Standing over and financing the scientific institutes in the 1920s were a variety of government offices. Some institutes were supported by the Russian republic Commissariat of Education, but the physical sciences increasingly came under the industrial commissariats or the Supreme Economic Council. Biology was mainly the purview of the Commissariats of Health or the Russian Commissariat of Agriculture. The idea was to unite theory and practice, an idea central to Marxism but also popular with many scientists on the eve of the Revolution who thought that Russia needed their expertise to overcome its backwardness. Thus the Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute had contracts with many industrial agencies, including a long-lasting and ultimately unsuccessful study of insulation for long-distance power cables. Successful or not, these contracts provided supplementary financing and demonstrated to the party leadership the usefulness of scientific research. The party authorities were perfectly aware that the scientists were not Bolsheviks. Many of them did believe that they should help the new state to modernize the country, whatever its leadership, but they were not Marxists. For the time being, this divergence of aims was not a problem.
The end of NEP meant, however, a radical upheaval in society launched by Stalin and the party leadership and a radical upheaval in art, literature, the humanistic disciplines, and the natural sciences. No area was spared this “cultural revolution,” as it was called at the time, an upheaval in culture that matched that in the villages and the factories of the Soviet Union. This cultural revolution itself was short-lived but it was the beginning of a fundamental transformation of Soviet culture.
19 Building Utopia
Starting in 1929, the Soviet leadership began to transform the society of the USSR, to build an industrialized modern state, but not a capitalist state. The new society was to realize the old dream of socialism, a place without private property where the state ran and managed production of goods and services for the benefit of everyone. This was the idea. The reality that emerged after more than a decade of upheaval served as the framework of the Soviet Union until its demise two generations later.
The basic outlines were in place at the end of 1927 with the first five-year plan and the course toward collectivization of agriculture. The plan was to last from the beginning of 1928 to the end of 1932, and called for a twenty percent annual increase in industrial production, a rate of growth that was unheard of at the time. Such a growth rate implied a huge increase in urban population, and that required much more food than the country produced with its backward peasant agriculture. To complicate matters, grain exports were the Soviet Union’s main source of hard currency to buy the new industrial equipment abroad that was essential for rapid industrialization. The solution was to be the collectivization of agriculture, which would increase per acre yield and free millions of hands to work in the new industry. The original plan for the pace of collectivization was moderate, with about a fifth of peasant households to be collectivized by the end of 1932.
The first thing that went wrong was the crisis in grain procurements early in 1928. The response of Stalin and the leadership was to return to grain requisitioning such as they had practiced in the Civil War. In 1929 the food supply situation was so serious that local authorities began to introduce rationing, soon established throughout the country. The crisis also stimulated Stalin and his supporters toward faster industrialization, for they felt that it showed that the kulak was getting stronger and could eventually make socialism impossible. The solution was to change the first five-year plan in 1929, with vastly increased production targets for state industries and huge construction schemes. These were the decisions that led to the opposition of Bukharin and the “rights,” so that the plan was also political. To fulfill the targets and discredit the “rights,” Stalin also had to make the speeded up plans work at whatever cost. The result of the speedups was that the plan ceased to work: managers in the targeted areas took supplies and workers wherever they could get them at whatever cost, wrecking the balances in the plan. The quality of production suffered as the physical output target consumed all attention. As food supplies decreased, the factories began to find their own sources, making semi-legal deals with farms to supply the factory dining rooms, which quickly became the main sources of food for their workers.
The plan called not just for more production but also for a total modernization of the key industrial sectors. The Soviet engineers and planners wanted to follow American industrial models such as Henry Ford’s River Rouge auto plant, which relied on a moving production line rather than on many highly skilled workmen as was the case in Europe. To the Soviets, with millions of unskilled workers, this seemed to be the solution and the great Soviet tractor (and tank) factories were set up on these lines. The tractor factories were crucial to the collectivization plan, but for them as for everything else the country needed far more iron and steel for machines. Throughout the world this was the great age of metal and machines, and if the USSR was to have them, it would have to build huge new complexes. A giant dam on the Dniepr River was built to provide electricity for Ukrainian industry. In the Urals a great industrial base began to grow with whole new cities like Magnitogorsk built from scratch in order to mine iron ore. These were what were called “shock construction” sites, and resources were pulled from everywhere to supply them. The party mobilized youth to work there – the youth lived in tents and mud huts – as a grand campaign to continue the work of the revolution. The press plastered their achievements all over the country, and the most successful “shock workers” saw their pictures in Pravda and on billboards.
The first five-year plan was to be the great turning point in the building of socialism, the decisive break with the past, and Stalin and his allies saw it as a class war. The organs of the state and party under the Georgian Bolshevik Sergo Ordzhonikidze turned their fire first on industrial management, enlisting former Trotskyists to ferret out alleged bureaucratism. Workers and local party committees were encouraged to inform on their bosses, accusing them of incompetence, or even worse, “wrecking.” Anyone responsible for a factory where production flagged or accidents were frequent could be accused of consciously trying to stop the building of socialism by sabotage. Local activists and the GPU (Main Political Administration, successor to the Cheka) also went after Communist managers with enthusiasm, but anyone from the old order was a particular target. During these years the GPU staged show trials of “enemies,” engineers and managers from the pre-revolutionary elites, Menshevik economists, agrarian experts who had supported the SRs or liberals before 1917, and other “former people.” The attack on the old intelligentsia went far beyond the economic sphere: historians and literary scholars, even some natural scientists were arrested and tried. In the non-Russian republics the authorities went after the local intelligentsia as well, accusing them of links with foreign states and various separatist schemes. Most of the managers and engineers were accused of “wrecking”; that is, intentionally causing accidents and slowing down production, usually on the orders of émigré organizations and foreign intelligence agencies. By 1930 these methods had discredited much of the existing administrative units, and Stalin placed Ordzhonikidze in charge of the Supreme Economic Council, where he brought his staff, many former Trotskyists among them, to manage the speedup of the plan.
The ever-increasing plan targets and the chaos that resulted from collectivization meant that millions of people were displaced, roaming the country from one construction site to another. Housing became an acute problem, especially in Moscow and other big or new cities. Most of the urban population came to live in communal apartments, usually older apartments cut up into several rooms with a common kitchen and bathrooms. Whole families lived in one room or two small rooms. In many places workers lived in barracks or “temporary” housing. Initially the plan had called for rapid expansion of at least basic consumer goods, but the increasing targets for heavy industry gutted the production of textiles and other basic commodities. To make things w
orse, the series of war scares in the late 1920s encouraged massive investment in the military industry until 1934, and this investment reached levels not seen again until the eve of World War II. The standard of living of the population began to fall precipitously. In a few places strikes even broke out over the shortages of food supplies. The managers in the crucial industries could not maintain their workforces without radical measures, and they went beyond supplying food in the factory cafeterias to building apartment houses and schools, tram lines, and clinics for their workers. A whole new type of hierarchy appeared in Soviet society, which put not just the party elite but also entire factories and industries above the rest. Workers in priority industries like the auto and tractor factories or the defense complex managed to get through these years with at least the basic needs of life supplied, while at textile factories or other light industries, many of them with predominantly female work forces, the workers had too little food even to work a full day.
City life meant intense privation, even for the youthful enthusiasts at shock construction sites. These hardships were nothing compared to the disasters of collectivization. At the beginning the party was not even clear what the new collective farm was to look like: was it to be some sort of association of peasant households for common planting and harvesting, or was it to be a total commune with farmers living in communal housing and eating together, as well as farming all the land together? And how fast was it to proceed, and how? In any case, it was in the autumn of 1929 when Stalin decided to go for as much collectivization as he could get. To prepare the ground the leadership decided on the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” and the GPU set out to round up and deport the kulaks. Several thousand were executed, but nearly two million were deported to the north, the Urals and Siberia, where they were put in “special settlements” to cut timber or sometimes to work in the mines or on construction. They arrived in remote areas where they had to build their own houses, often in the dead of winter without any facilities, medical care, or established food supplies. Thousands escaped and thousands died, until in 1931 the GPU took over the special settlements, the first large group to come under the auspices of the GULAG. For the time being, the special settlers vastly outnumbered the prisoners in actual concentration camps.
With the kulaks out of the way, collectivization went on at top speed. Under intense pressure from rural party officials as well as emissaries sent from the cities, the peasants were convinced to abandon their strips of land and combine them, in theory at least, into one huge farm to be worked together. To make matters worse, the authorities in some areas tried to push the peasants not just into collective farms but even into communes, the super-collectivized units with communal living and eating arrangements. By early 1930, almost half of the peasants had agreed to join a collective, but they also slaughtered their livestock, not wanting to waste them in the new order. There was as yet no equipment to work the farms beyond the old plows and horses, whose numbers were rapidly decreasing. Opposition was rife, with thousands of “incidents,” ranging from real rebellions to minor objections blown up into anti-Soviet demonstrations by the GPU. Early in 1930 Stalin realized that he had to pull back. The economic results of forcing the peasants into collective farms were becoming serious, and he published an article in Pravda under the title, “Dizzy with Success.” Local party members were getting too enthusiastic, he wrote, and were pursuing target numbers for their own sake, not paying enough attention to local circumstances and the mood of the peasantry. After the article, the number of collective farms fell rapidly and the communes were abandoned, but the process did not stop, it only paused and then resumed at a slower pace. In the meantime, disaster struck.
As collectivization continued, with all the disruptions that it caused, the weather played a cruel trick. In 1931 and 1932 bad weather struck – cold in some areas and drought in others – in the Ukraine and southern Russia, the main grain producing areas. By the summer of 1932 this meant famine that spanned a wide belt running from the Polish border into Siberia. The authorities reacted slowly, keeping up their collections of grains at the amount fixed in better years. Only toward the end of the year did they begin to ease off, but it was already too late, and famine had spread taking with it some five to seven million peasants throughout the southern regions of the USSR, about half of these in the Ukraine. The casualties of the famine, not the kulaks, turned out to be the principal victims of collectivization. The drought hit the peasants when the numbers of livestock had fallen, on average, by half and they had no reserves of grain; all of this was the result of the chaos of collectivization and the relentless collection of grain for the cities. The famine disturbed the authorities, but they did very little about it. Stalin did not take any extraordinary methods against the famine, which crushed opposition to collectivization. Not until better weather in 1933 produced a better harvest did the famine come to an end.
By the middle of the 1930s the basic outlines of the Soviet collective farm, the kolhoz, were in place, for the notion of setting up communes had been abandoned. The Russian village had always been a community, with houses clustered in the village surrounded by the fields. What was new was that the fields were now under the control of the kolhoz (actual property rights were still vested in the state). The kolhoz had a chairman and a governing board that set the farming tasks, which the peasants carried out together, plowing and sowing, harvesting and taking care of the livestock. For their work on the farm the peasants received payment, not in money but in the form of part of the harvest calculated by a system known as “labor-days.” The bulk of the harvest went to the state at a fixed price, one that favored the state and the cities over the kolhoz.
The kolhoz rarely owned its own machinery. As the new tractor factories came on line, the tractors went to a new institution, the Machine-Tractor Station, some eight thousand of them by the end of the decade. These were state operations, and they rented out the tractors and other machinery with the drivers and workers, providing the essential equipment for the kolhoz as well as assuring state control over the collective farms. If the machinery put the state into farming directly, the market did not disappear entirely in the countryside. Unlike the cities, where all retail trade was in state hands by the early 1930s, the peasantry was explicitly granted the right to farm small private plots alongside their houses. They used them primarily for vegetables and smaller livestock and took the produce to the peasant markets that reappeared in all Soviet cities. Though the private plots were only about four percent of the kolhoz land, they produced forty percent of vegetables and potatoes and over sixty-six percent of the meat coming from the collective farms. Their products were sold at prices much above those fixed in the stories and factory cafeterias, but at least they were available.
From 1933 to about 1936 the tension and upheaval in Soviet society lessened considerably. The rightists in the party had capitulated and publicly recanted their errors as had the Trotskyists, and Bukharin became the editor of Izvestiia. In 1932 the government abolished the Supreme Economic Council, replacing it with a series of People’s Commissariats for different branches of industry. The most important was the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, headed by Ordzhonikidze. It seemed that a more rational style of economic management had triumphed, for Ordzhonikidze took with him to the new organization many of the former Left Oppositionists and even many “bourgeois specialists” like those whom he had harassed in 1926–1929. New methods of increasing productivity in the work force emerged. In 1935 the Donbass miner Aleksei Stakhanov managed to produce fourteen times his norm of coal and was proclaimed a national hero. Other workers tried to imitate the simple reorganization of work methods that he used to achieve the goal, and were rewarded as Stakhanovites. Work gangs and shops within factories announced “socialist competition” contests to over fulfill the plan, earning brief fame as well as more concrete benefits. In themselves these campaigns, heavily sponsored by the party, achieved little, but labor productivity m
anaged to grow anyway. The extreme shortages of food and consumer goods began to abate and in 1935 the rationing of food and other consumer goods ended. Nevertheless, many basic commodities would be periodically or permanently in deficit. Elaborate systems of informal supply among the population formed to deal with these shortages, ranging from crude black market operations (strictly illegal and widely punished) to relatively harmless exchanges of goods among families and friends. The population was learning to cope. Unemployment had disappeared, to be replaced with a permanent labor shortage, though real wages were well below those of the late 1920s for the great majority of workers.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 42