These measures were fatal for the policy inaugurated by Lenin in 1921. By the last three months of 1927 there was a drastic shortage of food for the towns as state purchases of grain dropped to a half of the amount obtained in the same period in the previous year. Among the reasons for the mismanagement was the ascendant party leaders’ ignorance of market economics. Another was their wish to be seen to have a strategy different from the United Opposition’s. Trotski was calling for the raising of industrial prices, and so the Politburo obtusely lowered them. Such particularities had an influence on the situation.
Nevertheless they were not in themselves sufficient to induce the NEP’s abandonment. Although there was a collapse in the amount of grain marketed to the state, no serious crop shortage existed in the country: indeed the harvests of 1926–7 were only five per cent down on the best harvest recorded before the First World War. But whereas Bukharin was willing to raise the prices offered by the state for agricultural produce, Stalin was hostile to such compromise. Stalin’s attitude was reinforced by the basic difficulties experienced by the party earlier in the decade. The national and religious resurgence; the administrative malaise; poverty, ill-health and illiteracy; urban unemployment; military insecurity; problems in industrial production; the spread of political apathy; the isolation of the party from most sections of society: all these difficulties prepared the ground for Stalin to decide that the moment was overdue for a break with the NEP.
The alliance of Stalin and Bukharin had been the cardinal political relationship in the defeat of successive challenges to the ascendant party leadership. With help from Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin and Bukharin had defeated Trotski and the Left Opposition. Together they had proceeded to crush the United Opposition of Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev. They seemed a formidable, unbreakable duumvirate. But disagreements on food-supplies policy started to divide them. And whatever was done about this policy would inevitably deeply affect all other policies. The USSR was entering another political maelstrom.
PART TWO
9
The First Five-Year Plan
(1928–1932)
From 1928 Stalin and his associates undertook a series of actions that drastically rearranged and reinforced the compound of the Soviet order. Lenin’s basic elements were maintained: the single-party state, the single official ideology, the manipulation of legality and the state’s economic dominance. In this basic respect Stalin’s group was justified in claiming to be championing the Leninist cause.
Yet certain other elements were greatly altered and these became the object of dispute. Compromises with national and cultural aspirations had existed since 1917, and there had been relaxations of religious policy from the early 1920s: Stalin brusquely reversed this approach. Moreover, he crudified politics and hyper-centralized administrative institutions. Yet this was still a compound bearing the handiwork of Lenin’s communist party — and in economics, indeed, he strengthened the state’s existing dominance: legal private enterprise above the level of highly-restricted individual production and commerce practically ceased. Stalin’s enemies in the party contended that a rupture with Leninism had occurred and that a new system of Stalinism had been established. Official spokesmen, inveterate liars though they were, were nearer to the truth in this matter when they talked of the development of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism’. Such a term asserted continuity while affirming that Stalin had changed the balance and composition of the elements of the Soviet compound.
The fracturing of the NEP began not in Moscow but in the provinces — and at the time there were few signs that anything was afoot. Nor did it start with foreign policy or factional struggles or industrializing schemes. The origins can be traced to a journey to the Urals and Siberia taken by Stalin in January 1928.He was travelling there on behalf of the Central Committee in order to identify what could be done about the fall-off in grain shipments to the towns. None of his colleagues had any idea of his true intentions.
Once he was beyond the scrutiny of his central party colleagues, Stalin brashly issued fresh instructions for the collection of cereal crops in the region. In many ways he was re-instituting the methods of War Communism as peasants were called to village gatherings and ordered to deliver their stocks of grain to the state authorities. The policy of grain requisitioning was replicated later in 1928 across the USSR. Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev, Andrei Zhdanov, Stanislav Kosior and Stalin’s newly-discovered supporter in mid-Siberia, Sergei Syrtsov, were instructed to lead campaigns in the major agricultural regions. Over the next two years the New Economic Policy was piece by piece destroyed. In agriculture it was replaced by a system of collective farms. In industry it gave way to a Five-Year Plan which assigned both credit and production targets to factories, mines and construction sites. Private commercial firms vanished. Force was applied extensively. Kulaks were repressed, managers were persecuted, wages were lowered.
Planning as a concept acquired a great vogue around the world. The instability of capitalism after the Great War had an impact upon the attitudes of many people in the West, especially when the foundations of the global financial system were shaken by the Great Depression in autumn 1929. Mass unemployment afflicted all capitalist countries. There was a slump in trade and production across Europe. Bankrupt financiers leapt out of the windows of New York skyscrapers.
Central state direction of economic development gained in favour as politicians and journalists reported that the Soviet Union was avoiding the financial catastrophe that was engulfing the Western economies. Outside the global communist movement there continued to be abhorrence for the USSR; but the use of authoritarian measures to effect an exit from crisis acquired broader respectability. Dictatorship was not uncommon in inter-war Europe. Benito Mussolini, an ex-socialist, had seized power in Rome in 1922 for his National Fascist Party, and right-wing dictatorships were established in countries such as Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. In Germany, too, democracy was under threat in the 1920s from a Nazi party which — like the German Communist Party — did not disguise its contempt for due legal process. Confidence in the old — and not so old — ways of conducting politics was widely being eroded.