by Will Podmore
The Soviet government at once started to reform Russian life. The government disestablished Russian Orthodoxy and secularised education, marriage and family law. Women got equal rights. It allowed divorce (virtually unobtainable before the revolution). In 1920, it legalised hospital abortion. Labour protection laws and efforts to provide maternity and nursery care assisted women into work. It ended the Pale of Settlement – areas of permitted residence for Jews. It ended Russification policies in regions inhabited by non-Russians and encouraged linguistic and cultural autonomy. The Central Asian Republics banned child marriage and marriage by purchase or barter.
In 1920 and 1921, war-ravaged and blockaded Russia suffered an unprecedentedly severe drought. When famine swept the country, killing five million people, the League of Nations rejected calls for famine relief. Huge surpluses of breadstuffs were allowed to rot, rather than be sent ‘to aid Bolshevism’. Russia had the gold and goods to buy the food and medicines it needed, but it could not buy them because of the blockade.
The British, French and US governments, in particular, never ceased their attacks on the Soviet Union. White Russian officers in France, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria trained terrorists who were then sent to the Soviet Union. These officers kept in touch with the British, French and US intelligence services. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, MI6 sent terrorists into the Soviet Union to assassinate communist officials.77 The Soviet Union’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, did not respond by sending terrorists into Britain.
Modern historians have acknowledged that the Soviet Union was defending itself against Western aggression, not vice versa. As Stephen Dorril commented, the NKVD was “an essentially defensive ‘vigilant’ organisation, primarily concerned with security and threats, both external and internal, against the USSR.”78 Gabriel Gorodetsky pointed out, “Given the reality of capitalist encirclement and fears of renewed intervention, defence against the external threat was a prerequisite for the achievement of ‘Socialism in One Country’.”79 As Dorril observed, the British and US governments were “guilty of all the sins of subversion and interference, disregard for national sovereignty and war-mongering, of which they always accused their Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union.”80 US diplomat Raymond Garthoff stressed, “we were, for example, in fact going beyond what the adversary was doing in paramilitary and covert operations violating sovereignty and challenging the legitimacy of the Soviet Union.”81
MI6 forged documents to whip up hatred of the Soviet Union. In 1921, Foreign Secretary Curzon, on the basis of such reports, protested against alleged Soviet intervention in Ireland and India. The Soviet government calmly exposed the documents as ‘elementary fabrications’, much to Curzon’s embarrassment. The British government used the forged ‘Zinoviev letter’ to wreck negotiations for loans to the Soviet Union. The Secret Intelligence Service claimed, “the authenticity of the document is undoubted.”82 For more than 50 years, the Foreign Office continued to claim that it was genuine.
Isolated and threatened, the Soviet Union had to work out how to survive alone, an unprecedented task. In 1920, it drew up a plan for electrifying the whole country, which meant building 30 central power stations with a total capacity of 1.5 million kilowatts. It was achieved by 1930. By 1922, the government had set up a central bank (Gosbank) which started to stabilise the currency. The government had to defeat the ‘swing to the left’ that began to gather strength from 1922. This leftism pushed the notions that money would be quickly abolished and that finance would not exist in a socialist society. The party’s slogans were “Use industry against capitalism. Use money against capitalism.” In the 1920s, the government formed Industrial Banks and Agricultural Banks, with branches across the country. The Bolsheviks proved that you could have industry, money and banks, without capitalism.
By 1927, industrial and agricultural production regained their pre-war level. In the mid-1920s, industry grew faster and more steadily than in the capitalist countries, impressive achievements given that the Soviet Union had suffered more war damage than any other country. But under the New Economic Policy (1922-26), more than a tenth of workers were unemployed and private agriculture was not productive enough to support the industrial growth needed to keep the Soviet Union safe. NEP was blocking the necessary industrialisation of the country. NEP also increased the powers of a kulak class which believed that it should continue to be the master of all Russia’s farmland.83
Carr summed up the progressive moves from market to plan: “The development both of agriculture and of industry stimulated by NEP followed capitalist rather than socialist lines. In agriculture it meant the encouragement of the kulak. In industry, it favoured the growth of light industries working with limited capital for the consumer market and earning quick profits rather than of the heavy industries which were, by common consent, the basis of a future socialist order, but required an initial volume of long-term capital investment; for this contingency the principles and practices of NEP made no provision. Hence the struggle in agricultural policy against the predominance of the kulak, which began in 1924 and remained acute throughout 1925, was matched at the same period by a similar struggle in industrial policy centring on the requirements of heavy industry. … with the fourteenth party congress in December 1925, the expansion of heavy industry became the predominant aim of economic policy.”84 The Soviet Union increased industrial production and investment by 10-15 per cent a year from 1925 to 1929.
Threats of war
In May 1926, Marshal Josef Pilsudski seized power in Poland and imposed a military dictatorship. The British government backed the coup. In August, the Soviet government offered Poland a neutrality and non-aggression pact, which Poland rejected. Under British and French influence, the Polish and Romanian governments signed a military convention. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Polish government sent armed Poles and White Russians on raids into Ukraine and Byelorussia to murder officials and destroy infrastructure.85
In early 1927, Chiang Kai-Shek crushed the Chinese revolution. The British government was aiding Tsarist forces still based in China. In India, the government was building air bases, forts and a military railroad through the Khyber Pass to the Afghan frontier. The British press increased its anti-Soviet propaganda. There were more terrorist acts than ever before in the Soviet Union and there were raids on Soviet embassies and trade missions in Berlin, Peking, Shanghai and Tientsin.
The British government sought a pretext for breaking off the diplomatic and trade relations established in 1924. Under the Official Secrets Act, possessing a secret Signals Training manual from the Aldershot military base was an offence. MI5 claimed that ARCOS [the All-Russian Cooperative Society] had a copy. So it got Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s permission to raid ARCOS (which was protected by diplomatic immunity) to get the evidence.86 But no manual was found, nor any evidence of Soviet espionage.87 As The Observer noted at the time, “The raid by itself was a fiasco. … But this being so, Parliamentary considerations forced a total breach in order to defend the raid.”88
So, on 26 May, the British government broke relations with the Soviet Union. As a result, Soviet imports from Britain fell sharply, which was a blow to British exporters and manufacturers when they were trying to increase exports. The break sabotaged a £10 million credit agreed on 11 May to assist the Soviet Union to buy British textile machinery. The break also led other governments to break off relations.
In June, a White Russian emigré named Koverda assassinated the Soviet Ambassador to Poland. The murderer was a member of an anti-Bolshevik body operating in Poland. Before the assassination, the Soviet government had warned the Polish government that this body was planning terrorist acts, but the Polish government did nothing to hinder its activities.
The British government continued to fund and arm counter-revolutionary terrorist groups in Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, and anti-Soviet forces in Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and China. Brit
ain, France, the Balkan states, Romania, Poland, the Baltic states and Finland had all given refuge to hundreds of thousands of White soldiers who had fled at the end of the War of Intervention, and these states had kept these soldiers in arms and ready for war. Senior British military officers often met their Eastern European counterparts. All these diplomatic and military ties were part of preparations for a new attack on the Soviet Union.89
Chapter 2
The Soviet Union from 1927 to 1933
The need to collectivise
All these acts increased the threat of war against the Soviet Union and brought new urgency to the tasks of industrialisation and collectivisation. Collectivisation was needed not just to fund industrialisation but also to end Russia’s regular famines. The only alternative to collectivisation was to allow famines to continue every two to three years. Between 1918 and 1927, there were five poor harvests, two famine years and only three good harvests. Continuing the NEP would have led to more famines. If the Soviet Union had not collectivised agriculture, it would have caused millions of deaths.
To survive, the Soviet Union needed advanced industry as a basis for defence. To expand industry, it needed grain to feed the towns, and also for export, to finance imports of industrial equipment. Finance was needed to industrialise, but industry could not provide it quickly enough. Foreign investment was not likely. So investment could only come from larger agricultural yields, which meant that agriculture had to be mechanised. Therefore it was necessary to replace unproductive peasant smallholdings with modern large-scale farms, to collectivise agriculture.
The 15th Party Congress in December 1927 decided, “The way out is in the passing of small disintegrated peasant farms into large-scale amalgamated farms, on the basis of communal tillage of the soil; in passing to collective tillage of the soil on the basis of the new higher technique. The way out is to amalgamate the petty and tiny peasant farms gradually but steadily, not by means of pressure but by example and conviction, into large-scale undertakings on the basis of communal, fraternal collective tillage of the soil, supplying agricultural machinery and tractors, applying scientific methods for the intensification of agriculture. There is no other way out.”1 General Secretary Joseph Stalin inserted a clause on the importance of industrialisation for defence.2 He wrote, “to slow down the rate of development of industry means to weaken the working class.”3 As he warned in 1931, “we are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.”
The capitalist states waged permanent blockades (which are acts of war) against the Soviet Union (as they did later against every other country trying to defend its sovereignty). These states knew that international trade helped developing countries to get better technologies, enabling them to increase their productivity, and that to import technologies, developing countries needed to export and earn universally accepted currencies like the dollar. So the capitalist states did all they could to stifle Soviet trade and therefore development. The Soviet Union had to industrialise as swiftly as possible to become self-sufficient before the capitalist powers could combine to attack it.
The kulaks profited from Russia’s regular famines by buying and hoarding foodstuffs. In 1928, they stopped selling their grain to the cities, causing food shortages which forced workers out of the factories. Kulaks and monks fought collectivisation, damning tractors as ‘devil-machines’, ‘the work of anti-Christ’. The government had to act against the kulaks to prevent a famine.
As the late Moshe Lewin advised, “In order to understand this process of wholesale dekulakization, it is also essential to bear in mind the misery in which millions of bednyaks lived. All too often they went hungry; they had neither shoes nor shirts, nor any other ‘luxury items’. The tension which had built up in the countryside, and the eagerness to dispossess the kulaks, were in large measure contributed to by the wretchedness of the bednyaks’ conditions, and the hatred which they were capable of feeling on occasion for their more fortunate neighbours, who exploited them pitilessly whenever they had the chance to do so.”4
In 1928-29, the Soviet Union started to collectivise the farms. Agricultural cooperatives helped to mechanise farming. In 1924, Russia had only 2,560 tractors. As late as 1928, tractors ploughed less than one per cent of the land and hand labour did three quarters of the spring sowing. By 1929, there were 34,000 tractors. The party called for 25,000 workers to assist in collectivisation – more than 70,000 volunteered.
In September 1930, the government decided to concentrate all tractors owned by collective farms into state-owned Machine Tractor Stations. Shevchenko Machine Tractor Station, for example, comprised a central machine shop with 200 tractors and all necessary supporting machinery, servicing the surrounding peasants on 150,000 acres. It ran a school for village tractor drivers, giving peasants their first education in the use of tractors and other machines. It rented machines for a percentage of the crop and required peasants who wished to use them to adopt crop rotation in consultation with the station’s experts. The peasants still lived in the ancient village they had always known. Yet their fields were knit with other fields beyond the horizon into one great factory system, producing not cloth or iron but grain. Credits, travelling libraries and health exhibits entered the countryside. In December 1929, there was only one such station in the whole Soviet Union; by 1934 there were 3,500, servicing two-thirds of all Soviet farming.5
The collective farms, based on traditional rural settlements or villages, were a form of socialist economy, because their main instruments of production were socialised, the land belonged to the state and there were no exploiting or exploited classes within them. The collective farms were more advanced than the individual peasant economies which surrounded them. Their fields were not divided into strips, so yields and incomes were higher than on comparable lands cultivated by individual peasants. As Thomas Campbell, who farmed a 95,000-acre wheat farm in Montana, noted in 1932, “Because of the increased area of holdings and higher yields in the collectives, as a result of the greater use of tractors and modern implements and production methods, the income per household on the average collectivized farm has increased at least 150 per cent as a nation-wide average, and by more than 200 per cent in numerous localities.”6
Collectivisation converted the Soviet Union from a backward to a progressive agricultural nation. Before collectivisation, grain harvests averaged 70.4 million tons in 1928-32. After collectivisation, they averaged 77.1 million tons in 1934-40.7 American historian Mark Tauger recently summed up, “collectivisation brought substantial modernisation to traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union, and laid the basis for relatively high food production and consumption by the 1970s and 1980s. … collectivisation allowed the mobilisation and distribution of resources, like tractors, seed aid, and food relief, to enable farmers to produce a large harvest during a serious famine, which was unprecedented in Russian history and almost so in Soviet history. By implication, therefore, this research shows that collectivisation, whatever its disruptive effects on agriculture, did in fact function as a means to modernise and aid Soviet agriculture.”8
In response to collectivisation, the kulaks destroyed food stores, seed and farm animals, killing 44 per cent of the Soviet Union’s cattle, 65 per cent of its sheep and goats and 50 per cent of its horses. In 1930 alone, there were 13,800 terrorist attacks, which killed 1,197 Soviet officials and hundreds of teachers. There were armed rebellions in Chechnya, Fergana, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Karachai-Cherkesa, Ingushieta and Dagestan. Kulaks ‘openly toasted the forthcoming liquidation of all communists’.9
So the Soviet Union had to defeat the kulaks. It also had to defeat those who denied the needs to collectivise and industrialise. The Right Opposition, led by Nikolai Bukharin, favoured agriculture over industry, the market over the state, the private sector over the public sector and private investment over public investment. Bukharin
said that the impetus for progress could only come from the peasantry as a whole, including the kulaks. He proposed, “We shall move ahead by tiny, tiny steps, pulling behind us our large peasant cart.” Trotsky advocated a long period of collaboration with capitalism: “By introducing the New Economic Policy … we created a certain space for capitalist relations in our country, and for a prolonged period ahead we must recognize them as inevitable.”10 In April 1930, Trotsky’s Bulletin of the Opposition said, “Put a stop to ‘mass collectivisation’. … Put a stop to the hurdle race of industrialisation. … Abandon the ‘ideals’ of self-contained economy. Draw up a new variant of a plan providing for the widest possible intercourse with the world market.”
The First Five-Year Plan (1928-33)
Through central planning, the country built up its industry and became self-sufficient, independent of the capitalist world. The First Five-Year Plan proposed that 47 per cent of investment should be in new factories, especially steel and chemical plants. Building large, new capital-intensive factories using the newest technology became government policy. The 1929 Fifth Union Congress of Soviets’ resolution on the plan recognised ‘the full utilisation of the recent achievements of world science and technology’ as one of the ‘indispensable conditions of the successful realisation of the five-year plan’. New industries produced capital equipment, especially machine tools, the core industry that produced the machines needed to make all other types of machinery. In 1914, Russia barely had a machine tool industry; by 1939, it was producing 58,000 different types of machine tools. The expansion of industry based on the production of the means of production created a self-reliant socialist economy. Whole new industries produced caterpillar tractors, cotton pickers, chemicals, airplanes, blooming mills, lathes, precision instruments, linotypes, turbines, generators, locomotives and electric cars.