Stalinism, 1928-1940
DAVID R. SHEARER
In the late 1920s, the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under the leadership of its General Secretary, Joseph Stalin, launched a series of'socialist offensives', a revolution that transformed the country. Within a few short years, the USSR bore little resemblance to the country it had been. In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was a minor industrial power, a poor but resource-rich country, based on a large but primitive agrarian network of small-hold peasant farms. By the late 1930s, very few individual farms remained. The country's agricultural production had been forcibly reorganised on a massive and mechanised scale. Most ofthe rural population lived on huge state-managed agrifarm complexes. Through state planning and forced investment, industrial production had doubled, then tripled and quadrupled. By the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had become an industrial military power on the scale of the most advanced countries. The Great Patriotic War, as the Second World War was called, accelerated these modernising processes, and brought about other major changes. The country, which had been nearly 80 per cent rural in the late 1920s, was, by the early 1950s, becoming increasingly urbanised, mobile and educated. Literacy rates had soared as the result of intensive state spending on education. Roads, rail lines, radio and air travel connected the previously isolated parts of the country. Cultures that had had no language boasted their own schools, organised national institutions, written literary traditions and legal status as nations within the Soviet state. From an ethnically dominant Russian Empire, the Soviet Union was transformed into a state of constitutionally organised nations. By the time of Stalin's death in March 1953, the USSR had become an industrial, military and nuclear giant. It was one of only two global 'superpowers'. The Soviet Union's power was rivalled and checked only by the power of the United States.
This modernising revolution from above was one of the most remarkable achievements of the twentieth century, and one of the costliest in human lives. Stalin's revolution was full of brutal and shocking contradictions, even in such a brutally shocking century as the twentieth. The belief that they were building socialism motivated party and state leaders with a sincere concern to construct towns, build roads and schools, to introduce scientific methods of farming, to modernise industries and to uplift culture. This same belief allowed leaders to destroy churches, synagogues and mosques, move populations wholesale, impoverish and work the population to the point of starvation and to imprison and shoot massive numbers of people. Soviet leaders claimed that they were building socialism and human dignity; what they created was an industrial-military state built, in large part, on the back of a slave labour system unprecedented in modern history. Stalinist officials, with few exceptions, saw no contradiction in their motives or actions. All were part of a grand historical mission to construct a new, specifically socialist, kind of modernity. This chapter describes the state and society that developed out of Stalin's revolution from above.
Industrialisation, collectivisation and class war
To Stalinist leaders, building socialism in one country meant, first and foremost, modernising and expanding the country's basic industrial sectors: iron and steel production, mining, metallurgy and machine building, energy generation and timber extraction, and, of course, agriculture. During the 1930s, but especially in the years of the First Five-Year Plan, 1928-32, the Soviet state poured funds into the construction of heavy industrial projects, a 'bacchanalian' orgy of planning, spending and construction, as one economist put it.[1]The results were dramatic, truly heroic on a historical scale, even while enormously wasteful and costly in both human and financial terms. These years of the Soviet industrial revolution have been made famous by the names of some of the world's largest construction projects. This was the era of Magnitogorsk, a metal city of 100,000 workers and families that was raised within the span of half a decade from the plains of central Siberia. No less dramatic was the raising of Kuznetsstroi, another metallurgical and machine-building giant. The hydroelectric dam at Dneprostroi, started in 1928, generated its first power in 1934. The Volga River-White Sea canal system was built almost entirely by the killing machine of forced labour, yet it also stands as a major engineering feat. Tractor and locomotive manufacturing plants rose or were renovated and modernised. Military weapons, tanks, ships and aeroplane production also increased as secret military factories were constructed.
The litany of statistics chronicling Soviet industrial achievements under Stalin was and still is impressive. In the Russian Republic, alone, construction of new energy sources jumped the number of kilowatt hours of energy generated from 3.2 billion in 1928 to 31 billion in 1940. Coal production increased from 10 to 73 million tons per year, iron ore from 1 to 5 2 million tons, steel from 2 to 9 million tons. The Soviet Union went from an importer to an exporter of natural gas, producing 560 million metric tons by 1932.[2]
The drive for socialist industrialisation was impressive, but it was only one aspect of Stalin's revolution, one front of the socialist offensive. The second major front of the socialist offensive was played out in the countryside in the campaigns to collectivise agriculture. State control of the countryside was crucial, according to Stalinist leaders, if the effort to construct Soviet socialism was to succeed. It was through the international sale of agricultural surplus that industrialisation had to be financed and that the socialist cities were to be fed, yet throughout the 1920s, the countryside had been purportedly in the hands of a petty-bourgeois, anti-Soviet, private farm class. These 'rich' peasants, or kulaks in Bolshevik parlance, held the revolution hostage to the whims of the market and threatened the socialist sector by withholding grain from the state. The grain crises of 1927 and 1928 seemed to prove this point. Although the harvests in those years had been reasonably good, state agencies experienced serious difficulties meeting their procurement quotas. Peasant producers preferred to sell to private buyers at higher prices than those offered by state buyers, or they withheld their grain altogether from the urban markets. In any case, the procurement crises of the late 1920s brought to a head the constraints on state-sponsored modernisation that faced the regime. Moderates within the party hierarchy such as Nikolai Bukharin and Mikhail Tomskii argued for tax and pricing mechanisms to coax grain from the countryside. They warned against any forced or repressive measures that would strain social and economic relations with private producers at a time when the government could ill afford such problems. They repeated Lenin's maxim that there be no third revolution to threaten the NEP truce between workers and peasants, town and countryside.
Stalin and those around him took a different and increasingly militant view. They argued that to placate the kulak class would only place the government and its plans in greater jeopardy. Stalin argued for outright requisitioning of grain at state prices, and he instituted such methods during personal visits to the Urals and Siberia in early 1928. Moderate party leaders opposed these policies. They were taken aback by Stalin's 'feudal-military' exploitation of peasants, and they accused Stalin of taking unilateral action against the party's policies of conciliation. This charge was true, but Stalin by then had won over the majority of the members of the party's top political bureau, the Politburo. In February 1929, the General Secretary forced a humiliating showdown with the moderates in the Politburo and the party's Central Committee.
Citing claims ofpopular support from workers and poor peasants, and with the backing of the party elite, Stalin launched the infamous collectivisation drive of the First Five-Year Plan period. Mass propaganda campaigns created an aura of legitimacy, even as Stalinist leaders mobilised local party committees, political police, internal security forces and even military units and volunteer gangs from urban factories. These were the shock troops that enforced the orderto collectivise. In the course ofthe ensuing several years, usingpersuasion and propaganda, but often outright force, the regime methodically destroyed the system of private land tenure in the country and organised agricultural production into large, state-administered farming administrations. Peasants and villages were organised either into collective farms, the kolkhozy, or into state farm administrations called sovkhozy. Kolkhozy were supposedly voluntary co-operative farm organisations, whereas sovkhozy were farms owned outright by the state, which paid peasant farmers as hired labour, a rural proletariat.
1
Naum Jasny,
2
Iu. A. Poliakov et al.,