NEP, a period of experimentation, taught valuable lessons. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they understood more clearly what they opposed than how to implement a singular conception of the future. And while the decade of the 1920s produced a wide range of innovation, it also tapped a strong reservoir of traditionalism. By the mid 1920s experimentation was under fire from within. Revolutionary ardour in politics, economics, and society did not diminish, but life itself forced a serious reassessment of what was both possible and desirable. By 1928–9, therefore, Bolshevik rule had given rise to widespread sentiment for realizing the promise of the proletarian revolution more rapidly, and it had also spawned a backlash against the results of ill-conceived programmes. Ironically, these sentiments were as much complementary as conflicting. And both would play a central role in the Stalinist upheavals about to begin.
11. Building Stalinism 1929–1941
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.