had goaded party officials to bully peasants into collective farms. He had issued fearsome directives on dekulakisation. He had sacked and disgraced politicians who criticised the pace of collectivisation; even his cronies in the Politburo had attracted his ire. But he had a highly developed instinct for political self-preservation. Embitterment against him was intense in society. The time had come to place the blame on those who had faithfully implemented his wishes. He got away with this. Confused lower-level officials allowed many millions of households to revert to traditional land tenure. Quickly the percentage of collective farms in the USSR’s agriculture started falling: by early June it was only twenty-three.26 Yet Stalin, while willing to retreat tactically, was fixed on his strategy: Soviet farming was to be forced into the collectivist mould in short order. After the summer the campaign for total collectivisation was resumed and in 1932 about 62 per cent of the households engaged in agriculture belonged to collective farms. The percentage was to rise to ninety in 1936.27 This was achieved by means of massively increased force applied with greater precision than before. The result was turmoil in the countryside. The combination of violent seizure of grain stocks and violent reorganisation of farm tenure and employment resulted in famine across vast areas.
The economic premise of policy was not publicly revealed, but Stalin made it plain in an instruction to Molotov: ‘Force up the export of grain to the maximum. This is the core of everything. If we export grain, credits will be forthcoming.’28 A few days later, in August 1930, he repeated the message in case its content had not been fully accepted. Mikoyan had reported complacently about the level of wheat procurement across the USSR. This to Stalin was insufferable. The point was to go on raising that level and to ‘force up’ the grain export trade ‘wildly’.29 Nothing less than a hysterical campaign to collect and sell wheat abroad would satisfy him.
Again and again he reverted to tactical, temporary retreats such as had happened with ‘Dizzy with Success’. On holiday by the Black Sea in August 1931 he saw enough for himself to know that collectivisation had reduced ‘a series of districts in west Georgia to starvation’. But characteristically he blamed the resident party and OGPU officials: ‘They don’t understand that the Ukrainian methods of grain procurement, necessary and sensible in grain districts, are imprudent and harmful in non-grain districts which, moreover, have no industrial proletariat.’ He even deplored the arrest of hundreds of people – not a reaction normally found in Stalin’s career.30 Stalin recommended that grain be shipped forthwith into west Georgia. Contrary to what is often thought, the Politburo under his leadership frequently made such decisions on emergency relief. But always the main strategic objective was kept in mind and eventually reapplied. Industrialisation and collectivisation were two sides of the same coin. The state needed to seize grain for export in order to finance the expansion of mining and manufacturing output. Stalin left no one in the Kremlin in doubt about this.
He barked out the case for driving the economic transformation at a frenetic pace in a speech to a conference of industrial officials and managers on 4 February 1931:31
To slacken the tempos would be to fall behind. And the backward get beaten. We don’t want to be beaten. No, that’s not what we want. The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish– lords. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: ‘You are wretched, you are abundant, you are mighty, you are powerless, Mother Russia.’
The language had an emotional intensity he had not used since Lenin’s funeral. The sonorous phrases hit home like a hammer. The patriotic appeal was unmistakable. The simple metaphor of ‘beating’, repeated again and again, conveyed the urgency of the struggle ahead.
Stalin warned his audience: ‘Such is the law of the exploiters: beat the backward and the weak. The wolf’s law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak – so you are in the wrong and therefore you can be beaten and enslaved.’32 The solution, he insisted, was irresistible:33
We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must close that gap in ten years. Either we do this or we’ll be crushed.
This is what our obligations before the workers and peasants of the USSR dictate to us.
He had no doubt about what could be achieved. At a May Day reception in 1933 he was to declare:34
If the Russians are armed with tanks, aircraft and a marine fleet, they’re invincible, invincible.
But they cannot advance badly armed in the absence of technology, and the whole history of old Russia is summed up in this.
The Leader’s voice in his 1931 speech to the industrial officials and managers had confirmed that there would be no vacillation. The course of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation had been set and there would be no deviation from it. Leader, party and state were wholly determined to reach the plotted destination. Firmness and courage were required. But Stalin was confident. In a sentence that was quickly picked up by official propagandists he declared: ‘There are no fortresses that could not be stormed by Bolsheviks.’ Looking across the audience, he moved to the finale of his speech:35
We have carried out a series of the hardest tasks. We have overthrown capitalism. We have constructed large-scale socialist industry. We have turned the middle peasant on to the path of socialism. We’ve done the most important thing from the viewpoint of construction. There’s still a little left to do: to learn technology and to master science. And when we do that, we’ll have tempos which at present we daren’t even dream about.
And we’ll do that if we really want to!
Stalin was a bureaucrat, conspirator and killer and his politics were of a monstrous species. Yet he was also inspiring. Nobody listening to him on that occasion could fail to be impressed by his performance.
He was summoning his subordinates, in the republic and the provinces as well as in Moscow, to effect a gigantic political and economic transmutation. He knew that he could not know everything that went on. He was adept at getting thousands of officials to show the required zeal by setting out a general policy or handing down fixed delivery quotas. Many subordinates were appalled by the ‘excesses’. But many others – out of conviction, fear or ambition – co-operated eagerly. Once the project had been formulated in 1928–9, officialdom in all Soviet institutions competed with each other to obtain a share of the increased resources. They also aspired to the power and privileges dangled as a bait in front of them. The direction of policy had been made abundantly clear and they wanted to take advantage of the journey about to be embarked upon.36
His summons was successful. The First Five-Year Plan, scheduled to last to the end of 1933, was completed a year ahead of schedule. National income had nearly doubled since the tax-year 1927–8. Gross industrial output had risen by a remarkable 137 per cent. Within industry, the output of capital goods registered a still more impressive increase of 285 per cent. The total employed labour force had soared from 11.3 million under the New Economic Policy to 22.8 million. The figures have to be treated with caution. Stalin and his associates were never averse to claiming more for their achievements than they should have done; and indeed they themselves derived information from lower echelons of party and government which systematically misled them. Disruption was everywhere in the economy.37 Ukraine, south Russia and Kazakhstan were starving. The Gulag heaved with prisoners. Nevertheless the economic transformation was no fiction. The USSR under Stalin’s rule had been pointed decisively in the direction of becoming an industrial, urban society. This had been his great objective. His gamble was paying off for him, albeit not for his millions of victims. Magnitogorsk and the White Sea–Baltic Canal were constructed at the expense of the lives of Gulag convicts, Ukrainian peasants and even undernourished, overworked factory labourers.