A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  XXXVII

  THE FIRST THREE FIVE-YEAR PLANS, 1928-41

  Enough of living by the law

  Given by Adam and Eve.

  The jade of history we will ride to death.

  Left!

  Left!

  Left!

  MAIAKOVSKY

  It [the First Five-Year Plan] asked no less than a complete transformation from backward agricultural individualism to mechanized collectivism, from hothouse subsidized industry to self-sufficient industry on the greatest, most modern scale, from the mentality of feudalism, far behind the Western industrial age, to socialism still ahead of it.

  DURANTY

  "When a forest is cut down, splinters fly." Of course, it is unfortunate to be a splinter.

  THE REMARK OF A SOVIET CITIZEN TO THE AUTHOR IN THE SUMMER OF 1958

  Stalin's sweeping victory at the Fifteenth All-Union Congress of the Communist Party in December 1927 marked the inauguration of the era of Stalin and his five-year plans. The general secretary was to direct the destinies of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics and of world Communism for twenty-five eventful years, becoming in the course of that quarter of a century perhaps the most totalitarian, powerful, and feared dictator of all time.

  Stalin

  Stalin began his life and career humbly enough. In fact, it has often been mentioned that he was one of the few Bolshevik leaders of more or less proletarian origin. Born a son of a shoemaker in 1879 in the little town of Gori near the Georgian capital of Tiflis - or Tbilisi - Joseph Dzhugashvili attended a Church school in Gori until 1894 and then went to the theological seminary in Tiflis. In 1899, however, he was expelled from the seminary for reasons that are not entirely clear. By that time, apparently, Stalin had become acquainted with some radical writers and in particular with Marx and Lenin. He joined the Social Democratic party and when it

  split in 1903 sided firmly with the Bolsheviks. Between 1902 and 1913 Dzhugashvili, or rather Stalin as he came to be known, engaged in a variety of conspiratorial and revolutionary activities, suffering arrest and exile several times. He managed to escape repeatedly from exile, which has suggested police collusion to certain specialists. Stalin's last exile, however, continued from 1913 until the February Revolution. Apparently the Georgian Bolshevik first attracted Lenin's attention when he organized a daring raid to seize funds for the Party. Stalin's revolutionary activity developed in such Transcaucasian centers as Tiflis, Batum, and Baku, as well as in St. Petersburg. In contrast to many other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin never lived abroad, leaving the Russian empire only to attend a few meetings. Because of Stalin's Bolshevik orthodoxy and Georgian origin, the Party welcomed him as an expert on the problem of nationalities, a subject to which he devoted some of his early writings.

  One of the first prominent Bolsheviks to arrive in Petrograd, Stalin participated in the historic events of 1917, and after the October Revolution he became the first commissar for national minorities. As a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front he played a role in the Civil War, for example, in the defense of Tsaritsyn against the Whites. Incidentally, Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad in 1925 and Volgograd in 1961. It might be noted that in the course of executing his duties he quarreled repeatedly with Trotsky. But Stalin's real bid for power began in 1922 with his appointment as general secretary of the Party, a position that gave him broad authority in matters of personnel. The long-time official Soviet view of Stalin as Lenin's anointed successor distorts reality, for, in fact, the ailing Bolshevik leader came to resent the general secretary's rigidity and rudeness and in his so-called testament warned the Party leadership against Stalin. But Stalin's rivals failed to heed Lenin's late forebodings, and, before too long, Stalin's Party machine rolled over all opponents. The complete personal dictatorship which began in 1928 was to last until the dictator's death in 1953.

  The amount of time that has elapsed since Stalin's death has not been nearly enough for historians to pass a definitive judgment on the Soviet dictator and his historical role. Views of Stalin have ranged from the utterly fantastic eulogy of him as a universal genius, expounded for many years by the propaganda machine of Russian and world communism, to the extremely hostile impression that he was a blood-soaked, man-devouring, oriental monster. Many commentators have made interesting attempts to explain the general secretary, his importance, and his work. Stalin has been credited, for example, with "inflexible will, unwillingness to yield, realistic statesmanship and high organizing abilities." Hardheaded realism and common sense have been mentioned frequently as the dictator's outstanding traits. Deutscher's well-known book presents him as a hard-

  pressed Marxist realist carrying out a consistent policy and reacting intelligently to the needs of the moment. Yet, as in the case of Ivan the Terrible, there was madness in Stalin's method. That madness, formerly a matter of suspicion and controversy, received fully convincing documentation in Khrushchev's celebrated speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and especially during the session of the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, as well as in the memoirs of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, published in 1967, and in most recent Soviet material. In addition to fighting real battles and struggling against actual opponents, Stalin lived in the paranoiac world of constant threat and wholesale conspiracy. Fact and fantasy were blended together, making the detection of the dictator's motives extremely difficult. Still, in retrospect, Stalin's proverbial ruthlessness and vindictiveness and his passion for discovering ever-new enemies and plots find their explanation in abnormal psychology rather than in any compelling objective necessity or in any alleged rational advantages of a "permanent purge." That causation is given central attention in Tucker's study of Stalin and it is reflected, in a different sense, in Ulam's recent important book on the general secretary. Paranoiac tendencies joined with Marxism in transforming the Russian scene.

  The First Five-Year Plan

  The First Five-Year Plan and its successors hit the Soviet Union with tremendous impact. The U.S.S.R. became a great industrial nation: from being the fifth country in production when the plans began, it was eventually second only to the United States. In agriculture individual peasant cultivation gave way to a new system of collective farming. Indeed 1928 and 1929 have been described as the true revolutionary years in Russia: it was then that the mode of life of the peasants, the bulk of the people, underwent a radical change, whereas until the First Five-Year Plan they continued to live much as they had for centuries. A vast social transformation accompanied the economic, while at the same time the entire Soviet system as we came to know it acquired its definitive form in the difficult decade of the '30's.

  Perhaps paradoxically, the five-year plans are not easy to explain. Marxist theory did not specifically provide for them and certainly did not spell out the procedures to be followed. To be sure, the needs of the moment affected the decisions of Soviet leaders. Yet Stalin's and his associates' response to the needs constituted only one alternative line of action, and often not the most obvious. In fact, the leadership rapidly reversed itself on such key subjects as the speed of collectivization.

  Certain considerations, however, help to explain the five-year plans. To begin with, although Marxism did not provide for industrialization it in-

  sisted on a high level of it. The dictatorship of the proletariat in a land of peasants remained an anomaly. If, contrary to the doctrine, industries and workers were not there in the first place, they had to be created. Marxists in general, and Bolsheviks in particular, thought of socialism entirely in terms of an advanced industrial society. Such authors as Ulam have demonstrated in a rather convincing manner the close and multiple ties between Marxism and industrialization. The collectivization of agriculture, in turn, represented the all-important step from an individual and, therefore, bourgeois system of ownership and production to a collective economy and, therefore, to socialism. As already mentioned, after the October Revolution the Soviet govern
ment proceeded to nationalize Russian industry. Lenin showed a special interest in electrification, popularizing the famous slogan: "Electrification plus Soviet power equals communism." In 1921 the State Planning Commission, known as Gosplan, was organized to draft an economic plan for the entire country. It studied resources and proposed production figures; eventually it drew up the five-year plans.

  Although the New Economic Policy constituted a retreat from socialism, that retreat was undertaken only as a temporary measure and out of sheer necessity. In addition to its social results, unacceptable to most Communists, the N.E.P. raised serious economic problems. While by 1928 Russian industry had regained its pre-World War level, a further rapid advance appeared quite uncertain. With the industrial plant restored and in operation - a relatively easy accomplishment - the Soviet Union needed investment in the producers' goods industries and a new spurt in production. Yet the "socialist sector" of the economy lacked funds, while the "free sector," particularly the peasants, failed to rise to government expectations. The Soviet economy in the 1920's continued to be plagued by pricing problems, beginning with the disparity between the low agricultural prices and the high prices of manufactured consumers' goods, resulting in the unwillingness of peasants to supply grain and other products to the government and the cities - a situation well described as the "scissors crisis." Gerschenkron and other specialists have argued that the Bolsheviks had good reason to fear that a continuation of the N.E.P. would stabilize a peasant society at the point where it was interested in obtaining more consumers' goods, but neither willing nor able to support large-scale industrialization. As already indicated, Stalin's Five-Year Plan proved attractive to the Party because it promised a way out of the impasse: the Soviet Union could abandon the New Economic Policy and become a truly socialist country without waiting for world revolution. "Socialism in one country" gripped many imaginations and became the new Bolshevik battle cry.

  Once the Plan went into operation, the economic factors involved in its execution acquired great significance, all the more so because the planners set sail in essentially uncharted waters and often could not foresee the re-

  suits of their actions. In particular, according to Gerschenkron, A. Erlich, and certain other scholars, the fantastically rapid collectivization of agriculture came about as follows: while the Plan had called for a strictly limited collectivization, set at 14 per cent, the unexpectedly strong resistance on the part of the peasants led to an all-out attack on individual farming; moreover, the government discovered that the collectives, which finally gave it control over the labor and produce of the peasants, enabled it to squeeze from them the necessary funds for industrial investment. It has been estimated that the Soviet state paid to the collectives for their grain only a distinctly minor part of the price of that grain charged the consumer; the remaining major part constituted in effect a tax. That tax, plus the turnover or sales tax that the Soviet state charged all consumers, together with the ability of the government to keep the real wages down while productivity went up, produced the formula for financing the continuous industrialization of the Soviet Union.

  In addition to ideology and economics, other factors entered into the execution of the five-year plans. Many scholars assign major importance to considerations of foreign policy and of internal security and control. Preparation for war, which affected all major aspects of the five-year plans, began in earnest after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, and while Japan was further developing its aggressive policies in the Far East. The stress on internal security and control in the five-year plans is more difficult to document. Yet it might well be argued that police considerations were consistently uppermost in the minds of Stalin and his associates. Collectivization, from that point of view, represented a tremendous extension of Communist control over the population of the Soviet Union, and it was buttressed by such additional measures - again combining economics and control - as the new crucial role of the Machine Tractor Stations, the M.T.S., which will be mentioned later.

  The First Five-Year Plan lasted from October 1, 1928, to December 31, 1932, that is, four years and three months. The fact that Soviet authorities tried to complete a five-year plan in four years is a significant comment on the enormous speed-up typical of the new socialist offensive. The main goal of the Plan was to develop heavy industry, including machine-building, and that emphasis has remained characteristic of Soviet industrialization from that time on. According to Baykov's calculation, 86 per cent of all industrial investment during the First Five-Year Plan went into heavy industry. Whole new branches of industry, such as the chemical, automobile, agricultural machinery, aviation, machine tool, and electrical, were created from slight beginnings or even from scratch. Over fifteen hundred new factories were built. Gigantic industrial complexes, exemplified by Magnitostroi in the Urals and Kuznetsstroi in western Siberia, began to

  take shape. Entire cities arose in the wilderness. Magnitogorsk, for instance, acquired in a few years a population of a quarter of a million.

  The First Five-Year Plan was proclaimed a great success: officially it was fulfilled in industry to the extent of 93.7 per cent in four years and three months. Furthermore, heavy industry, concerned with means of production, exceeded its quota, registering 103.4 per cent while light or consumers' goods industry produced 84.9 per cent of its assigned total. Of course, Soviet production claims included great exaggerations, difficult to estimate because of the limited and often misleading nature of Soviet statistics for the period. To put it very conservatively and without percentages: "The fact remains beyond dispute that quantitatively, during the years covered by the F.Y.P., industrial production did increase and very substantially." Quality, however, was often sacrificed to quantity, and the production results achieved varied greatly from item to item, with remarkable overfulfillments of the plan in some cases and underfulfillments in others. Besides, the great industrial spurt was accompanied by shortages of consumer goods, rationing, and various other privations and hardships which extended to all of the people, who at the same time were forced to work harder than ever before. The whole country underwent a quasi-military mobilization reminiscent of War Communism.

  But the greatest transformation probably occurred in the countryside. As already mentioned, the collectivization of agriculture, planned originally ' as a gradual advance, became a flood. Tens of thousands of trusted Communists and proletarians - the celebrated "twenty-five thousand" in one instance, actually twenty-seven thousand - were sent from towns into villages to organize kolkhozes and establish socialism. Local authorities and Party organizations, with the police and troops where necessary, forced peasants into collectives. A tremendous resistance developed. About a million of the so-called kulaks, some five million people counting their families, disappeared in the process, often having been sent to concentration camps in far-off Siberia or Central Asia. A frightful famine swept Ukraine. Peasants slaughtered their cattle and horses rather than bring them into a kolkhoz. Thus from 1929 to 1933 in the Soviet Union the number of horses, in millions, declined from 34 to 16.6, of cattle from 68.1 to 38.6, of sheep and goats from 147.2 to 50.6, and of hogs from 20.9 to 12.2. Droughts in 1931 and 1932 added to the horrors of the transition from private to collectivized farming.

  Stalin himself applied the brakes to his own policy after the initial fifteen months. In his remarkable article, "Dizzy with Success," published in March 1930, he criticized the collectivizers for excessive enthusiasm and re-emphasized that collectives were to be formed on the voluntary principle, not by force. At the same time he announced certain concessions to

  collective farmers, in particular their right to retain a small private plot of land and a limited number of domestic animals and poultry. The new stress on the voluntary principle produced striking results: whereas fourteen million peasant households had joined collective farms by March 1930, only five million remained in collectives in May. But before long their number began to increase again when the authoriti
es resorted to less direct pressure, such as a temporary suspension of taxes and priority in obtaining scarce manufactured goods. By the end of the First Five-Year Plan more than fourteen million peasant households had joined the kolkhoz system. According to one count, at that time 68 per cent of all cultivated land in the Soviet Union was under kolkhoz agriculture, and 10 per cent under sovkhoz agriculture, while only 22 per cent remained for independent farmers. The Plan could well be considered overfulfilled.

  A sovkhoz is essentially an agricultural factory owned by the state, with peasants providing hired labor. Although sovkhozes, serving as experimental stations, as enormous grain producers in newly developed regions, and in many other crucial assignments, were more important for the Soviet economy than their number would indicate, Communist authorities refrained from establishing them as the basic form of agricultural organization in the country. Instead they relied on the kolkhoz as the norm for the Soviet countryside. A kolkhoz - kollektivnoe khoziaistvo, collective economy or farm - was owned by all its members, although it had to deliver the assigned amount of produce to the state and was controlled by the state. Significantly, the produce of a collective farm was generally allocated as follows: first, the part required by the state, both as taxes and as specified deliveries at set prices; next, the seed for sowing and the part to serve as payment to the Machine Tractor Station that aided the kolkhoz; after that, members of the collective received their shares calculated on the basis of the "workdays" - a unit of labor to be distinguished from actual days - that they had put in for the kolkhoz; finally, the remainder went into the indivisible fund of the collective to be used for its social, cultural, and other needs. The members also cultivated their small private plots - and with remarkable intensity and success. The Machine Tractor Stations, finally abolished in 1958, provided indispensable mechanized aid to the collectives, notably at harvest time, helping to co-ordinate the work of different kolkhozes and acting as another control over them. While it might be noted that the Soviet government found it easier to introduce collective farms in those regions where communal agriculture prevailed than in areas of individual proprietors, such as Ukraine, the kolkhoz bore very little resemblance to the commune. Members of a commune possessed their land in common, but they farmed their assigned lots separately, undisturbed, and in their own traditional