Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (21 page)

Yet the NEP was a short-term policy of ambivalence. On the one hand, the private sector though tolerated in theory was often persecuted in practice. On the other, many communist cadres could not see in the NEP the road to socialism for which they had fought; rather they saw the return to power and influence of the old pre-revolutionary technical, administrative and intellectual elites. It was difficult to reconcile the NEP with that utopian zeal to “build a new world” which was so integral to the communist project. As those with access to markets prospered, the NEP opened up increasing economic inequalities among different groups. Class and regional disparities grew—between richer peasants, wandering tradesmen, and an impoverished and restless urban labour force—and these threatened the always fragile cohesion of the entire economy. The NEP in fact made Soviet growth rates dependent upon the market behaviour of workers and peasants, not the Party or the state. Worst of all, perhaps, for the Moscow elite, it made it harder and harder to control the regions.
¹⁶

After Lenin’s death, a fierce debate raged within the Party over the pace and direction of economic policy. Initially Stalin was part of the group which called for continued moderation, against the Left Opposition gathered round Trotsky, who called for heavy investment in industry and harsh measures against the peasantry. But once the Left
Opposition had been politically outwitted and Trotsky marginalized, Stalin came closer to their view. The straw which broke the camel’s back and led directly to what would become known as Stalinism was the grain crisis of 1927–9. This was the point at which the weakness of the state became manifest. Not surprisingly, given the scarcity of reliable economic information, Stalin was caught completely unawares by what he was soon calling the “peasants’ strike.” Faced with lower grain stocks, rationing in cities, and increasingly expensive food prices, the regime reverted to the methods of War Communism and took emergency measures to collect grain by force.

By 1929, Stalin had won against his critics on both Left
and
Right: communism would be imposed upon the countryside, and farming would be collectivized and mechanized. At the end of the year, Stalin targeted the wealthier peasants, the so-called “kulaks,” and declared himself in favour of the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” According to the instructions issued from Moscow, these were to be divided into three groups: the most dangerous, those in the “counterrevolutionary kulak
aktiv
,” were to be handed over to the OGPU (the state security police); the second group was to be deported to “far-off” parts of the Soviet Union; the third was to be resettled elsewhere in the region where they lived. The total number of families involved was expected to be around one million in all—or from five to seven million people; in fact, ten million or more may have eventually been deported, and at least thirty thousand were shot out of hand.
¹⁷

Prosecuting the “truly Bolshevik struggle for grain” involved sending in shock troops of workers, Party cadres and the secret police in what amounted to an internal war—punishing lax local officials and sentencing “speculators,” those peasants, in other words, trying to keep grain for themselves. “When you are attacking, there is no place for mercy,” said one Party activist. “Don’t think of the kulak’s hungry children; in the class struggle philanthropy is evil.” Delivery targets were set which bore little relation to the producers’ ability to deliver. Yet local echelons of the state apparatus were under pressure to meet these “at any price”; their failure could mean punishment for “rotten liberalism.”

Of course, only a small proportion of peasants had any sort of wealth at all, and only a tiny proportion of farms employed paid workers.
“Why are you constantly yelling about kulaks?” the cadres were asked in one village. “We have no kulaks here.” Some of the poorer peasants, whom the regime tried to turn against the richer villagers, could see what was coming: “Now they are confiscating bread from the kulaks; tomorrow they will turn against the middle and poor peasant.” In the spring of 1930 they slaughtered their last cows rather than hand them over; not even the Germans eleven years later would inflict such damage on Soviet cattle stocks.
¹⁸

According to Soviet figures themselves, grain harvests fell in the 1930s, a clear reflection of the disastrous impact collectivization and coercion had had on the countryside; on the other hand, state grain procurements rose steadily from 10.7 million tons in 1928 to 31.9 million in 1937, or from 14.7 per cent of the total crop to 36.7 per cent. If the figures are unreliable, the general picture is clear enough. The regime had turned its back on those other strategies for industrial development that might have required patience and cooperation with the peasantry, in favour of short-term violence: this brought in the grain it needed but at the cost of long-term damage to Soviet farming, whose consequences for the Union itself would eventually prove fateful.
¹⁹

During the famine of 1932–3 with its millions of victims—a direct consequence of these policies—police kept foreigners out of the afflicted areas, and kept the victims in by reimposing an internal passport system, like the Tsarist model which Lenin had abolished. But of course many knew what was going on. “Dniepropetrovsk was overrun with starving peasants,” remembered one Party worker. “Many of them lay listless, too weak even to beg around the railway stations. Their children were little more than skeletons with swollen bellies.” He was appalled at what was happening, but his superior saw things differently. “A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime … It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We’ve won the war.”
²⁰

At first many people, inside the Party as well as outside, were bewildered by the scale of the turmoil. There were protests at the deportations, and public expressions of sympathy for the “kulaks.” Even
workers betrayed “negative attitudes.” “Were Lenin alive,” one remarked, looking at his portrait, “he would have allowed free trade and eased our lot; afterwards, he would have instituted a shift towards collectivization—not by force, but by consent and persuasion.” But this outrage was overlaid by sheer panic, and growing passivity. “Earlier an arrested man was led by two militiamen,” it was reported. “Now one militiaman may lead groups of people, and the latter calmly walk and no one flees.”
²¹

The grain procurement drives of the early 1930s became the training ground for a new generation of Party members, who became accustomed to a level of violence and repression which spread to the rest of Soviet society with the Terror a few years later. Their tendency to see a world of conspiracies, with “wreckers,” “White Russians,” terrorists and saboteurs engaged in a war against the Revolution—already visible in the war scare of 1927—was reinforced. Their strong-arm methods, after all, whipped up the kind of opposition which made such fears seem all too plausible, while official policy created problems, suffering and waste which could not be blamed on their real authors. The deportation of millions of peasants led to the rapid creation of forced-labour colonies, and to the perfection of techniques of population control that Stalin would employ against other class and ethnic minorities—Poles, Chechens, ethnic Germans among them—in the 1930s and 1940s. Last but not least, collectivization opened the way to the headlong industrialization of the first Five-Year Plan.

Forced industrialization was Stalin’s policy. He won the argument over the collectivization of agriculture, and now emphasized his desire for fast industrial growth to push Russia into the Machine Age. At stake was the Bolshevik boast to be creating a modern society. And in a hostile world, which had already tried to snuff out the Revolution at birth, the Soviet Union needed rapid industrialization to safeguard socialism. In February 1931 Stalin made a remarkable prophecy. “Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence?” he asked. “If you do not want this, you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop a genuine
Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must catch up this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we go under.” Operation Barbarossa was exactly a decade away.
²²

Stalin’s strategy demanded not merely ruthless control of the domestic food supply but high levels of investment in heavy industry, with consequent pressure upon urban living standards. In theory, the means was to be the Plan; but in reality, the Plan functioned chiefly as an unstable source of stimuli and goals, bearing little relation to resources, and frequently supplemented by high publicity “shock tactics” and “overfulfilment.” This is what explains the pell-mell rate of industrialization at the very time when the functioning of the state planning agencies was disrupted by deep purges, and when regional Party bosses were competing furiously for investment funds.

The striking thing is to what extent the whole frenzied and disorganized process worked. Real output often fell short of the ludicrous targets proposed in the Plan (which had anyway been wound up one year early), but this is less remarkable than the output gains that did take place. Entire new towns—Magnitogorsk, for example, the world’s largest steel plant—were built from nothing; existing metallurgical plants were pushed to their limit. Tractor factories and machine-tool industries developed rapidly to cut down the country’s import needs. All this despite the fact that so much investment was channelled into heavy industry that fuel and transport could not keep up, and generated frequent breakdowns and wastage.

In terms of creating work, the regime’s policy was an unparalleled and extraordinary success. The urban labour force increased from 11.3 million to 22.8 million between 1927–8 and 1932; by 1939 it had risen to 39 million. At the very time when capitalist Europe was deep in the slump, unemployment had been eliminated, large numbers of women were working, and the country actually suffered from a labour shortage. “It cannot be regarded as an accident,” boasted Stalin in 1934, “that the country in which Marxism has triumphed is now the only country in the world which knows no crises and no unemployment, whereas in all the other countries including the fascist countries, crisis and unemployment have been reigning for four years now.”
²³

Stalin’s policies were creating a new working class, drawn chiefly from the millions of peasants who flocked into the cities in these years, often to escape the new collective farms. Between 1929 and 1933, the number of foremen in industry leapt from 18,700 to 83,800—the vast majority drawn from the ranks of uneducated workers—the total number of managerial and technical personnel from 82,700 to 312,100. Here was indeed the emergence of a New Civilization, though not perhaps in the sense meant by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. A largely peasant society was being electrified, mechanized and conquered by a modernizing regime, but was also taking it over: peasants were being turned into workers, managers and Party cadres. By the end of the 1930s state, Party and economy were all being run by the beneficiaries of this social revolution.
²⁴

Of course, the supposed heroes of the Revolution quickly found that they were no freer than anyone else in the all-powerful state and Party machines. When the mostly illiterate and unskilled labourers moved from one job to another, they could be accused of “petty bourgeois spontaneity.” The imposition of labour discipline emerged as a major preoccupation of the regime, and in the face of growing food shortages, rationing and the scarcity of consumer goods, the labour unions were transformed from protectors of the workers into enforcers of labour discipline in the fight against “loafing” and “absenteeism.” The old leadership was dismissed for “right-wing deviation” and the unions were ordered to “face production.” This meant, among other things, ignoring the primitive and dangerous conditions at work.

If building socialism sounded exciting to the droves of Western intellectuals who came to watch, it was harsh and injurious in practice. Despite the worship of the Machine, Soviet industrialization was highly labour-intensive and the low level of technical expertise meant that many machines lay idle while work was done by hand: especially in the first few years, lorries and tractors mattered less than horses and wheelbarrows. But labour-intensive is an abstract term: 10 per cent of the “kulak” forced labourers sent in to construct Magnitogorsk died in the first bitter winter there. Workers building the gigantic hydroelectric power plant at Dneprostroi were little better off: “Barrack dwellers complained of snow drifting through rooms. Tent
dwellers endured temperatures below -13 degrees C in the winter and tornado-strength winds whipped tents away in the summer of 1929.” And these hazards were only made worse by the introduction of “socialist emulation,” or competition spearheaded by “shock workers” and the hated Stakhanovites.
²⁵

The entire effort required heavy pressure upon private savings—through the sale of government bonds—and consumer spending. Individual wants were subordinated to the needs of the collectivity—a trend which elicited both grumbling and a feeling of selflessness. Bread rationing was imposed in 1929 and the consumption of meat and dairy products fell. Only in 1935 was there some improvement. The cities were growing all the time—the urban population doubled between 1926 and 1939—making the perennial housing shortage much worse. Living space norms per person in Moscow fell by one third between 1929 and 1931. The hunger for better housing became just one of the reasons why people entered the Party, before the Party apparatus itself was purged so ruthlessly in the mid-1930s.