by Ian Grey
Stalin did not believe, however, that the peasants could ever be won over to socialism. He knew them better than any of the party intellectuals. Since his rapid tour of Siberia to wrest hoarded grain from the peasantry, he had become convinced that they must be forced into collectives. Meanwhile, he was not prepared for the party to be dependent on the peasants in its great historic task of building socialism.
Another extremely important factor was his sense of urgency. He demanded immediate action because he was convinced that the implementation of his policies was crucial to the survival of the party and of the nation. Survival meant catching up and overtaking the industrialized Western powers. Soviet Russia was weak and at their mercy, and would remain so until it had transformed its economy and built up its industrial strength.
In one of his most revealing speeches, Stalin explained in challenging terms this urgent need to catch up with and overtake the West. It happened at the first all-union conference of workers in socialist industry in February 1931, when all were feeling the frenzy and pressures of the First Five-year Plan and were longing for some relief. Stalin would permit no relief.
“The question is sometimes asked,” he declared, “whether it is not possible to reduce the tempo slightly, to hold back the movement. No, it is not possible, Comrades! It is not possible to lower the tempo. On the contrary, so far as strength and opportunities allow, it is necessary to increase the tempo. Our obligations to the workers and peasants of the U.S.S.R. demand this of us. Our obligations to the working class of the whole world demand this of us.
“To retard the tempo - this means to drop behind. And those who are backward are beaten. We do not want to be beaten! No, we do not want that! The history of old Russia was, among other things, that she was constantly beaten because of her backwardness. The Mongol Khans beat her! The Turkish Beys beat her! The Swedish feudal lords beat her! The Polish-Lithuanian nobles beat her! The Anglo-French capitalists beat her! The Japanese barons beat her! All beat her - for her backwardness. For military backwardness, cultural backwardness, governmental backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and went unpunished. . . .
“In the past we did not and could not have a fatherland. But now, when we have overthrown capitalism and power belongs to us, to the people - now we have a fatherland, and we will defend its independence. Are you prepared for our socialist fatherland to be beaten and for her to lose her independence? If you do not want that, then you must in the shortest time liquidate her backwardness and develop the present Bolshevik tempo in the construction of its socialist economy. . . . We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this gap in ten years. Either we do this or they crush us!”
This sense of purpose, together with those personal qualities which by some alchemy give some men mastery over their fellows, made him a dynamic leader. He acted with the conviction that Marxist dogma as interpreted by Lenin himself provided the infallible formula to achieve national strength and social justice. But this method, rooted in the Bolshevik ethic that all means were justified by the ends, transformed him into an inhuman tyrant.
The First Five-year Plan was a program of production targets and slogans for Stalin’s assault on Russia’s backwardness. It came into operation in 1928 but was approved only in April 1929 by the Sixteenth Party Conference. It set ambitious goals for industry and envisaged a massive socialization of agriculture. But the overriding importance of the plan was that it provided a challenge to the Russian nation; it summoned the people to a life of heroic endeavor. At the same time, it gave cover for a brutal collectivization of agriculture. It was a bold assault on two fronts.
This First Five-year Plan was in scale and achievement probably the greatest planned economic venture in man’s history. Results fell short of targets but were nevertheless prodigious. This feat was, moreover, accomplished in four and a quarter years, for on December 31, 1932, the plan was declared to have been fulfilled. The wastage and the cost in human suffering and sacrifice were horrifying. But Stalin was convinced that the price must be paid. The party, transported by his demand for supreme effort, accepted the price. And with extraordinary endurance, the mass of Russians labored and served.
The programs of collectivization and industrialization were launched simultaneously. The collectivization campaign had made some progress in 1928. The number of kolkhozi, or collective farms, had grown in the year ended June 1, 1928, from 14,830 to 33,258 and their membership from 194,200 to 416,700 peasant households. But to Stalin, such a rate of increase was completely unacceptable. As the winter of 1928–29 approached, the threat of famine became serious. There were persistent shortfalls in grain deliveries. The peasants were ignoring and possibly actively challenging the Soviet government and its policies. He demanded urgent action.
During 1929, the campaign gathered impetus; it was soon to sweep across the country in a destructive wave, recalling the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. On December 27, 1929, Stalin proclaimed that “we have recently passed from a policy of confining the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to a policy of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” This amounted to a declaration of total war and even a sentence of death on an ill-defined section of the peasantry, some 10 million in number. It is estimated that 5 million were deported to Siberia and the Arctic region, and of them, at least a quarter perished on the journey. Thousands were killed in the villages while trying to defend their property.
On January 5, 1930, the Central Committee decreed that the target of collectivizing the vast majority of peasants within the plan period was entirely practicable. Further, it referred to the completion of the collectivizing of all grain-producing regions by autumn 1932. This raised the campaign to a climax of fury. In October 1929, 4.1 percent of peasant households had been collectivized; by March 1930, the figure was more than 50 percent; and by July 1, 1934, it was 71.4 percent of the farmlands and of the peasant households. The figures represented percentages of 100 million human beings. It was a development staggering in scale.
Stalin achieved this revolution in agriculture by ruthless use of force and terror. Local Soviets were directed to confiscate the property of kulaks, making it the nucleus for the commonly owned and indivisible collectives. In practice, this applied to the land and livestock of all peasants who did not voluntarily join the collectives. The OGPU, which had been expanded for the purpose, was the chief instrument in enforcing the campaign. But 25,000 “workers with adequate political and organizational experience” were also sent into the countryside to act as shock troops. The Committees of the Poor, which had whipped up savage hatreds and destruction during the Civil War, were revived. They encouraged bitter antagonism between the poor and the better-off peasants and helped to eliminate all possibility of united action against the government campaign.
The MTS (Machine Tractor Stations) were one of the many means by which peasants were coerced into collectivization. Agronomists, veterinary specialists, and mechanics were attached to each station, which served groups of collectives. In 1929, only one MTS existed. At the Sixteenth Party Congress in June-July 1930, Y. A. Yakovlev reported that 200 stations were operating, with tractors of Russian manufacture. Tractors were desperately needed, especially after the slaughter of horses, and they were for use only on the kolkhozi. Peasants who resisted collectivization found themselves without the means to plow their land.
Party records from the Smolensk region, captured during World War II and later published, give firsthand evidence of the chaos and violence which convulsed the countryside. The records make clear that the campaign of collectivization developed into an orgy of indiscriminate arrests, rapes, and looting. Attempts by party officials to restrain excesses were ignored. The slogan of many “dekulakization brigades” was “Drink! Eat! It’s all ours!”
In many regions, the peasants fought with blind destructive fury. Murder and arson were widespread. The communists wer
e the enemies. Party files in Smolensk recorded that “as reports of killings and arson multiplied, Party members were warned to stay away from windows when working in Soviet institutions and not to walk in the village streets after dark.” Inexorably the campaign continued. Regional party officials were threatened with severe disciplinary action if they failed to ensure collection of grain quotas and the entry of their peasants into the kolkhozi. Slogans, such as “Who does not join the kolkhozi is the enemy of Soviet power,” faced peasants with the choice of joining or being transported elsewhere or being killed.
The peasants demonstrated the hatred they felt for the regime and its collectivization policy by slaughtering their animals. To the peasant, his horse, his cow, his few sheep and goats were treasured possessions and a source of food in hard times. But faced with confiscation and transfer of their livestock to the kolkhozi, peasants chose to slaughter them. In the first months of 1930 alone, 14 million head of cattle were killed. Of the 34 million horses in Soviet Russia in 1929, 18 million were killed. Further, some 67 percent of sheep and goats were slaughtered between 1929 and 1933.
The rage of violence and destruction threatened to get completely out of control. Party leaders proclaimed the success of the campaign with state grain collections in 1929 higher by 50 percent than in the previous year. But Stalin was disturbed by the dangers of anarchy. On March 2, 1930, he published in Pravda his famous article “Dizziness from Success.”
The time had come, he wrote, to restrain the excessive zeal of party officials and to call a halt to the forcible herding of peasants and livestock into kolkhozi. Many officials had lost sight of the Leninist principle that entry into the kolkhozi was and must be voluntary. All officials and members must observe the model character of the collective farm, which was published in the same issue of Pravda. The article was followed on March 14 by detailed instructions from the Central Committee “On distortions of the party line with reference to the collectivization movement,” which called for greater care in handling the peasants. Many illegalities were specified; in particular, the treatment of thousands of poor and middle peasants as kulaks must be stopped.
Stalin’s article had the immediate effect of calming the fury which gripped many regions. At the same time, the peasants grasped the significance of the statement that entry into the kolkhozi should be voluntary, and they exercised the right to withdraw. Within two months, the proportion of households collectivized in the RSFSR fell from 60 to 23.4 percent. By June 1930, Stalin’s agricultural policy faced collapse. It seemed that peasant resistance had halted the collectivization program and had defeated him.
At the Sixteenth Party Congress, held in June-July 1930, however, Stalin himself and the delegates, some 2,100 in number, were united in acclaiming the “victory of the party line.” Stalin was well aware of the extent of peasant opposition and of the disasters caused by forced collectivization, but he displayed unshakable confidence in a successful outcome. He attacked the right oppositionists who had made dire predictions of the horrors that would result from the campaign against the kulaks and from enforced collectivization. “And now we are carrying out the policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class, the policy compared with which the previous repression of the kulaks was nothing. And look, we are alive and well!”
In the critical conditions of June 1930, the right-wing leaders might have been expected to offer opposition. They could claim they had forecast the disasters that would follow from the policies which Trotsky and the left-wing faction had advocated and which Stalin was now enforcing so drastically. But they declared their fervent support for Stalin and the party line. Rykov and Tomsky both made abject confessions before the full Congress that they had been totally wrong, and they pleaded for the party’s forgiveness. Bukharin was absent from the Congress, but he was to abase himself on a later occasion.
The need to maintain the unity of the party again proved to be an irresistible force. Many of the delegates with firsthand experience of the disasters in the countryside acted under the same compulsion. The party had to maintain its unity, especially at this time when it was the object of popular hatred. If the party became divided and lost its grip over the country, anarchy would follow, and they would be massacred to a man by the infuriated peasants.
The solidarity of the Congress was undoubtedly inspired, in part, by the general need to defend the party, the Revolution, and themselves. But Stalin’s leadership was the positive uniting factor. He dominated the Congress. He stood before the delegates, calm and completely in control. He was convinced the party line was the right line. He exuded confidence and strength, which swept away their doubts and fears. Moreover, he presented the party’s policies as bold endeavors which could not fail. In the euphoria he induced, delegates stood to acclaim their leader, who had declared that “there are no fortresses which we Bolsheviks cannot storm or seize!”
At the Congress, Stalin made it clear that the peasants must accept collectivization. The campaign was renewed in the autumn of 1930 and with evident effect. This time, the tactics used were more controlled, but the peasants found themselves harried by violence and exposed to inexorable pressures. By mid-1931, 52.7 percent of peasant households had been collectivized; some four years later the figure had risen to 90.5 percent.
The peasants had been beaten, starved, and plundered, and finally forced into the hated collectives. But they had wrung an important concession. This was the retention of the usadba, the private allotment of land, which remained in the possession of each peasant household. Private trade in food products, which had been a feature of NEP, had been forbidden in 1929 but was permitted again in the following year. The private markets, supplied from the peasant’s usadba, played a vital role in the supply and distribution of food at a time when food shortages and malnutrition were ever-present threats.
The industrialization campaign had also started with a show of moderation, Stalin was intoxicated, however, by visions of Russia transformed into an industrial nation. He gave the campaign an impetus which turned it into a frantic industrial revolution. By 1927, industry had recovered to prewar levels of production. Reporting to the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, Stalin had proposed that an annual rate of 15 percent increase in output should be accepted over the next few years. By mid-1929, the fever of industrialization had taken hold of him and he was demanding a 50 percent annual rate of increase.
The campaign was mounted on military lines, the Politburo acting as supreme headquarters. It maintained close control through the party machine and government administration over every sector of the economy. Incessant propaganda assailed the worker with a grandiose idea of the part he was playing in this heroic plan and demanded of him ever-increasing productivity. In every factory, giant progress boards were prominent, showing the output of groups and even individuals, and any who fell behind the targets were publicly criticized and harassed. Workers’ brigades were ranged against each other in “socialist competition.”
Party members and young people, especially members of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League), responded with enthusiasm. All were eager to express in action their faith in the party and their mission as builders of the new socialist world. Their dedicated, self-sacrificing labor was an important factor in the achievements of industry during the first plans.
The mass of the workers did not share this enthusiasm. They were weary from long hours of labor and the constant demands for higher production. Shortages of food and the drastic decline in their living standards were aggravated by the swarms of hungry peasants who invaded the cities and towns in search of work. Exhortations, proclaiming them as the vanguard of the proletariat of the world, and ubiquitous slogans, declaring that Soviet Russia was a workers’ state and that the workers owned the factories, merely intensified their disenchantment. Older workers, in particular, resented the change in their position in the factories. The early mood of the Revolution, carrying into the period of NEP, had promoted in all workers a sense of e
quality and of belonging to their factories. This feeling passed, and under severe pressures, they now worked in conditions far harsher than under capitalism. Absenteeism increased, as workers tried to escape factory discipline. This led to more repressive measures. In December 1932, the internal passport system was introduced, providing a means of keeping close check on all citizens in towns and factories and in frontier areas.
The basic plan objective of laying the foundations for a new, vastly expanded heavy industry was nevertheless achieved in these years. Industrial output mounted. But the great emphasis was not only on increasing production. Major decisions of industrial policy were also made. A new pattern of geographic distribution of heavy industry was initiated. The objectives were to ensure a more even allocation of industry throughout the country, to establish heavy industries near sources of fuel and raw materials, and to reduce the strain on transport. It was recognized, too, that the concentration of industry in European Russia made it vulnerable to attack from the West. Indeed, the creation of major industrial centers east of the Urals was to be one of the most important factors in saving Soviet Russia from crushing defeat in World War II.
This redistribution of industry led to the development of a second coal and steel industry in the Ural-Kuznetsk combine. Magnitogorsk, the center of the new industrial region of the Urals, began in 1931 as a collection of huts, housing the workers who were building the furnaces and rolling mills; eight years later, it was a city of 146,000 inhabitants. Kuznetsk in Siberia, known after 1932 as Stalinsk, and Karaganda in Kazakhstan, grew into great industrial cities in the same brief period.