Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  LEWIS SIEGELBAUM

  The 1930s brought monumental change—reflected most dramatically in the great purges and ‘terror’, most fundamentally in the campaign to collectivize agriculture and build a modern industrial economy. The regime expended, prodigiously and wastefully, human capital in what was advertised as the building of socialism, but what can better be described as the building of Stalinism.

  THE 1930s have long represented a watershed in the grand narratives of Soviet history. According to the Marxist-Leninist version, de rigueur in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s, it was the decade of ‘socialist construction’. Under the leadership of I. V. Stalin (or in the post-1956 de-Stalinized variant, the Communist Party), the Soviet people confounded sceptics, both domestic and foreign, by rapidly and enthusiastically constructing gigantic factories and dams, transforming backward villages into collective farms, and in the process becoming citizens of a genuinely socialist society. Their achievement was celebrated and formalized in the ‘Stalin Constitution’ of 1936, which guaranteed civil rights and equality among all the peoples of the USSR. But hectic industrialization and collectivization were not simply functions of ideological correctness. The threat of imperialist aggression that loomed throughout the period further justified this tremendous effort. Industrialization thus guaranteed survival of the nation and the cause of socialism that it represented.

  Diametrically opposed is a version more familiar to Western scholars. It holds that in the 1930s the Soviet Union became a full-blown ‘totalitarian’ society in which formal legality—including the 1936 Constitution—was a mere smokescreen for the dictatorship of the Communist Party and the caprice of its General Secretary, Stalin. The labour camps that dotted the outer reaches of the nation represented one manifestation of the regime’s repressiveness; the collective farms, supposedly an advancement on small-scale private agriculture, were also a form of incarceration, a ‘second serfdom’ for the peasantry. Industrial workers, ostensibly the ruling class, found themselves subjected to a harsh regimen of speed-ups and without recourse to independent representation or organized protest, while the intelligentsia was cowed into silence or conformity.

  As different as are these two renditions of the Soviet 1930s, they exhibit two common qualities. One is the emphasis on transformation. That is, both acknowledge that between 1929 and 1941 the Soviet Union changed dramatically and, so it seemed, irrevocably. The other is that they absolutize the transformations they register—categorically positive in the Marxist-Leninist version and no less categorically negative in the Western view.

  Obviously, both cannot be right. Even in the heyday of the Cold War, when scholarship was at its most polarized, one could find formulations that fell somewhere between the two poles. On the left, non-Soviet Marxists posited a ‘state capitalist’ social formation in which the bureaucracy functioned as the ruling class. Others stressed the neo-traditionalist elements of Stalinism, perceiving a ‘Great Retreat’ to traditional Russian (Orthodox) values, while still others argued for a more polymorphic understanding of power and its exercise.

  Only in the 1970s, however, did professional historians begin to contribute to the scholarly discourse, offering treatments more subtle than those available in earlier accounts. This new work, often social historical in nature, made a conceptual shift from preoccupation with the state to a focus on society.

  Consequently, the totalitarian model of Soviet politics, which depicted the state as the absolute arbiter of people’s fortunes, began to yield to an understanding of how different social groups—workers and managers on the shop-floor, peasants on state and collective farms, and the non-Russian peoples—employed techniques of resistance and accommodation to ‘negotiate’ their relationship with party and state officials. Excursions into cultural history and anthropology have since deepened this understanding through the inclusion of such cultural practices as anniversary celebrations, polar expeditions, aviation, music, film, the theatre, and literature.

  Ironically but understandably, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the annihilation of its Communist Party has led to the revival of the totalitarian model, especially within the Russian scholarly community. This is not necessarily a bad thing: ‘revisionist’ scholarship tended to obscure the total claim of the regime on its population, a claim that demanded acclamatory participation and was sanctioned by coercive, even arbitrary, forms of rule. Even if this claim was mythic and unrealizable, its very aspiration was of fundamental importance, for it shaped—or at least affected—social and personal lives in the 1930s, 1940s, and for some time thereafter. None the less, this ‘totalitarian’ state was rife with turbulence in the formal institutions of state and society in the 1930s; indeed, this instability was inherent in the Stalinist articulation of a totalistic agenda. In seeking to actualize its total claim on society, the Stalinist regime unleashed social mobility and flux; the lethal politics of implementation and a political culture of grandiosity and conformity masked an inherent unpredictability in political and social life.

  ‘There is no fortress the Bolsheviks cannot take’

  After the confusion of NEP, a policy that purported to build socialism through capitalist practices but appeared to many communists to build capitalism through socialist retreat, the Stalinist initiatives—the ‘Great Turn’—appeared to set priorities right. Instead of letting the market mediate in relations between state-owned industry and peasant agriculture, the state would centrally allocate resources and assign prices according to its own determination of rationality and need. Instead of 25 million peasant households producing agricultural goods on small plots with primitive methods and inadequate machinery, the state would assist peasants to establish collective farms, practise scientific farming, and remit their surpluses as partial payment for the equipment they leased. And in contrast to high levels of industrial unemployment endemic to NEP, investment in construction and industrial expansion would provide millions of new jobs and expand the size of the proletariat.

  This programme was nothing if not ambitious. Devised and advertised as the ‘Five-Year Plan for Industrialization and Socialist Construction’, it represented a radical break with previous economic policy and previous understanding of economic laws—now condemned as ‘bourgeois’. For the first time, the state would not only intervene in economic relations but actually serve as the chief, even sole, manager of the economy. In its ‘optimal’ version, the Five-Year Plan aimed to increase investment by 228 per cent, industrial production by 180 per cent, electrical generation by 335 per cent, and the industrial labour force by 39 per cent. But even these levels were deemed too modest by the regime: by the end of 1929 ‘Five in Four’—that is, the fulfilment of the Plan in four years—became official policy.

  How is this ‘riotous optimism’, in Alec Nove’s phrase, to be explained? Was it designed to mobilize available human resources—heedless of the real capabilities for reaching targets? This is an intriguing possibility, but not yet substantiated by concrete evidence. Or was this a political plan to provoke and discredit ‘Right Oppositionists’ (Nikolai Bukharin and others), who sought to scale down targets? It can be argued that Stalin exploited the ‘politics’ of the plan, but that the process of target inflation goes beyond such tactical manœuvres. The circumstantial should not be overlooked: with the onset of the Great Depression, the Five Year Plan had tremendous propagandistic value. Indeed, the Soviet regime expended much effort to demonstrate the contrast between general economic crisis in the capitalist world and the extraordinary feats of construction and industrial expansion in the Soviet Union. Technomania was a further impulse: the introduction of new mechanized technology, much of it imported from the West, promised bountiful, even unimaginable returns.

  But the ‘over-ambitious’ Five-Year Plan (Holland Hunter), and in a larger sense the entire Stalin revolution, derived from the merger of two hitherto discrete elements within Bolshevism. One was Prometheanism, the belief that collective human effort could accompli
sh transformative miracles. The other was revolutionary maximalism, a psychology of egalitarianism, expropriation, even a belief in the creative role of violence. The former had its roots in nineteenth-century machine worship; the latter in the voluntarist strain of populists of the 1870s and Bolsheviks (in contrast to Mensheviks) after the turn of the century. Together, they comprised a new political culture, one that sought to ‘catch up to and overtake’ the advanced capitalist countries but, in its very haste, reproduced some elements of backward Russia.

  Promoted from the top and exalted by the emerging cult of Stalin, the new political culture set the tone for industrialization and a good deal else. As Moshe Lewin has noted, ‘the readiness not to bother about cost, not being too squeamish about means, the ability to press hard on institutions and people—this was the style and the temperament of those Stalinists, for whom most old guard Bolsheviks were by now too European and too “liberal”’. Pressed by V. M. Molotov, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, L. M. Kaganovich, and other Politburo members who fanned out across the country on trouble-shooting missions, the directors of industrial enterprises and far-flung construction sites resorted to all manner of stratagems in their dealings with supply agencies and in turn pressed hard on their subordinates. Provincial (obkom) party secretaries experienced the same sort of pressure and likewise learned to deflect it downwards. As a result, Stalin concentrated power at the top even as he diffused responsibility downward through thousands of vintiki (little screws) who had their own strategies for survival.

  Industrialization was analogous to a gigantic military campaign—with recruitment levies, mobilizations, ‘fronts’ (Donbas coal, the Dneprstroi dam, Magnitogorsk, the Stalingrad Tractor Factory), ‘light cavalry raids’ of the Komsomol against bureaucratic practices, heroic ‘shock troops of labour’ thrown into the breach, and victories (mostly symbolic) and frequent setbacks. In this frenzied atmosphere, replete with threats, verbal abuse, and recrimination, Angst was combined with enthusiasm, individual opportunism with collective effort. The result was a constant state of emergency, ubiquitous shortage, and near total chaos.

  Yet, by 1932 the regime could boast of some real achievements. Gross industrial production, measured in 1926–7 roubles, rose from 18.3 milliards to 43.3 milliards, actually surpassing the optimal plan. Producers’ goods, valued at 6.0 milliards in 1927–8, reached 23.1 milliards in 1932 compared to a projected 18.1 milliards, and within that category, the value of machinery more than quadrupled. Even taking into account considerable statistical inflation (i.e. the overpricing of machinery), these were impressive results. Less impressive were the rise in consumer goods production—from 12.3 milliard to 20.2 milliard roubles—and significant shortfalls in the output of coal, electricity, and steel. Total employment in construction, transportation, and industry did surpass the plan, increasing from 11.3 million to 22.8 million people.

  The War against the Peasants

  Simultaneously Stalin launched an assault on the final bastion of the old order—the hinterlands that encompassed the predominantly grain-growing provinces of Russia and Ukraine, the arid steppes of Central Asia, and the hunting and fishing preserves of the far north and Siberia. Here, according to the census of 1926, lived nearly 80 per cent of the Soviet Union’s 142 million people. Here too was the greatest challenge to the Communist Party leadership and its ambitions for socialist construction. Communists were few and far between in the Soviet countryside: in July 1928 they numbered 317,000 (22.7 per cent of the party’s total membership)—one communist for every 336 rural dwellers. Most were recent recruits with only the most tenuous grasp of communist ideology. Although teachers, agronomists, and other white-collar professionals represented the state and could propagandize the fruits of Soviet rule, the peasant masses generally were distrustful of ‘their’ village soviets and the Soviet government at large, a wariness borne of a history of endless depredations by outsiders.

  This attitude was mutual. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of ‘alliance’ (smychka) or rather because prosperous peasants (kulaks, literally ‘the tightfisted’) seemed to profit from the concessions associated with NEP, Soviet authorities regarded the peasantry as a petty bourgeois mass of small property-holders and a major barrier to the building of socialism. By all accounts, the grain procurement crisis of 1927–8 was the turning-point in this conflictual relationship. Having personally supervised the campaign to seize grain and other foodstuffs in the Urals and western Siberia, Stalin hit on the idea of organizing collective and state farms to pump out surpluses. These rural production units, fitfully and ineffectually sponsored in the past, henceforth became the regime’s formula for socialist construction in the countryside that was to serve the over-arching goal of industrialization.

  The industrialization drive itself was suffused with military metaphors, but collectivization was the real thing, a genuine war against the peasants. The ‘fortresses’ in this war were the peasants’ ‘material values’—their land, livestock, draught animals, and implements, all of which were to be confiscated and pooled as collective property. Party propagandists characterized mass collectivization as a ‘rural October’, analogous to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Petrograd in 1917. But collectivization and the resistance it provoked among the peasants cost vastly more in lives than the October Revolution or even the ensuing civil war.

  Not all peasants opposed collectivization. The poorest elements in the villages (the bedniak families without land or the means to work it) probably welcomed the prospect of gaining access to the property of their better-off neighbours. But the mass of ‘middle peasants’ (seredniaki) was not swayed by promises of tractors and credits. As a peasant told Maurice Hindus (a Russian-Jewish émigré who visited his native village), ‘Hoodlums and loafers … might readily join a kolkhoz. What have they to lose? But decent people? They are khoziaeva [independent producers and householders], masters, with an eye for order, for results. But what could they say in a kolkhoz? What could they do except carry out the orders of someone else. That’s the way I look at it.’

  The way Stalin looked at it, as he made clear at a party conference in April 1929, was that the kulaks were fomenting opposition to collectivization. This ad hoc ‘theory’ of the ‘intensification of the class struggle’ henceforth guided party policy as if it were a universal truth. Over the ensuing months, the party sought to accelerate the formation of collective farms. By June, one million—out of some 25 million—peasant households had enrolled in 57,000 collectives. Obviously, though, the vast majority still held back. Regional party appa-ratchiki, spurred on by directives and plenipotentiaries from the centre, pleaded with and cajoled village assemblies. ‘Tell me, you wretched people, what hope is there for you if you remain on individual pieces of land?’ an agitator shouted at the peasants in Hindus’s village. ‘You will have to work in your own old way and stew in your old misery. Don’t you see that under the present system there is nothing ahead of you but ruin and starvation?’ ‘We never starved before you wise men of the party appeared here,’ was the reply.

  The rhythm of collectivization, like much else during the First Five-Year Plan, proceeded in fits and starts. During the summer and autumn of 1929, the rate accelerated largely due to two initiatives: the enactment by local officials of ‘wholescale’ (sploshnaia) collectivization in certain grain-growing areas of the North Caucasus and lower Volga; and the establishment of giant collectives absorbing whole groups of villages. Most were of the relatively loose kind (i.e. tozy rather than arteli or kommuny), whereby households retained ownership of seed, machinery, and draught animals. Meanwhile, the administrative infrastructure for collective farming began to take shape with the formation of an all-Union Kolkhoztsentr for channelling credits and equipment, and a Traktortsentr (Tractor Centre) for overseeing the establishment of machine tractor stations (MTS).

  The most intense phase occurred during the winter of 1929/30. The signal was Stalin’s article in Pravda, published on the thirteenth anniversary of the
October Revolution. Entitled ‘The Great Turn’, it claimed that the ‘middle peasant’—that 80 per cent mass of the village—‘is joining the collective’. On the basis of recommendations produced by a special Politburo commission under A. Iakovlev, the Commissar of Agriculture, the party’s Central Committee issued its fateful decree, ‘On the Tempo of Collectivization’, on 5 January 1930. The decree called for collectivizing not merely the 20 per cent of arable land envisioned by the First Five-Year Plan, but ‘the huge majority of peasant farms’ in the most important grain regions by the autumn of 1930. It also rejected the toz in favour of the more ‘advanced’ arteli.

  The question of what to do with the kulaks was finally resolved in a Central Committee decree of February 1930. They were to be expropriated—‘liquidated as a class’—and subjected to one of three fates: (1) resettled on inferior land outside the kolkhoz; (2) deported and resettled on land in other districts; or (3) arrested and sent to prisons or labour camps in remote parts of the country. By 1933 approximately 1.5 million people had been subjected to the second form of dekulakization and 850,000–900,000 to the third. That almost any peasant who agitated against collectivization could be labelled a kulak (or ‘subkulak’ a kulak sympathizer) was the key point: ‘dekulakization’ was as much a weapon of intimidation against non-kulaks as it was a sledge-hammer against the well-to-do peasants.

  By March 1930 an estimated 55 per cent of peasant households at least nominally had enrolled in collective farms. At this point, however, Stalin decried the excesses of local officials, claiming that they were ‘dizzy with success’. This admonition let loose the floodgates holding peasants within the kolkhoz and, as recently declassified archival documents testify, caused acute consternation among provincial agents of collectivization who feared ‘re-kulakization’. By June only 23 per cent of households remained within collective farms. The reversal was short-lived, however. Fines and compulsory sales of property for peasants unable (or unwilling) to meet delivery quotas drove many back into the kolkhoz system; by July 1931 the proportion of households had risen to 53 per cent, and a year later to 61.5 per cent. This included the pastoral Kazakhs who were subjected to ‘denomadization’, a process that virtually wiped out their sheep herds and, in conjunction with a typhus epidemic, led to the death of approximately 40 per cent of the population between 1931 and 1933. Throughout the Soviet Union, the losses of livestock due to slaughter and neglect were enormous: by 1933 the numbers of cattle, pigs, and sheep were less than half what they had been in 1928.