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 accomplish 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.’