In the late 1930s consumer goods continued to trickle back into the stores and the lives of women as well as men eased. The weak point of the Soviet economy was and remained in agriculture. The collective farms were just barely able to supply the burgeoning cities with grain, but pre-1940 meat production never reached the levels found in the late 1920s. Meat and milk came overwhelmingly not from the kolhoz but from the private plots the state had allowed the peasants to retain after collectivization. The population continued to rely heavily on the peasant market, more expensive than state stores, and on workplace distribution centers for anything beyond the most basic foodstuffs. Nevertheless, the country was able to vastly increase military production again at the end of the 1930s, in the face of the danger of war, without completely wrecking the plan and the supply of consumer goods. This was not nearly the promised utopia, but it did provide the basis of the Soviet version of a modern society. It was just barely enough.
For Stalin’s new industrial giant of a country was about to face a threat greater than any kulaks or imaginary Japanese spies. By 1938 the heart of Europe was under the power of Adolf Hitler, who had made it clear in Mein Kampf that Germany must conquer “living space” to survive, and that Germany’s living space was to be found in the Soviet Union. In 1931, Stalin had told a conference of industrial managers that Russia “was fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. Either we catch up in ten years or they crush us.” Perhaps his evaluation of the state of the Soviet economy had been too pessimistic at the time, but his prediction of the time they had at their disposal was right on the mark. They had exactly ten years.
20 War
From the very beginning the Soviet leadership expected an invasion sooner or later. This conviction grew from the actual situation of the Soviet Union since the revolution, the experience of intervention and hostility of almost all other states, and also from their analysis of the world. For they expected not just an attack on their own country but a war among the western powers as well, and thought it likely that the war in the West would come first. Their analysis of the world came from Lenin’s view of the most recent stage of capitalism, which he understood to be the period of imperialism. He believed that the First World War was the result of the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of massive semi-monopolistic corporations and banks, which in turn led to a speeded up competition for markets and resources. The result was the division of the world among great empires, and the desire of the late-comers in that process, Germany in particular, to re-divide the world. Thus, even without the existence of the USSR, another war was inevitable. Stalin and the Soviet elite accepted this conception of the world without any doubts, and their own historic experience in the First World War, as well as their observation of the various rivalries in the world after 1918, only strengthened their conviction. At the same time they realized that the differences (“contradictions”) among the capitalist powers might be temporarily shelved in an anti-Communist alliance or that one or more of the western powers might be strong enough to attack them on its own. Until 1933 the principle threat seemed to come from the British Empire, the apparently hegemonic power of the time. The Red Army constructed its war plans on the assumption that an attack would come from Poland and Rumania with British (and perhaps French) backing or even participation. The de facto military arrangements with Weimar Germany were designed in part to obstruct such an eventuality. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January of 1933, the Soviets confronted an entirely new situation.
At first the Soviets were not excessively concerned. Since 1928 the Comintern had predicted a new crisis of capitalism, and the Depression seemed to bear out that prediction. The Soviet leadership, like many other observers, was not convinced that the Nazis were really much different from other reactionary German groups that had supported restoration of the Kaiser and suppression of the left parties. Anti-Semitism, the parades, and the uniforms, all seemed to be just trappings to deceive the naïve, not symptoms of a more serious and sinister purpose. Though Hitler eliminated the German Communist Party (and the Socialists) in a matter of months, the Soviets were still convinced that Hitler’s support was limited and his regime unstable. The 1934 purge of the Storm Troopers seemed to confirm this picture, and Soviet propaganda as well as internal discussion stressed the alleged unpopularity of Hitler’s economic and other programs with the German working class. At the same time, the Soviets noted the rearmament of Germany and its increasingly aggressive tone in international affairs. Late in 1934 the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, a step both symbolic and practical, especially as Hitler had taken Germany out of the League the year before. Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov used the League as one of his principle stages on which to proclaim the need for the Western powers to make an agreement with the USSR to oppose Hitler.
Talk of opposing Hitler from the Soviets was not merely a gesture, for the Soviet Union now possessed a new army, much more powerful than the old-fashioned Red Army of the 1920s. Two factors were crucial in the transformation of the army. One was the pre-1933 cooperation with the army of the Weimar republic, which provided the Red Army with a complete picture of the most recent developments in military technology and organization. The turn of Western armies toward motorized units, tanks, and aircraft was perfectly clear, yet in 1928 the Red Army still relied on cavalry and infantry armed with rifles and machine guns. Even artillery was inadequate. The second factor was the first five-year plan. The five-year plan originally called for quite considerable increases in military production, but the highly charged atmosphere of world politics (the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931) impelled Stalin to raise the targets for military production even higher. In the next year, the Soviet Union produced four thousand tanks, an immense number by the standards of the time, and they reflected sophisticated designs, both foreign and Soviet. The same enormous effort was put into aircraft production, particularly of heavy bombers. These modern weapons reflected the military doctrine of the Soviet army staff, particularly that of Tukhachevskii, who believed that modern wars would be decided by fast mechanized and armored units as well as long-range aerial bombing. By 1935 the USSR had one of the most advanced armies in the world. Its only limitation was size, for budgetary constraints kept the standing army relatively small.