A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  way. Organization and regimentation of labor became the very essence of the kolkhoz.

  The Second and Third Five-Year Plans

  The Second Five-Year Plan, which lasted from 1933 through 1937, and the Third, which began in 1938 and was interrupted by the German invasion in June 1941, continued on the whole the aims and methods of the initial Plan. They stressed the development of heavy industry, completed the collectivization of agriculture, and did their best to mobilize the manpower and other resources of the country to attain the objectives. The Soviet people lived through eight and a half more years of quasi-wartime exertion. Yet these plans also differed in certain ways from the first and from each other. The Second Five-Year Plan, drawn on the basis of acquired knowledge more expertly than the first, tried to balance production to avoid extreme over- or underfulfillment. It emphasized "mastering the technique," including the making of especially complicated machine tools, precision instruments, and the like. Also, it allowed a little more for consumers' goods than the first plan did. However, in the course of the Second Five-Year Plan, and especially during the third, military considerations became paramount. Military considerations linked to ideology had of course always been present in the planning of Soviet leaders. From the beginning of industrialization, Stalin and his associates had insisted that they had to build a powerful socialist state quickly, perhaps in a decade, or be crushed by capitalists. In the 1930's the threat became increasingly real and menacing. Soviet leaders did what they could to arm and equip Red forces, and they accelerated the development of industries inland, east of the Volga, away from the exposed frontiers.

  Both the Second Five-Year Plan and the third, as far as it went, were again proclaimed successes, and again the official claims, in spite of their exaggeration, had some sound basis in fact. Industry, especially heavy industry, continued to grow. On the basis of official - and doubtful - figures, the Soviet share in world production amounted to 13.7 per cent in 1937, compared to 3.7 in 1929 and to 2.6 for the Russian Empire in 1913. In the generation of electrical power, for example, the Soviet Union advanced from the fifteenth place among the countries of the world to the third, and it was second only to the United States in machine building, tractors, trucks, and some other lines of production. Moreover, the Soviet Union made its amazing gains while the rest of the world experienced a terrible depression and mass unemployment.

  In agriculture collectivization was virtually completed and, except for the wilderness, the Soviet countryside became a land of kolkhozes and

  sovkhozes. Slightly less than 250,000 kolkhozes replaced over 25 million individual farms. The famine and other horrors of the First Five-Year Plan did not recur. In fact, agricultural production increased somewhat, and food rationing was abolished in 1935. Still, the economic success of Soviet agricultural policy remained much more doubtful than the achievements of Soviet industrialization. Peasants regularly failed to meet their production quotas. They showed far greater devotion to their small private plots than to the vast kolkhoz possessions. In other ways, too, they remained particularly unresponsive to the wishes of Communist authorities. A full evaluation of Soviet social engineering should also take account of the costs. As one author summarized the salient human aspects of Soviet agricultural policies during the socialist offensive:

  As a result of collectivization the number of families on the land diminished from 26,000,000 to 21,000,000. This means that 5,000,000 families or approximately 24,000,000 individuals must have left the countryside. Of these the increase in the towns accounts for one half. Twelve millions are not accounted for. A part of them has undoubtedly perished, the other part has found new possibilities in the Far East, in the Arctic, or in Central Asia.

  An Evaluation of the Plans

  Any over-all judgment of the first three five-year plans is of necessity a complicated and controversial matter, as the writings of Bergson, Grossman, and other economists clearly indicate. The plans did succeed - and succeed strikingly - in developing industry, particularly heavy industry, and in collectivizing agriculture. Skepticism as to the feasibility of the plans, extremely widespread outside the Soviet Union, turned to astonishment and sometimes admiration. To repeat, not only did production greatly increase, but entire new industries appeared, while huge virgin territories, including the distant and difficult far north, began to enter the economic life of the country. Red armed forces, by contrast with the tsarist army, obtained a highly developed industrial and armaments base, a fact which alone justifies the five-year plans, in the opinion of some critics. Moreover, the entire enormous undertaking was carried out almost wholly by internal manpower and financing, except for the very important contribution of several thousand Western specialists in all fields who were invited to help, and some short-term credit extended to the Soviet government by German and other suppliers during the first years of industrialization. Considered by many as Stalin's chimera, the five-year plans proved to be an effective way - if not necessarily the only or the best way - to industrialize a relatively backward country.

  Yet the cost was tremendous. Soviet authorities could accomplish their aims only by imposing great hardships on the people and by mobilizing the country in a quasi-military manner for a supreme effort. The very terminology of the five-year plans, with its iron or coal fronts, shock brigades, and constant communiques, spoke of war. Piece work became common and wage differentials grew by leaps and bounds. The new emphasis on "socialist competition" culminated in the Stakhanov movement. In 1935 Alexis Stakhanov, a coal miner in the Donets Basin, was reported to have overfulfilled his daily quota by 1400 per cent in the course of a shift hewing coal. "Stakhanovite" results were soon achieved by other workers in numerous branches of industry. Rewarding the Stakhanovites, whose accomplishments stemmed in different degrees from improved technique, enormous exertion, and co-operation by their fellow workers, the goyernment used their successes to raise general production norms over a period of time. Most workers must have resented this speed-up - some Stakhanovites were actually killed - but they could not reverse it. After the October Revolution, and especially in the '30's, labor unions, to which almost all workers belonged, have served as agencies of the state, to promote its policies and rally the workers behind them, rather than as representatives of labor interests and point of view. Hardships of Soviet life included a desperate shortage of consumers' goods, as well as totally inadequate housing combined with a rigid system of priorities. As a result the black market flourished, and indeed has remained an essential part of the Soviet economic system. Criticisms of the first three five-year plans - in fact, of their successors as well - have also pointed to top-heavy bureaucracy and excessive red tape, to a relatively low productivity per worker and production per inhabitant, to the frequently poor quality of the items produced, and to numerous weaknesses, perhaps outright failure, in agriculture. It can legitimately be asked whether a different regime could have industrialized the country better and with less pain.

  For extreme painfulness emerged as a fundamental aspect of the first three five-year plans. While all suffered to some extent, some groups of the population suffered beyond all measure. One such group, as already mentioned, was the kulaks and their families. Another, overlapping but by no means identical with the kulaks, was the inmates of the forced-labor camps. A history of Soviet forced labor remains to be written in full: it was ignored in Soviet publications as well as by such Soviet sympathizers as Dobb in his interesting and useful studies of the Soviet economy. Scholars who tried to reconstruct reality had to do so on the basis of limited and sometimes controversial evidence. Still, after the information provided by numerous former inmates who left the Soviet Union during the Second World War, the researches of such scholars as D. Dallin and Nicolaevsky, the writings of Solzhenitsyn, and especially the material becoming available after the collapse of the Soviet

  Union, the basic outlines of the Soviet forced-labor system are reasonably clear. Having begun in the early 'thirties t
he system encompassed millions of human beings on the eve of the Second World War, in spite of the extremely high mortality rate in the camps. Forced labor was used especially on huge construction projects, such as the Baltic-White Sea and other canals, and for hard work under primitive conditions in distant areas, as in the case of the lumber and gold industries. The political police - from 1922 to 1934 known as the G.P.U. and the O.G.P.U. rather than the Cheka, after 1934 as the N.K.V.D. after the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, subsequently as M.V.D. and M.G.B., and after 1954 as K.G.B. - which guarded and administered forced labor, developed veritable concentration-camp empires in the European Russian and Siberian far north, in the Far East, and in certain other areas of the Soviet Union.

  The Great Purge

  The great purge of the 1930's helped to fill forced-labor camps and formed another major, although perhaps unnecessary, aspect of the five-year plans. It also marked Stalin's extermination of all opposition or suspected opposition and his assumption of complete dictatorial power. Although earlier some engineers and other specialists, including foreigners, had been accused of sabotaging or wrecking the industrialization of the country, the real purge began in December 1934 with the assassination of one of the party leaders who was boss in Leningrad, Serge Kirov, and reached high intensity from 1936 to 1938. The purge eventually became enormous in scope; it was directed primarily against Party members, not against the White Guards or other remnants of the old regime as repressive practices had been before.

  The assassin of Kirov, proclaimed to be a member of the Left Opposition, was shot, together with about a hundred alleged accomplices. Revelations at the Twenty-second Party Congress strengthened the suspicions of some specialists that Stalin himself was apparently responsible for Kirov's murder. A Party purge followed. While uncounted people disappeared, the three great public trials featured sixteen Bolshevik leaders, notably Zino-viev and Kamenev, in 1936, another seventeen in 1937, and twenty-one more, including Bukharin and Rykov, in 1938. The accused were charged with association with Trotsky, counterrevolutionary conspiracy, "wrecking," and treasonable alliance with Soviet enemies abroad. Invariably they confessed to the fantastic charges and in all but four cases received the death penalty. Observers and scholars such as Conquest have been trying since to find reasons for the staggering confessions in everything from torture to heroic loyalty to Soviet communism. The purge spread and spread, affecting virtually all Party organizations and government branches,

  the army, where Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other top commanders perished at the same time, and almost every other prominent institution, including the political police itself. It reached its height when Nicholas Ezhov - hence Ezhovshchina - directed the N.K.V.D. from late September 1936 until the end of July 1938. Fainsod wrote the best summary of these events:

  The period of the Yezhovshchina involved a reign of terror without parallel in Soviet history. Among those arrested, imprisoned, and executed were a substantial proportion of the leading figures in the Party and governmental hierarchy. The Bolshevik Old Guard was destroyed. The roll of Yezhov's victims included not only former oppositionists but many of the most stalwart supporters of Stalin in his protracted struggle with the opposition. No sphere of Soviet life, however lofty, was left untouched. Among the purged Stalinists were three former members of the Politburo… and three candidate members… An overwhelming majority of the members and candidates of the Party Central Committee disappeared. The senior officer corps of the armed forces suffered severely. According to one sober account "two of five marshals of the Soviet Union escaped arrest, two of fifteen army commanders, twenty-eight of fifty-eight corps commanders, eighty-five of a hundred ninety-five divisional commanders, and a hundred and ninety-five of four hundred and six regimental commanders." The havoc wrought by the purge among naval commanding personnel was equally great. The removal of Yagoda from the NKVD was accompanied by the arrest of his leading collaborators… The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and the diplomatic service were hard hit… Almost every commissariat was deeply affected.

  The purge swept out in ever-widening circles and resulted in wholesale removals and arrests of leading officials in the union republics, secretaries of the Party, Komsomol, and trade-union apparatus, heads of industrial trusts and enterprises, Comintern functionaries and foreign Communists, and leading writers, scholars, engineers and scientists. The arrest of an important figure was followed by the seizure of the entourage which surrounded him. The apprehension of members of the entourage led to the imprisonment of their friends and acquaintances. The endless chain of involvements and associations threatened to encompass entire strata of Soviet society. Fear of arrest, exhortations to vigilance, and perverted ambition unleashed new floods of denunciations, which generated their own avalanche of cumulative interrogations and detentions. Whole categories of Soviet citizens found themselves singled out for arrest because of their "objective characteristics." Old Bolsheviks, Red Partisans, foreign Communists of German, Austrian, and Polish extraction, Soviet citizens who had been abroad or had relations with foreign countries or foreigners, and "repressed elements" were automatically caught up in the NKVD web of wholesale imprisonment. The arrests mounted into the

  Michael Lomonosov

  Dmitrii Mendeleev

  Nicholas Lobachevsky

  Ivan Pavlov

  Maxim Gorky and Theodore Chaliapin

  Nicholas Gogol

  Anton Chekhov

  Nicholas Chernyshevsky

  Michael Lermontov

  Alexander Pushkin

  Boris Pasternak

  Alexander Herzen

  Dmitrii Shostakovich

  Waslaw Nijinsky

  Anna Akhmatova

  Modest Musorgsky

  Peter Tchaikovsky

  Ernest Ansermet, Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Serge Prokofiev

  Leon Trotsky

  Joseph Stalin

  Lenin

  Nikita Khrushchev

  Stalin's Funeral. From right: Khrushchev, Beria, Chou En-lai, Malenkov, Voroshilov, Kaganovitch, Bulganin, Molotov.

  Soviet Leaders at Kremlin Meeting of the Supreme Soviet Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, November 4, 1967. From left: Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgorny, Suslov.

  millions; the testimony of the survivors is unanimous regarding crowded prison cells and teeming forced labor camps. Most of the prisoners were utterly bewildered by the fate which had befallen them. The vast resources of the NKVD were concentrated on one objective-to document the existence of a huge conspiracy to undermine Soviet power. The extraction of real confessions to imaginary crimes became a major industry. Under the zealous and ruthless ministrations of NKVD examiners, millions of innocents were transformed into traitors, terrorists, and enemies of the people.

  Orders were even issued to arrest a certain percentage of the entire population. The total number of those taken by the political police has been estimated at at least eight million. Before the great purge had run its course, Ezhov himself and many of his henchmen fell victim to it after Lavrentii Beria, a Georgian like Stalin, took control of the N.K.V.D.

  Stalin's System

  The great purge assured Stalin's complete control of the Party, the government, and the country. As frequently pointed out, the Old Bolsheviks, members of the Party before 1917 and thus not creatures of the general secretary, suffered enormous losses. Virtually all of those who had at any time joined any opposition to Stalin perished. But, as already mentioned, some devoted Stalinists also fell victim to the purge; it was on the whole that group, together with the military men, that was posthumously vindicated by Khrushchev. When the Eighteenth Ali-Union Party Congress gathered in 1939, Old Bolsheviks composed only about 20 per cent of its membership compared to 80 per cent at the Seventeenth Congress in 1934. Moreover, except for a few lieutenants of Stalin, such as Viacheslav Molotov, born Skriabin, almost no leaders of any prominence were left. For example, with the exception of Stal
in himself and of Trotsky, who was murdered in 1940, Lenin's entire Politburo had been wiped out.