The Red Flag: A History of Communism (30 page)

Many others, however, saw the campaigns as a drive to force people to work harder for less pay.
⁵²
Stalin had hoped to finance industrialization by squeezing the peasantry; in reality it was workers who paid the real price, because the other half of the ‘Great Break’ – the collectivization of agriculture – was such an utter catastrophe. Workers were labouring harder for much less money: between 1928 and 1933 their real wages fell by more than a half.
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If the Bolshevik vanguard had some limited success in mobilizing the factories, its attempts to transform the countryside ran into almost universal opposition. This was hardly surprising, as collectivization amounted to a wholesale assault on the peasantry’s values and traditional way of life. It had, of course, long been Marxist doctrine that the smallholder peasant was ‘petty-bourgeois’, and that farms should ultimately be run like socialist factories. It was commonly believed that bigger was better; and collective farms made for greater efficiency through mechanization. But collectivization also became entwined with the party’s need to resolve the grain crisis. Collective farms, controlled by the party, allowed the regime to impose its power on the countryside and force reluctant peasants to produce, and relinquish, their grain for the cities.

Collectivization involved seizing land from ‘kulaks’, and this category swiftly expanded to include anybody who resisted joining the collective. The fate of the kulaks varied: some were imprisoned in the expanding prison system (Gulag); others were given poor land; others were deported to towns to work in factories or on construction projects; many died on their journey to their place of exile. Unsurprisingly, the process of collectivization soon assumed the form of a new civil war – between the Bolsheviks and the peasantry. Some peasants, the young, poor, or former Red Army soldiers, saw advantages in supporting the campaign, but the vast majority were opposed. And as local party and Komsomol bodies began to falter from the end of 1929, the regime was forced to send out tens of thousands of urban worker-activists to bolster the collectivization campaign, a manoeuvre reminiscent of the Jacobin Revolutionary Armies’ expeditions to seize grain. These volunteers were convinced that they were on the right side of history, bringing modernity to the benighted masses. A member of a later detachment, Lev Kopelev, remembered their terrifying certainty:

Campaigns against religion were a central part of this ‘war’ for the ‘souls’ of the peasantry. After a period of harsh persecution during the civil war, the regime had established an uneasy
modus vivendi
with the Orthodox Church by the mid-1920s. However, with the ‘Great Break’ came a renewed assault. In 1929 all church activities apart from religious services were banned – from charitable work to church processions – but more violent attacks were also commonplace. Enthusiastic Komsomols and activists from the League of the Militant Godless engaged in acts of iconoclasm and vandalism, whilst church bells were melted down and valuables confiscated.
⁵⁵

Such campaigns only reinforced the conviction of most peasants that collectivization was a satanic assault on a moral, Christian way of life. One rumour, circulating in the North Caucasus in 1929, presented an apocalyptic prediction of the future under the collective farm:

Rebellions were widespread and women were often in their vanguard, aware that they would not be subject to the sort of immediate repression their menfolk would suffer. So, in January 1930 in Belogolovoe, a village in the Western region, eight Communist activists arrived at the church to take away the bell and were attacked by a group of local women, who beat them up and stopped them from continuing their work.
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The Bolsheviks were bound to win the war of collectivization through brute force, but they lost the peace. Profound resentment of
the collective system remained. Peasants, who had been used to organizing work themselves, allocating land through a council of heads of households, were now obliged to obey the command of state officials. Although they were paid for their labour in principle, in practice wages came from whatever was left after all dues were paid to the state. With neither money nor autonomy as incentives to work, they responded to their masters’ demands with resentful foot-dragging. Kravchenko, then a member of a grain detachment, was shocked by the ‘appalling state of neglect and confusion’ on the farm he visited, and ordered the farm’s president to assemble the board:

Stalin’s response was much more vindictive. Determined to maintain industrialization, which required grain exports and food for workers, he ordered that extremely high grain targets be set in 1931 and 1932, despite poor weather. Between 1932 and 1933 he launched a savage attack on allegedly ‘enemy’ groups within the peasantry, who were waging a ‘silent war against Soviet power’. Through all this upheaval, Stalin insisted on taking grain from the countryside, even if it was the seed grain for the following year, and families hiding food were punished severely. The result was famine. A letter from a peasant in the Volga region in 1932 to the authorities revealed the despair and devastation in the countryside:

Stalin’s callous pursuit of industrialization at the cost of immense suffering led to a devastating famine, in which an estimated 4–5 million died.
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This was one of the most destructive events in Soviet history, and one of the first of many disasters caused by the dogmatic agrarian policies of Communist regimes.

The regime was faced with a serious crisis. Food was running out in the cities and strikes were breaking out. The harsh exploitation of the peasantry was partly responsible for the shortages, but so was the wastefulness of the new command system as a whole.

During the early years of the Stalin era, a group of journalists working for
Krokodil
(
The Crocodile
) – an officially sanctioned satirical magazine – came up with an inspired hoax. After securing clearance from the secret police (the OGPU, the Cheka’s successor) and Stalin’s economic trouble-shooter, Lazar Kaganovich, they created a fictitious industrial organization, which they called ‘The All-Union Trust for the Exploitation of Meteoric Materials’. They then set about furnishing it with essential items: they tricked the State Rubber Stamp Trust into issuing them with a stamp, and printed impressive stationery, complete with a fake list of directors drawn from comic characters in Russian literature. Suitably stamped letters were sent out to various industrial organizations raising the exciting prospect of a new source of special, high-quality metals – meteorites. The All-Union Trust for the Exploitation of Meteoric Materials, the letter claimed, had established, scientifically, that meteorites would fall in various locations in Central Asia. They knew, they claimed, precisely when and where they would land and could supply the ensuing detritus to favoured partners in Soviet industry. Industrial officials throughout the USSR took the bait. Letters of interest flooded in. The Furniture Trust offered office refurbishment in exchange for the precious metals; the State Phonographic Trust proposed phonographs and records to entertain the expeditionary parties as they travelled through the Central Asian wilderness to recover the meteoric material. Armed with these and more substantial offers, they were granted a large credit by the State Bank. But they went a step too far when they approached the Deputy Commissar for Heavy Industry for help in constructing a factory to process the metals. The Deputy Commissar, less credulous than most,
smelt a rat and locked them in his office. Eventually the OGPU were summoned, and they, in the spirit of the hoax, made a show of pretending to arrest the meteoric entrepreneurs. Much to the hoaxers’ chagrin, however, Kaganovich’s sense of humour did not stretch to allowing them to publish the story – it would have been too humiliating for the Soviet Union’s industrial elite. Instead the officials’ punishment was limited to ridicule within the confines of the corridors of power.
⁶¹

This story, told by a
Krokodil
cartoonist to Zara Witkin, an American engineer working in Moscow at the time, reveals much about the nature of the economic system created in the early Stalinist period. The command economy might best be described as a ‘hungry state’ – its appetite for resources, whether raw materials, labour, or industrial goods, was limitless.
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The logic of this system explains why the industrial officials were so easy to dupe. Charged with fulfilling wildly ambitious plans to produce heavy industrial goods, they were blithely unconcerned about costs and practicality, because they simply could not go bust. Profit and loss were immaterial. As long as there was a chance that the meteoric materials were as good as promised, they had little reason to hold back. The ravenous industrial economy swallowed everything that came within reach; it is no surprise that it salivated at the prospect of the meteoric metals.

The First Five-Year Plan built some of the great industrial behemoths of the Soviet economy, such as the metal plants in Magnitogorsk in the Urals and Kuznetsk in Siberia. According to official figures, output doubled in many parts of heavy industry. However, this was achieved at enormous cost. The unrealistic targets, the ‘storming’ labour methods, and the deployment of semi-trained workers and engineers created shortages, waste and chaos. ‘Self-criticism’ and ‘class struggle’ were also damaging practices which soon escaped party control. In Leningrad (the renamed St Petersburg/Petrograd) as many as 61 per cent of shock-worker brigades were electing their managers, and bosses complained that workers were refusing to obey them.
⁶³
The Plan was declared to have been achieved after four years, but in reality 40 per cent of plan targets were unfulfilled.
⁶⁴

Chaos and poor economic performance forced Stalin to retreat, and in June 1931 he announced the beginning of the end of his revolution. He declared that the class war against the bourgeois specialists was officially over; the authority of managers was restored and the fervour
of party activists and secret police reined in: as Kaganovich declared, from now on the ground had to shake whenever the Soviet manager entered the factory. Stalin was also eventually compelled to abandon his economic utopianism. The Second Five-Year Plan of 1933 was, whilst still ambitious, more modest and pragmatic.

Most significantly, this was also the beginning of the move to greater inequalities that marked mature Stalinism. Stalin severely trimmed his erstwhile enthusiasm for the achievements of ‘labour heroism’. Workers had to be paid according to how hard they worked; they were not yet ready, he declared, for equal wages and appeals to self-sacrifice. These, it now appeared, would only be practical under full Communism, not the lower phase of socialism that the USSR currently occupied.
⁶⁵
During the late 1920s special rations had been given to higher officials, but these privileges were extended to other officials, engineers and some other members of the ‘socialist intelligentsia’ in the early 1930s. Wages also became more differentiated, though engineers and technicians still only received 1.8 times the average worker’s salary.
⁶⁶

Greater class peace might have been declared in industry, but it was to be almost another two years before it came to the countryside. Only disastrous famine and urban unrest forced Stalin to retreat in May 1933. Party officials were told to scale down repressions in the countryside, and in 1935 the regime began to compromise with the peasantry. Peasants were permitted to sell some of their produce on the local market, and on the collective farms wage incentives were improved.
⁶⁷
Though dubbed ‘neo-NEP’ by critics, this was not a return to the market of the 1920s. The distribution of most goods was now firmly in the hands of state bureaucrats, and remained so until the end of the USSR; peasants continued to resent the regime, and as a consequence agriculture remained a serious drag on the Soviet economy – as it did wherever collectivization was attempted. Peasants only worked with any energy on their private plots, and in 1950 almost a half of all meat was produced on them, though they constituted a tiny proportion of the land.