by S. A Smith
K. I. Tokareva to M. I. Kalinin, 9 March 1926, Town Hospital, Urda Bukeevskaia
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no stretch of the imagination did this mean that they felt satisfied: indeed the gap between Soviet ideal and quotidian reality probably intensified their disillusionment in a government that fell so short of its own standards. Yet in criticizing the regime forfailing to live up to its ideals, they implicitly ascribed a certain legitimacy to it.
Nation-building
The idea of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in which the RSFSR would be one republic among several, was not formalized until 1922. By that date, a series of bilateral treaties between the RSFSR and the republics of Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bukhara, Khorezm, and the Far East had begun to cement these states into a federation. C. Rakovsky, the Bulgarian head of the Ukrainian soviet government, and the Georgian Bolsheviks, P. G. Mdivani and £ F. I. Makharadze, favoured a loose arrangement whereby republics g would remain sovereign entities. By contrast, Stalin favoured e 'autonomization', which entailed incorporating the republics into the jg RSFSR. Lenin rejected this solution as redolent of the chauvinism of the 1 old regime, and insisted on a federation in which non-Russian republics would have equal status with the RSFSR. Stalin was forced to accept this, but took advantage of Lenin's illness to ensure that the devolution of power to non-Russian republics did not weaken the party's dictatorship. The constitution of the USSR, finally ratified on 31 January 1924, left no doubt that ultimate power lay with Moscow. Where non-Russians resisted incorporation, they were duly crushed, as in summer 1925 when I. S. Unshlikht led 7,000 troops, including 8 planes and 22 heavy artillery, to 'disarm the bandit population' of Chechnia.
Nevertheless within the framework of a Russian-dominated Soviet Union, the 1920s witnessed an extraordinary process of nation-building, as the Bolsheviks entrenched nationality as the major principle of sociopolitical organization. Ethnographers set to work classifying ethnic groups, many of which had little understanding of themselves as
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nations, and programmes were devised to promote native political elites and intelligentsias together with minority languages and cultures. The process was designed, in Stalin's words, to produce republics and autonomous regions that were 'national in form, but socialist in content'. This was something of a paradox, since the Soviet Union claimed to represent the transcendence of the nation-state and, at various times, deployed a rhetoric of ultimate 'fusion' of nations into a single Soviet people. In practice, however, nationality, once seen as an impediment to socialism, came to be viewed positively - as the modality through which the economic, political, and cultural development of the non-Russian peoples would take place. Having eliminated traditional elites, the regime created a base for itself in the non-Russian republics by promoting members of the indigenous population - mainly young, politically active males from humble backgrounds - to positions of leadership. By institutionalizing the autonomies as political units and by creating national elites, Soviet rule helped to create quasi-nations, albeit at sub-state level. Broadly, this policy of indigenizing the party-state was vindicated. The proportion of Ukrainians in the Ukrainian Communist Party, for example, rose from 24% in 1922 to 52% in 1927, while Kazakh membership of that republic's party grew from 8% to 53% between 1924 and 1933. At the centre, however, Slavs continued to monopolize the key positions in the political, military, and security apparatuses. In other words, the limits of autonomy were firmly set by Moscow and those who dared to buck those limits risked the fate of the talented Sultangaliev, who was tried in June 1923 for being a'national communist'.
The cultural dimension of the programme of nation-building, which tooktheformof mass literacy and education and the promotion of print culture in native languages, was a brilliant success. Alphabets were devised for people who had no written language. By 1927, 82% of schools in Ukraine were teaching through the medium of Ukrainian. Native intelligentsias were offered preferential access to higher education and professional positions. Where there were minority
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peoples within national autonomies they were given their own national Soviets. In the Far East, for example, Chinese and Korean peoples enjoyed an unprecedented degree of tolerance, taking part in local government, establishing their own schools and newspapers. This emphasis on cultural-national autonomy, however, did not preclude conflict. The Tatars favoured updating Arabic as the written medium of their language, whereas Muslims in Azerbaijan and the northern Caucasus pressed for a Latin script. By 1925 official opinion had lined up behind the latter. Moscow genuinely encouraged national diversity, but always on its terms. Firmly committed to an evolutionist view of social development, it did not consider all cultures equal and had little compunction in attacking aspects of cultures, such as those in Central Asia, which it deemed 'backward'. Indeed one's very recognition as a nation depended on Moscow: the Kurds, for example, were never so recognized; and the extent of one's political autonomy was also £ dependent on the whim of Moscow, Abkhazia, for example, had its full g republican status withdrawn in 1931. The 1920s, then, were a unique era e of nation-building, yet contradictions between the institutionalization jg of nationality within a federal structure and the centralization of 1 economic and political power in a Slav-dominated unitary state were evident from the first.
Crisis of NEP
Between 1926-7 and 1928-9 the terms of trade for agriculture improved, owing to a lowering of industrial prices; but though the total volume of food sold continued to rise, grain sales did not increase. Indeed a lowering of the procurement price of grain led to a serious shortage by the autumn of 1927, when only 16.9% of the harvest was marketed. By the summer of 1928 rationing had been reintroduced in the cities. Meanwhile, the government was committed to stepping up the rate of investment in heavy industry, a commitment hardened by the war scare of summer 1927, brought on by Britain's severance of diplomatic relations. The procurement crisis of 1928 thus threw into
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doubt whether the ambitious targets of the First Five-Year Plan, ratified in December 1927, could be realized. Many in the party were now convinced that kulaks were holding the country to ransom. Having trounced the right opposition, Stalin resolved to smash these 'bourgeois' forces.
In recent years NEP has been the subject of heated debate. During Gorbachev's perestroika from 1986 to 1991, many argued that NEP could have delivered balanced economic growth at a rate equal to that achieved by the crash industrialization of the First Five-Year Plan, once allowance is made for waste and destruction. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the consensus changed, historians arguing that NEP was doomed to collapse under the weight of its contradictions. The foregoing account has tried to show that whilst where is no absolute contradiction between plan and market, NEP was a deeply contradictory system. From the start it proved vulnerable to crises, and as it evolved the temptation to use command-administrative methods to alter the workings of the market proved irresistible. Yet in 1928 NEP was not in terminal crisis. Grain procurement was a serious problem, springing directly from the strategy of prioritizing investment in heavy industry in an economy where there was an acute shortage of consumer goods, but a change in the price of grain relative to other agricultural commodities could have improved grain sales. The key problem was that NEP could not generate the level of investment required to sustain the rate of industrialization to which Stalin and his epigones were now committed. Ludicrously ambitious though their targets for growth subsequently became, they were not necessarily wrong to think that growth had to be rapid. In particular, the tense international situation created by the Versailles peace settlement left the Soviet Union vulnerable to hostile powers, and dictated that she build her economic and military strength as rapidly as possible.
Nevertheless, in the final instance, the break with NEP was determined not by sober assessment of the international situation or by technical
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discussion
of rates of investment, but by ideology. One may doubt that kulaks were gaining ground on the proletariat, but Bolsheviks, like everyone else, acted not upon the basis of 'reality' but upon their perception of reality. The party's entire rationale was to bring about 'socialism'; now it looked as though the continuance of NEP would cause the state to drown in a sea of petty-bourgeois forces or succumb to international capital. However, if the deep structure of Bolshevik ideology - its calculus of class forces - made the break with NEP likely, it did not mean that ideology necessitated the violent 'dekulakization', wildly escalating planning targets, the terror, and forced labour that Stalin proceeded to unleash. The choice to go on an all-out 'offensive' was precisely that: a choice made by Stalin and his supporters.
With NEP the meaning of the revolution changed profoundly: it was no longer principally about equality, justice, popular power, or £ internationalism, but about the party-state mobilizing the country's
g human and material resources to overcome economic, social, and
I
e cultural backwardness as rapidly as possible. As the Bolsheviks
jg themselves recognized, the options were now heavily circumscribed by
1 international isolation and by a backward economy and social
structure. It should also be added that their options were
circumscribed by the institutions and practices of the party-state that
were now in place, although they were less capable of appreciating this.
In this context, the project of proletarian self-emancipation gave
way to one of exploiting the productive power of the proletariat and
peasantry in order to drag the country out of backwardness. As this
happened, Bolshevik ideology mutated, with more elitist and
technocratic tendencies coming to prevail, at least for the time being.
It was in this limiting structural context that the inner party struggle
was played out.
Lenin bequeathed a structure of power that rested on personalized leadership, making the individual qualities of the leader of far more consequence than is the case for leaders in democratic states. The
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struggle to find a successor to Lenin, and the ideological conflicts bound up with that struggle, were thus fraught with consequence for the future course of the revolution. The death of Lenin at the age of 53 was a fateful contingency, not least because he had become convinced that Stalin posed a threat to party unity. Had he lived, he could probably have nipped in the bud the ambitions of a man whom he had done much to promote. Moreover, notwithstanding the narrowing of revolutionary options or the narrowing of the permitted debate within the party, Bolshevism still retained some ideological diversity. Lenin had begun to reflect on the implications for socialism of Russia's backwardness and isolation. It was on these rather sketchy reflections that Bukharin built his model of NEP, one in which the state and private sectors would interact through the market and in which civil peace would be the paramount goal of the party. Avery different scenario was offered by the Left, in which industrialization would proceed robustly at the expense of the peasantry until revolution broke out in the more developed world. There were, in other words, real choices to be made. But one should not, finally, lose sight of the fact that these choices were fundamentally circumscribed by the exigencies of backwardness and international isolation. One may speculate that Bukharin's socialism at a snail's pace would have gradually eroded the party's monopoly of power and allowed the economic and military gap between the Soviet Union and the capitalist powers to widen. Similarly, Trotsky's hope that Russia could be saved by revolution in the West proved vain. Notwithstanding the acute instability of world capitalism after 1929, or the rise of fascism, no western country experienced the systemic breakdown that constitutes a true revolutionary situation, i.e. one in which revolutionaries have a real chance of taking power. In the absence of revolution in the capita list West, it is unlikely that the Left could have avoided some form of coercion in its bid to industrialize, since the capacity of the peasant to thwart the goals of the regime was considerable and coercion was built into the very structure of the relationship between state and society. Use of coercion, however, does not imply the Great Terror. It was Stalin who recognized that the
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totalitarian state could be used to smash the constraints of backwardness through a 'revolution from above'. He did not scruple at the cost.
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Chapter 5
NEP: society and culture
With the onset of NEP social inequality began to increase. Class remained a fragile structure, since its material underpinnings such as ownership of means of production, the employment of labour, and the exercise of managerial authority were weak. Moreover, there were plenty of opportunities to advance oneself - by leaving the village, by getting an education, by joining the Komsomol, by getting a job in a soviet institution - so social relations remained fluid. Compared with capitalist societies, Soviet society was not highly differentiated, yet its pattern of differentiation was more complex than official categories allowed. Leaving aside the emerging nomenklatura elite, which not surprisingly was absent from official categories, the most rapidly growing occupational group were the service employees, a heterogeneous category, which embraced hundreds of thousands of office workers and petty functionaries in the state and party apparatuses, clerical, managerial, and technical staff in industry, and unskilled workers in the service sector. By 1926 they constituted the largest occupational group in Moscow. In strict Marxist terms, these were an unproductive stratum that formed part of the petty-bourgeoisie. Faced by the seemingly spontaneous proliferation of social groups that had no place in the idealized model of socialism, the Bolsheviks struggled to control the confusing social world of NEP by imposing familiar categories of class upon it.
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The Bolsheviks were convinced that differentiation was increasing among the peasantry. The recovery of the rural population had been rapid. By 1926, 82% of the 147 million people in the Soviet Union -5.5% higher than in 1914 - lived in the countryside. The number of peasant households was rising fast - from 18.7 million in 1914 to about 24 million in 1927 - owing to the desire of sons to split from the parental household. In spite of these tendencies, the great bulk of peasant households were classed as middle peasants, since they worked principally for subsistence and relied on their own labour. The Bolsheviks, however, were convinced that NEP was increasing the number of rich and poor households at the expense of those in the middle. This is how they interpreted statistics such as those which purported to show that in 1927 26% of households were poor; that 57% belonged to the 'middle' peasantry; 14% to the 'upper middle'; and 3.2% to the kulaks. These statistics classified households £ according to the value of their 'means of production', but the extent g of differentiation varied according to the means of production one e looked at. Sown area per capita, for example, was distributed fairly jg equally; holdings of livestock, rented land, and hired labour were 1 distributed less equally; and ownership of machinery was distributed very unequally. Moreover if one measured the data by household rather than per capita the degree of differentiation became greater. The real concern of the Bolsheviks was with what they believed to be the growing influence of kulaks. Of all categories, none was harder to define than this. Formerly associated with money-lending, kulaks could be variously defined as wealthy farmers, especially if they hired labour; as farmers who produced mainly for the market; as farmers who hired out heavy machinery or draft animals; or as peasants whose wealth derived from trade in such items as liquor. It is probably reasonable to conclude that the degree of differentiation among the peasantry was greater than many western historians allow; but it is unlikely that kulaks were flourishing at the expense of the middle peasants, if only because full-blown NEP was in operation for too short a time.
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If the regime was alarmed by the supposed increase in influence of kulaks, it was also greatly exercised by 'nepmen', i.e. the traders, manufacturers, and suppliers who seized the new opportunities to engage in private enterprise. Probably the biggest group of the 3 million so classified were engaged in handicrafts in the countryside, but it was those who traded or ran small businesses in the cities who came in for most obloquy, since some amassed considerable fortunes. There was surprisingly little overlap between them and the pre-revolutionary merchant class, except among the rarefied elite of large wholesalers. Among ordinary folk, struggling to feed and clothe themselves, traditional hatred of 'speculators' found a focus in the nepmen, some of it acquiring an anti-semitic tinge. Such antipathy was reinforced by the merciless caricature of nepmen in the official media as vulgar nouveaux riches, ignorant upstarts, swindlers, and philistines. In truth, many nepmen did flaunt their wealth, dining on caviar and champagne, hiring servants, buying houses, dressing in suits, silk dresses, or expensive fur coats. So far as the regime was concerned they existed on sufferance, necessary to revive a devastated market yet feared as polluters of the social body.