The War Against the Working Class

by Will Podmore

  Work started in 1927 on Dnieperstroy, the great hydro-electric dam project in the Ukraine, then the world’s biggest dam, and it was finished in 1932, two years ahead of schedule. 1930 saw the completion of three major projects - the Turkish railway, the agricultural machinery factory at Rostov-on-Don and the Stalingrad tractor factory. At the Uralmashzavod heavy engineering factory in Sverdlovsk, work started on building the main production shops of the greatly expanded project. After many difficulties, construction was started at both ends of the great Ural-Kuznetsk combine.

  American journalist Anna Louise Strong wrote in 1935, “The Five-Year Plan was Soviet Russia’s ‘War for Independence’ from the exploiting capitalist world. Men died in that war, but they won it. They changed their country from a land of backward industry and medieval farming, defended only by grim will, to a land of modern industry, farming and defence. From an agrarian country of small peasant holdings farmed in the manner of the Middle Ages, the Soviet Union became a predominantly industrial country. Twenty million tiny farms became two hundred thousand large farms, collectively owned and partly mechanized. A country once illiterate became a land of compulsory education covered by a net-work of schools and universities. New branches of industry arose: machine tools, automotive, tractor, chemical, aviation, high-grade steel, powerful turbines, nitrates, synthetic rubber, artificial fibers. Thousands of new industrial plants were built; thousands of old ones remodelled. The Soviet Union emerged from the Five-Year Plan a powerful, modern nation, whose word has weight in the councils of the world. To this end millions of men fought and endured as in battle.”11 The Chinese, the Koreans, the Cubans and the peoples of Eastern Europe later used the Five-Year Plan model.

  More recently, British historian R. W. Davies commented, “The outstanding achievement was the astonishing expansion in industrial investment, which was in 1929/30 more than 90 per cent above the level of the previous year, and several times as large as in 1913. … The vast construction programme which began the transformation of the USSR into a great industrial power was under way.”12 American historian David Granick concluded, “If, as the Russians of that era did, we define modern production methods as consisting of those of mass production and continuous flow, then it must be admitted that Soviet machinebuilding achieved a massive shift towards modernity. Judged by these criteria, Soviet machinebuilding by 1932 had probably caught up with its American and surpassed its west European counterpart in its level of technological organization.”13

  Social progress

  This industrial progress brought social progress too. Public services included free education (up through higher education), free health care, guaranteed pensions, low-cost child care, very low rents and cheap holidays. Between 1917 and 1931, half a million people were rehoused in central Moscow. Between 1926 and 1931, the Soviet Union built 30 million square metres of new housing space. By 1928, there were 63,219 doctors, up from the pre-war number of 19,785. There were 225,000 hospital beds, up from 175,000, and 256,000 nursery places, up from 11,000. By the end of the First Five-Year Plan, there were 76,000 doctors, more than 330,000 hospital beds and 5,750,000 nursery places. By 1938, there were 4,384 child and maternity welfare centres; in tsarist Russia, there had been only nine. Fourteen new medical colleges were founded and 133 new secondary medical schools. By 1937, there were 132,000 doctors. In Azerbaijan for example, there were 2,500 doctors, where before the revolution there had been only 291. The Soviet public health budget in 1937 was about 75 times that of Russia in 1913.

  In 1914, half all peasant children had died before the age of five and the infant mortality rate was 273/1,000. By 1935, it was 77/1,000. By 1971, only 22.9 of every 1,000 infants died before the age of one. From 1917 to the mid-1960s, life expectancy for men rose from 31 years to 66 and for women from 33 to 74. Life expectancy was the best indicator of a country’s health status. Sir Arthur Newsholme, former General Medical Officer of the Local Government Board, London, and Dr J. A. Kingston, summed up their 1933 survey, “Our observations of soviet arrangements for the medical and hygienic care of mothers and their children have filled us with admiration, and with wonder that such good work, scientific and advanced work, should be undertaken and successfully accomplished in the period when the finances of the country are at a low ebb. The maternity and child-welfare institutions and arrangements seen by us gave us the impression that they were nowhere being stinted or restricted because of financial stress.”14 Better living conditions improved peoples’ health. In World War One, 30 per cent of Russians called up had been unfit for service; in World War Two, just 5 per cent were unfit for service.

  The Soviet Union was the first country to introduce equal pay for equal work. The proportion of women in institutions of higher education rose from 31 per cent in 1926 to 43 per cent in 1937 and to 77 per cent in World War Two, then fell to 52 per cent in 1955 and 42 per cent in 1962. Most of the women who benefited were from the working class and peasantry. In 1937, 16 per cent of the elected members of the Supreme Soviet were women. By the 1940s, women held a fifth of all leading government and party posts.

  Expanding education and science

  The Soviet Union hugely expanded literacy and education. After a long struggle in the 1920s, the country rejected leftist claims that schools were relics of pre-modern times, that teachers and lecturers were bourgeois or even feudal, that culture was bourgeois, and that schools would wither away in socialist society. The number of teachers rose by 251 per cent between 1927 and 1939. Between 1929 and 1933, attendance at preschools rose from 838,000 to 5.9 million. By 1932, 95 per cent of 8-11 year-olds were in primary school. The number of secondary school pupils rose from 1.8 million in 1926-27 to 12.1 million in 1938-39.

  The number of teachers in higher education rose from 18,000 in 1927-28 to 57,000 in early 1933. Between 1927-28 and 1932-33, the number of students grew from 159,800 to 469,800 and then to 812,000 in 1940-41. From 1928 to 1933, the number of specialists in heavy industry with degrees rose from 13,700 to 50,700 and the number of agronomists with degrees rose from 18,000 to 126,000. In 1928-29, there were 120,000 pupils in industrial and other apprenticeship schools (building, transport, forestry and farm) and 152,000 in the mainly artisan trade schools. By 1931-32, after the merging of the apprenticeship and trade schools, there were more than a million.

  Spending on science tripled between 1927-28 and 1933 and doubled between 1933 and 1940. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union spent more of its national income on science than any other country. The number of research scientists grew from 18,000 in 1929 to 46,000 in 1935. Scientific thinking became increasingly widespread. The Soviet government promoted a practical materialism that enabled people to live and work effectively in a literate, industrialised society. As American historian Loren Graham pointed out, “Contemporary Soviet dialectical materialism is an impressive intellectual achievement. … In terms of universality and degree of development, the dialectical materialist explanation of nature has no competitors among modern systems of thought.”15 Stalin defended scientific thinking and opposed Trofim Lysenko’s leftist claim that “any science is class-based”, asking, “What about mathematics? And what about Darwinism?”16

  In 1917, 17 million adults were illiterate, 14 million of them women. During the 1930s, rural male literacy rose from less than 70 per cent to 85-90 per cent, female from less than 40 per cent to more than 70 per cent. In 1937, after twenty years of socialism, 90 per cent of people were literate. By contrast, in India, after 180 years of British rule, 93 per cent of the people were illiterate. As Ukraine’s historian Orest Subtelny noted, “Unlike the tsarist regime, the Soviets placed a high priority on education, and their achievements in this area were truly impressive. … Most dramatic were Soviet strides in the elimination of illiteracy.”17

  By 1933, there were 40,000 libraries, by 1938, 70,000. Between 1929 and 1933, the number of cinemas rose from 9,800 to 29,200 and newspaper circulation rose from 12.5 million to 36.5 mil
lion. In 1913, 26,200 book titles were produced in 86.7 million copies; by 1938, 40,000 titles in 692.7 million copies. The Soviet film industry flourished, with brilliant film-makers like Sergei Eisenstein (Strike, 1924, Battleship Potemkin, 1925, October, 1927, Alexander Nevsky, 1938, and Ivan the Terrible, 1944 and 1958) and Vsevolod Pudovkin (The Mother, 1926, The End of St Petersburg, 1927, and Storm Over Asia, 1928), and later Sergei Bondarchuk, whose two-part War and Peace (1965-67) should rank as one of the finest films ever made. The government and every organised part of Soviet life devoted time and effort to awakening interest in literature, music, theatre, dance and the visual arts. Architecture flourished.18 In 1935, the Moscow Metro was opened, a magnificent feat of engineering and construction.

  The Soviet Union promoted the values of social equality, enthusiasm for science, secularism and social responsibility. As a Moscow textile factory’s paper urged, “You are yourselves responsible for your own lot. Don’t leave the work to others.”19

  A new working class

  The Soviet government sought to ensure that the working class really was the ruling class. In a Politburo discussion about workers, Stalin urged, “these are people, not things. And which people? From the ruling class. These are not just phrases. If some bosses or spetsy [specialists] do not relate to the workers as people of the ruling class, that is, people whom it’s necessary to convince, whose needs must be fulfilled, if the worker waves his hand, twenty times asked for improvements in technology in Lisichank, and they did nothing, what kind of attitude to the worker is that, if not to a thing?”

  He argued against the common view of workers as just ‘labour power’: “The working class is not only labour power, they’re living people, they want to live …” And again: “If a manager thinks that his working class is labour power and not the ruling class and that he needs to bang out a profit, then such a manager cannot and should not be at the factory.”20

  The Soviet government opened the gates of opportunity to the working class. The First Five-Year Plan achieved huge upskilling as peasants became industrial workers, unskilled workers became skilled workers, and skilled workers moved into management, the professions and higher education. The proportion of students from working class families rose from a quarter in 1927-28 to a half in 1932-33. On the policy of promoting workers, Sheila Fitzpatrick, the historian of Soviet education, commented, “Stalin’s policy prevailed, and in retrospect it must surely be seen as a very bold and imaginative policy which did in fact serve to consolidate and legitimize the regime. At the very beginning of the industrialization drive, before there was any natural expansion of opportunity for upward social mobility, the regime demonstratively repudiated the ‘bourgeois’ professionals and began to promote very large numbers of workers and peasants into the administrative and specialist elite.” She remarked, “The policy and its objective – the creation of a new elite, or ‘proletarian intelligentsia’ – were clearly stated in 1928. If one assumes that Stalin saw it as a breakthrough policy that would not be indefinitely continued, the objective was successfully reached. This was a major political achievement, and its impact on the nature of the Soviet regime and leadership was lasting.” She summed up, “For the vydvizhentsy [those promoted], industrialization was an heroic achievement – their own, Stalin’s and that of Soviet power – and their promotion, linked with the industrialization drive, was a fulfillment of the promises of the revolution.”21

  From 1929 on, the Soviet Union adopted shock movements and socialist competition, based on mass initiative, which promoted modernisation and better management. Teams of workers competed to produce more, with higher productivity, and to cut costs and improve labour discipline. Production conferences in 1928-29 adopted 83.4 per cent of suggestions made by workers.22 As Stalin pointed out, “The decisions of single persons are always, or nearly always, one-sided. Out of every one hundred decisions made by single persons, that have not been tested and corrected collectively, ninety are one-sided.”23

  American trade union organiser Robert Dunn observed at the time, “the trade union fabkom [factory committee] is a growing force in the Soviet Union. It brings workers not only into the unions, but into the whole economic activity of the country. It is the principal organ of workers’ democracy in a government and an industrial system operated by and for workers. In no other country does this type of workers’ council have so much power. … In no other country does it have such varied and important functions. Nowhere do its members have so much freedom and responsibility as in the USSR.”24

  In 1929-32, the Soviet Union created 16-17 million new jobs, doubling the number of wage and salary earners. The dependents/wage-earners ratio improved from 2.26 in 1927 to 1.59 in 1935. From 1932 to 1940, the number of wage and salary earners grew from 24 million to 34 million. In 1926, 26 million people lived in towns and cities; by 1939, 56 million. From 1926 to 1939, the number of people in non-agricultural jobs rose from 11.6 million to 38.9 million. This shift out of agriculture took from 30 to 50 years in other countries.

  But even so, creating an industrial working class, a stable and reliable class that had cut its ties to the land, was a difficult and lengthy process.25 Industrial skills were developed through learning-by-doing in a factory environment. It was one thing to build new factories, but it took time before new industries became efficient.

  Ukraine

  1931 had an unusually cold spring, delaying the sowing. An unusually hot summer brought drought and cut grain yields. The 1931 crop was disastrous: gross production in the principal eastern grain districts was 10.7 million metric tons below the 1927-30 average. 1932’s March was even colder than 1931’s, May and June were even hotter than 1931’s. Again, the dreadful weather caused a disastrously low harvest.

  Kulaks in Ukraine made the resulting famine even worse. Isaac Mazepa, leader of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement, admitted, “At first there were mass disturbances in the kolkhosi [collective farms] or else the Communist officials and their agents were killed, but later a system of passive resistance was favoured which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolsheviks’ plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest. … The opposition of the Ukrainian population caused the failure of the grain-storing plan of 1931, and still more so, that of 1932. … The autumn and spring sowing campaigns both failed. Whole tracts were left unsown. In addition, when the crop was being gathered last year, it happened that, in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40 and even 50 per cent was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing.”26

  Stalin wrote in May 1933 to the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, “the esteemed grain growers of your region (and not only your region) carried out a sitdown strike (sabotage!) and would not have minded leaving the workers and the Red Army without bread. The fact that the sabotage was quiet and apparently harmless (bloodless) does not alter the fact that the esteemed grain growers were basically waging a ‘quiet’ war against Soviet power. A war by starvation (voina na izmor), dear com. Sholokhov …”27 Michael Ellman recently commented, “Stalin’s idea that he had faced a peasant strike was not an absurd notion indicating paranoia. It seems that there really were numerous collective refusals by collective farmers to work for the collective farms in 1932.”28

  On 17 February 1932, almost six months before the harvesting of the new crop, the Soviet government loaned the collective farms in the eastern part of Ukraine more than six million quintals of grain to set up both seed and food funds. Certain areas, such as the Ukraine and North Caucasus which had to consume all the available grain, remained with little or no seed funds, so the Soviet government loaned to Ukraine’s collective farms three million quintals of seed, and to those of the North Caucasus, more than two million quintals.29

  The government accepted Stalin’s proposal to cut grain procurement from Ukraine by 40 million puds [640,000 tons].30 This 11 per cent reduction was followed by a 17 per cent reduction in October. In
February 1933, the government authorised the issue of more than 800,000 tons of grain as seed to Ukraine, North Caucasus, the Lower-Volga Region, Urals and Kazakhstan, and a further 400,000 tons before the end of the spring sowing. Between February and July, the government authorised the issue of 320,000 tons of grain for food.31 This included 194,000 tons of food aid to Ukraine. In total, nearly two million tons were issued for seed, food and fodder. Further, “Considerable efforts were made to supply grain to hungry children.”32 The organisation of the farms was improved and several thousand more tractors, combines and trucks were delivered.

  Leading scholars of Russian history have refuted the claim that the famine was an act of genocide. Terry Martin concluded, “The famine was not an intentional act of genocide specifically targeting the Ukrainian nation.”33 David Shearer noted, “Although the famine hit Ukraine hard, it was not, as some historians argue, a purposefully genocidal policy against Ukrainians. … no evidence has surfaced to suggest that the famine was planned, and it affected broad segments of the Russian and other non-Ukrainian populations both in Ukraine and in Russia.”34 Diane Koenker and Ronald Bachman agreed, “the documents included here or published elsewhere do not yet support the claim that the famine was deliberately produced by confiscating the harvest, or that it was directed especially against the peasants of Ukraine.”35 Barbara Green also agreed, “Unlike the Holocaust, the Great Famine was not an intentional act of genocide.”36 Steven Katz commented, “What makes the Ukrainian case non-genocidal, and what makes it different from the Holocaust, is the fact that the majority of Ukrainian children survived and, still more, that they were permitted to survive.”37 Adam Ulam agreed too, writing, “Stalin and his closest collaborators had not willed the famine.”38 Ellman concluded, “What recent research has found in the archives is not a conscious policy of genocide against Ukraine.”39