The Russian Revolution (25 page)

With the ruthless onslaught on the Left Opposition fresh in the minds, the `Rightist' leaders trod carefully; and the punishment after their defeat was correspondingly mild. But this was the last open (or quasi-open) party opposition in the party. The ban on factions that had existed in theory since 1921 now existed in practice, with the result that potential factions automatically became conspiracies. Overt disagreements on policy were now a rarity in party congresses. The party leadership was increasingly secretive about its deliberations, and the minutes of Central Committee meetings were no longer routinely circulated and accessible to rankand-file party members. The leaders-particularly the supreme Leader-began to cultivate the godlike attributes of mystery and inscrutability.

The Soviet press had also changed, becoming far less lively and informative about internal affairs than it had been in the 192os. Economic achievements were trumpeted, often in a way that involved blatant distortion of reality and manipulation of statistics; setbacks and failures were ignored; and news of the 1932-3 famine was kept out of the papers altogether. Exhortations for higher productivity and greater vigilance against `wreckers' were the order of the day; frivolity was suspect. The newspapers no longer carried Western-style advertisements for the latest Mary Pickford film nor reported trivia like street accidents, rapes, and robberies.

Contact with the West became much more restricted and dangerous during the First Five-Year Plan. Russia's isolation from the outside world had begun with the 1917 Revolution, but there was a fair volume of traffic and communication in the 1920s. Intellectuals could still publish abroad; foreign journals could still be ordered. But suspicion of foreigners was a strong motif in the show trials of the Cultural Revolution, and this reflected a growing xenophobia in the leadership, and no doubt in the population as well. The First Five-Year Plan goal of `economic autarchy' also implied withdrawal from the outside world. This was the time in which the closed frontiers, siege mentality, and cultural isolation that were to be characteristic of the Soviet Union in the Stalin (and post-Stalin) period were firmly established.28

As in Peter the Great's time, the people grew thinner as the state grew strong. Stalin's Revolution had extended direct state control over the whole urban economy and greatly increased the state's ability to exploit peasant agriculture. It had also greatly strengthened the state's police arm, and created Gulag, the labour-camp empire that became intimately involved in the industrialization drive (primarily as a supplier of convict labour in areas where free labour was in short supply) and would grow rapidly in the coming decades. The persecution of `class enemies' in collectivization and the Cultural Revolution had left a complex legacy of bitterness, fear, and suspicion, as well as encouraging such practices as denunciation, purging, and `self-criticism'. Every resource and every nerve had been strained in the course of Stalin's Revolution. It remained to be seen how far the aim of dragging Russia out of backwardness had been achieved.

6 Ending the Revolution

IN Crane Brinton's terms, a revolution is like a fever which grips the patient, rises to a climax, and finally subsides, leaving the patient to resume his normal life-'perhaps in some respects actually strengthened by the experience, immunized at least for a while from a similar attack, but certainly not wholly made over into a new man'.' Using Brinton's metaphor, the Russian Revolution went through several bouts of fever. The 1917 revolutions and the Civil War constituted the first bout, `Stalin's Revolution' of the First Five-Year Plan period was the second, and the Great Purges was the third. In this scheme, the NEP interlude was a time of convalescence followed by a relapse or, some might argue, a new injection of the virus into the hapless patient. A second period of convalescence began in the mid-1930s, with the stabilization policies that Trotsky labelled the `Soviet Thermidor' and Timasheff called `the great retreat'.' After another relapse during the Great Purges of 19378, the fever appeared to be cured and the patient rose shakily from his bed to try to resume normal life.

But was the patient really the same man as before his bouts of revolutionary fever? Was his old life there to resume? Certainly the `convalescence' of NEP meant in many respects a resumption of the kind of life that had been interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1914, the revolutionary upheavals of 1917, and the Civil War. But the `convalescence' of the 193os had a different character, for by this time many of the links with the old life had been broken. It was less a matter of resuming the old life than of starting a new one.

The structures of everyday life in Russia had been changed by the First Five-Year Plan upheavals in a way that had not been true of the earlier revolutionary experience of 1917-20. In 1924, during the NEP interlude, a Muscovite returning after ten years' absence could have picked up his city directory (immediately recognizable, because its old design and format had scarcely changed since the prewar years) and still have had a good chance of finding listings for his old doctor, lawyer, and even stockbroker, his favourite confectioner (still discreetly advertising the best imported chocolate), the local tavern and the parish priest, and the firms which had formerly repaired his clocks and supplied him with building materials or cash registers. Ten years later, in the mid-193os, almost all these listings would have disappeared, and the returning traveller would have been further disoriented by the renaming of many Moscow streets and squares, and the destruction of churches and other familiar landmarks. Another few years, and the city directory itself would be gone, not to resume publication for half a century.

Since revolutions involve an abnormal concentration of human energy, idealism, and anger, it is in the nature of things that their intensity will at some point subside. But how does one end the revolution without repudiating it? This is a tricky problem for revolutionaries who last long enough in power to see the revolutionary impulse wane. The erstwhile revolutionary can scarcely follow Brinton's metaphor and announce that he has now recovered from his revolutionary fever. But Stalin was fully equal to this challenge. His way of ending the Revolution was to declare victory.

The rhetoric of victory filled the air in the first half of the 1930s. A new journal entitled Our Achievements, founded by the writer Maxim Gorky, epitomized this spirit. The battles of industrialization and collectivization had been won, Soviet propagandists trumpeted. The enemy classes had been liquidated. Unemployment had vanished. Primary education had become universal and compulsory, and (it was claimed) adult literacy in the Soviet Union had risen to 9o per cent.3 With its Plan, the Soviet Union had taken a giant step forward in human mastery of the world: men were no longer the helpless victims of economic forces over which they had no control. A `new Soviet man' was emerging in the process of building socialism. Even the physical environment was being transformed, as factories rose in the empty steppe and Soviet scientists and engineers applied themselves to `the conquest of nature'.

To say that the Revolution had been won was implicitly to say that the Revolution was over. It was time to enjoy the fruits of victory, if any could be found, or at any rate to rest from the strenuous exertions of revolution. In the mid-1930s, Stalin spoke of life having become more light-hearted, and promised `a holiday on our street'. The virtues of order, moderation, predictability, and stability came back into official favour. In the economic sphere, the Second FiveYear Plan (1933-7) was more sober and realistic than its wildly ambitious predecessor, though the emphasis on building a heavy industrial base was unchanged. In the countryside, the regime made conciliatory overtures towards the peasantry within the framework of collectivization, trying to make the kolkhoz work. A non-Marxist commentator, Nicholas Timasheff, approvingly described what was happening as a `great retreat' from revolutionary values and methods. Trotsky, disapproving, categorized it as `Soviet Thermidor', a betrayal of the revolution.

In this final Chapter, I will examine three aspects of the transition from revolution to post-revolution. The first section deals with the nature of the revolutionary victory proclaimed by the regime in the 1930s ('Revolution accomplished'). The second section examines the Thermidorian policies and tendencies of the same period ('Revolution betrayed'). The subject of the third section, The Terror, is the Great Purges of 1937-8. This throws a new light on the `return to normalcy' of the second section, reminding us that normalcy can be almost as elusive as victory. Just as there was hollowness in the regime's declaration of revolutionary victory, so there was also a good deal of phoniness and make-believe in its assurances that life was returning to normal, much as the population wished to accept them. It is no easy matter to end a revolution. The revolutionary virus stays in the system, liable to flare up again under stress. This happened in the Great Purges, a final bout of revolutionary fever that burned up much that remained of the Revolution-idealism, transformational zeal, the revolutionary lexicon, and, finally, the revolutionaries themselves.

`Revolution accomplished'

When the Seventeenth Party Congress met early in 1934, it was called `The Congress of Victors'. Their victory was the economic transformation that had occurred during the period of the First Five-Year Plan. The urban economy had been completely nationalized except for a small cooperative sector; agriculture had been collectivized. Thus the Revolution had succeeded in changing the modes of production; and as every Marxist knows, the mode of production is the economic base on which the entire superstructure of society, politics, and culture rests. Now that the Soviet Union had a socialist base, how could the superstructures fail to adjust themselves accordingly? By changing the base, the Communists had done all that needed to be done-and probably all that could be done in Marxist terms-to create a socialist society. The rest was just a matter of time. A socialist economy would automatically produce socialism, just as capitalism had produced bourgeois democracy.

This was the theoretical formulation. In practice, most Communists understood the revolutionary task and the victory in simpler terms. The task had been industrialization and economic modernization, epitomized in the First Five-Year Plan. Every new smokestack and every new tractor was a token of victory. If the Revolution had succeeded in laying the foundations of a powerful modern industrialized state in the Soviet Union, capable of defending itself against external enemies, it had accomplished its mission. In these terms, what had been achieved?

Nobody could miss the visible signs of the Soviet industrialization drive. Construction sites were everywhere. There had been headlong urban growth during the First Five-Year Plan: old industrial centres had expanded vastly, quiet provincial towns had been transformed by the advent of a big factory, and new industrial and mining settlements were springing up all over the Soviet Union. Massive new metallurgical and machine-building plants were under construction or already in operation. The Turksib railway and the giant Dnieper hydroelectric dam had been built.'

The First Five-Year Plan was declared to have been successfully completed in 1932, after four and a half years. The official results, which were the subject of a Soviet propaganda barrage at home and abroad, must be treated with great caution. Nevertheless, Western economists have generally accepted that there was real growth, amounting to what Walt Rostow later labelled industrial 'takeoff'. Summarizing the results of the First Five-Year Plan, a British economic historian notes that `though the claims in their totality are dubious, there is no doubt at all that a mighty engineering industry was in the making, and output of machine-tools, turbines, tractors, metallurgical equipment, etc. rose by genuinely impressive percentages'. Although steel production fell far short of its target, it still rose (according to Soviet figures) by almost 50 per cent. Output of iron ore more than doubled, though the planned increase was even greater, and hard coal and pig iron came close to doubling in the period 1927/8 to 1932.5

This is not to deny that there were problems with an industrialization drive that emphasized speed and output with such ruthless singlemindedness. Industrial accidents were common; there was massive waste of materials; quality was low, and the percentage of defective output high. The Soviet strategy was expensive in financial and human terms, and not necessarily optimal even in terms of growth rates: one Western economist has calculated that the Soviet Union could have achieved similar levels of growth by the mid1930s without any basic departure from the NEP framework.' All too often, `fulfilling and over-fulfilling the Plan' meant throwing rational planning to the winds and focusing narrowly on a few highpriority output targets at the expense of all else. New factories might be producing glamorous goods like tractors and turbines, but there was a dire shortage of nails and packing materials all through the First Five-Year Plan, and all branches of industry were affected by the collapse of peasant haulage and cartage which was an unplanned consequence of collectivization. The Donbass coal industry was in crisis in 1932, and a number of other key industrial sectors had acute construction and production problems.

Despite the problems, industry was the sphere in which the Soviet leaders genuinely believed they were in the process of achieving something remarkable. Virtually all Communists felt this way, even those who had earlier sympathized with the Left or Right Oppositions; and something of the same pride and excitement was apparent in the younger generation, regardless of party affiliation, and to some extent in the urban population as a whole. Many former Trotskyites had left the Opposition because of their enthusiasm for the First Five-Year Plan, and even Trotsky himself basically approved of it. Those Communists who had leaned to the Right in 1928-9 had recanted and fully associated themselves with the industrialization drive. In the internal calculus of many former doubters, Magnitogorsk, the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, and the other great industrial projects outweighed the negative aspects of Stalin's course like the heavy-handed repression and the collectivization excesses.