pressed Marxist realist carrying out a consistent policy and reacting intelligently to the needs of the moment. Yet, as in the case of Ivan the Terrible, there was madness in Stalin's method. That madness, formerly a matter of suspicion and controversy, received fully convincing documentation in Khrushchev's celebrated speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and especially during the session of the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, as well as in the memoirs of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, published in 1967, and in most recent Soviet material. In addition to fighting real battles and struggling against actual opponents, Stalin lived in the paranoiac world of constant threat and wholesale conspiracy. Fact and fantasy were blended together, making the detection of the dictator's motives extremely difficult. Still, in retrospect, Stalin's proverbial ruthlessness and vindictiveness and his passion for discovering ever-new enemies and plots find their explanation in abnormal psychology rather than in any compelling objective necessity or in any alleged rational advantages of a "permanent purge." That causation is given central attention in Tucker's study of Stalin and it is reflected, in a different sense, in Ulam's recent important book on the general secretary. Paranoiac tendencies joined with Marxism in transforming the Russian scene.
The First Five-Year Plan
The First Five-Year Plan and its successors hit the Soviet Union with tremendous impact. The U.S.S.R. became a great industrial nation: from being the fifth country in production when the plans began, it was eventually second only to the United States. In agriculture individual peasant cultivation gave way to a new system of collective farming. Indeed 1928 and 1929 have been described as the true revolutionary years in Russia: it was then that the mode of life of the peasants, the bulk of the people, underwent a radical change, whereas until the First Five-Year Plan they continued to live much as they had for centuries. A vast social transformation accompanied the economic, while at the same time the entire Soviet system as we came to know it acquired its definitive form in the difficult decade of the '30's.
Perhaps paradoxically, the five-year plans are not easy to explain. Marxist theory did not specifically provide for them and certainly did not spell out the procedures to be followed. To be sure, the needs of the moment affected the decisions of Soviet leaders. Yet Stalin's and his associates' response to the needs constituted only one alternative line of action, and often not the most obvious. In fact, the leadership rapidly reversed itself on such key subjects as the speed of collectivization.
Certain considerations, however, help to explain the five-year plans. To begin with, although Marxism did not provide for industrialization it in-
sisted on a high level of it. The dictatorship of the proletariat in a land of peasants remained an anomaly. If, contrary to the doctrine, industries and workers were not there in the first place, they had to be created. Marxists in general, and Bolsheviks in particular, thought of socialism entirely in terms of an advanced industrial society. Such authors as Ulam have demonstrated in a rather convincing manner the close and multiple ties between Marxism and industrialization. The collectivization of agriculture, in turn, represented the all-important step from an individual and, therefore, bourgeois system of ownership and production to a collective economy and, therefore, to socialism. As already mentioned, after the October Revolution the Soviet government proceeded to nationalize Russian industry. Lenin showed a special interest in electrification, popularizing the famous slogan: "Electrification plus Soviet power equals communism." In 1921 the State Planning Commission, known as Gosplan, was organized to draft an economic plan for the entire country. It studied resources and proposed production figures; eventually it drew up the five-year plans.
Although the New Economic Policy constituted a retreat from socialism, that retreat was undertaken only as a temporary measure and out of sheer necessity. In addition to its social results, unacceptable to most Communists, the N.E.P. raised serious economic problems. While by 1928 Russian industry had regained its pre-World War level, a further rapid advance appeared quite uncertain. With the industrial plant restored and in operation - a relatively easy accomplishment - the Soviet Union needed investment in the producers' goods industries and a new spurt in production. Yet the "socialist sector" of the economy lacked funds, while the "free sector," particularly the peasants, failed to rise to government expectations. The Soviet economy in the 1920's continued to be plagued by pricing problems, beginning with the disparity between the low agricultural prices and the high prices of manufactured consumers' goods, resulting in the unwillingness of peasants to supply grain and other products to the government and the cities - a situation well described as the "scissors crisis." Gerschenkron and other specialists have argued that the Bolsheviks had good reason to fear that a continuation of the N.E.P. would stabilize a peasant society at the point where it was interested in obtaining more consumers' goods, but neither willing nor able to support large-scale industrialization. As already indicated, Stalin's Five-Year Plan proved attractive to the Party because it promised a way out of the impasse: the Soviet Union could abandon the New Economic Policy and become a truly socialist country without waiting for world revolution. "Socialism in one country" gripped many imaginations and became the new Bolshevik battle cry.
Once the Plan went into operation, the economic factors involved in its execution acquired great significance, all the more so because the planners set sail in essentially uncharted waters and often could not foresee the re-
suits of their actions. In particular, according to Gerschenkron, A. Erlich, and certain other scholars, the fantastically rapid collectivization of agriculture came about as follows: while the Plan had called for a strictly limited collectivization, set at 14 per cent, the unexpectedly strong resistance on the part of the peasants led to an all-out attack on individual farming; moreover, the government discovered that the collectives, which finally gave it control over the labor and produce of the peasants, enabled it to squeeze from them the necessary funds for industrial investment. It has been estimated that the Soviet state paid to the collectives for their grain only a distinctly minor part of the price of that grain charged the consumer; the remaining major part constituted in effect a tax. That tax, plus the turnover or sales tax that the Soviet state charged all consumers, together with the ability of the government to keep the real wages down while productivity went up, produced the formula for financing the continuous industrialization of the Soviet Union.
In addition to ideology and economics, other factors entered into the execution of the five-year plans. Many scholars assign major importance to considerations of foreign policy and of internal security and control. Preparation for war, which affected all major aspects of the five-year plans, began in earnest after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, and while Japan was further developing its aggressive policies in the Far East. The stress on internal security and control in the five-year plans is more difficult to document. Yet it might well be argued that police considerations were consistently uppermost in the minds of Stalin and his associates. Collectivization, from that point of view, represented a tremendous extension of Communist control over the population of the Soviet Union, and it was buttressed by such additional measures - again combining economics and control - as the new crucial role of the Machine Tractor Stations, the M.T.S., which will be mentioned later.
The First Five-Year Plan lasted from October 1, 1928, to December 31, 1932, that is, four years and three months. The fact that Soviet authorities tried to complete a five-year plan in four years is a significant comment on the enormous speed-up typical of the new socialist offensive. The main goal of the Plan was to develop heavy industry, including machine-building, and that emphasis has remained characteristic of Soviet industrialization from that time on. According to Baykov's calculation, 86 per cent of all industrial investment during the First Five-Year Plan went into heavy industry. Whole new branches of industry, such as the chemical, automobile, agricultural machinery, aviation, machine tool, and electrical, were created from slight beginnings or even from scratch. Over fifteen hundred new factories were built. Gigantic industrial complexes, exemplified by Magnitostroi in the Urals and Kuznetsstroi in western Siberia, began to