an expert on the problem of nationalities, a subject to which he devoted some of his early writings.
One of the first prominent Bolsheviks to arrive in Petrograd, Stalin participated in the historic events of 1917, and after the October Revolution he became the first commissar for national minorities. As a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front he played a role in the Civil War, for example, in the defense of Tsaritsyn against the Whites. Incidentally, Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad in 1925 and Volgograd in 1961. It might be noted that in the course of executing his duties he quarreled repeatedly with Trotsky. But Stalin's real bid for power began in 1922 with his appointment as general secretary of the Party, a position that gave him broad authority in matters of personnel. The long-time official Soviet view of Stalin as Lenin's anointed successor distorts reality, for, in fact, the ailing Bolshevik leader came to resent the general secretary's rigidity and rudeness and in his so-called testament warned the Party leadership against Stalin. But Stalin's rivals failed to heed Lenin's late forebodings, and, before too long, Stalin's Party machine rolled over all opponents. The complete personal dictatorship which began in 1928 was to last until the dictator's death in 1953.
The amount of time that has elapsed since Stalin's death has not been nearly enough for historians to pass a definitive judgment on the Soviet dictator and his historical role. Views of Stalin have ranged from the utterly fantastic eulogy of him as a universal genius, expounded for many years by the propaganda machine of Russian and world communism, to the extremely hostile impression that he was a blood-soaked, man-devouring, oriental monster. Many commentators have made interesting attempts to explain the general secretary, his importance, and his work. Stalin has been credited, for example, with 'inflexible will, unwillingness to yield, realistic statesmanship and high organizing abilities.' Hardheaded realism and common sense have been mentioned frequently as the dictator's outstanding traits. Deutscher's well-known book presents him as a hard-
pressed Marxist realist carrying out a consistent policy and reacting intelligently to the needs of the moment. Yet, as in the case of Ivan the Terrible, there was madness in Stalin's method. That madness, formerly a matter of suspicion and controversy, received fully convincing documentation in Khrushchev's celebrated speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and especially during the session of the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, as well as in the memoirs of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, published in 1967, and in most recent Soviet material. In addition to fighting real battles and struggling against actual opponents, Stalin lived in the paranoiac world of constant threat and wholesale conspiracy. Fact and fantasy were blended together, making the detection of the dictator's motives extremely difficult. Still, in retrospect, Stalin's proverbial ruthlessness and vindictiveness and his passion for discovering ever-new enemies and plots find their explanation in abnormal psychology rather than in any compelling objective necessity or in any alleged rational advantages of a 'permanent purge.' That causation is given central attention in Tucker's study of Stalin and it is reflected, in a different sense, in Ulam's recent important book on the general secretary. Paranoiac tendencies joined with Marxism in transforming the Russian scene.
The First Five-Year Plan and its successors hit the Soviet Union with tremendous impact. The U.S.S.R. became a great industrial nation: from being the fifth country in production when the plans began, it was eventually second only to the United States. In agriculture individual peasant cultivation gave way to a new system of collective farming. Indeed 1928 and 1929 have been described as the true revolutionary years in Russia: it was then that the mode of life of the peasants, the bulk of the people, underwent a radical change, whereas until the First Five-Year Plan they continued to live much as they had for centuries. A vast social transformation accompanied the economic, while at the same time the entire Soviet system as we came to know it acquired its definitive form in the difficult decade of the '30's.
Perhaps paradoxically, the five-year plans are not easy to explain. Marxist theory did not specifically provide for them and certainly did not spell out the procedures to be followed. To be sure, the needs of the moment affected the decisions of Soviet leaders. Yet Stalin's and his associates' response to the needs constituted only one alternative line of action, and often not the most obvious. In fact, the leadership rapidly reversed itself on such key subjects as the speed of collectivization.
Certain considerations, however, help to explain the five-year plans. To begin with, although Marxism did not provide for industrialization it in-
sisted on a high level of it. The dictatorship of the proletariat in a land of peasants remained an anomaly. If, contrary to the doctrine, industries and workers were not there in the first place, they had to be created. Marxists in general, and Bolsheviks in particular, thought of socialism entirely in terms of an advanced industrial society. Such authors as Ulam have demonstrated in a rather convincing manner the close and multiple ties between Marxism and industrialization. The collectivization of agriculture, in turn, represented the all-important step from an individual and, therefore, bourgeois system of ownership and production to a collective economy and, therefore, to socialism. As already mentioned, after the October Revolution the Soviet government proceeded to nationalize Russian industry. Lenin showed a special interest in electrification, popularizing the famous slogan: 'Electrification plus Soviet power equals communism.' In 1921 the State Planning Commission, known as
Although the New Economic Policy constituted a retreat from socialism, that retreat was undertaken only as a temporary measure and out of sheer necessity. In addition to its social results, unacceptable to most Communists, the N.E.P. raised serious economic problems. While by 1928 Russian industry had regained its pre- World War level, a further rapid advance appeared quite uncertain. With the industrial plant restored and in operation - a relatively easy accomplishment - the Soviet Union needed investment in the producers' goods industries and a new spurt in production. Yet the 'socialist sector' of the economy lacked funds, while the 'free sector,' particularly the peasants, failed to rise to government expectations. The Soviet economy in the 1920's continued to be plagued by pricing problems, beginning with the disparity between the low agricultural prices and the high prices of manufactured consumers' goods, resulting in the unwillingness of peasants to supply grain and other products to the government and the cities - a situation well described as the 'scissors crisis.' Gerschenkron and other specialists have argued that the Bolsheviks had good reason to fear that a continuation of the N.E.P. would stabilize a peasant society at the point where it was interested in obtaining more consumers' goods, but neither willing nor able to support large-scale industrialization. As already indicated, Stalin's Five-Year Plan proved attractive to the Party because it promised a way out of the impasse: the Soviet Union could abandon the New Economic Policy and become a truly socialist country without waiting for world revolution. 'Socialism in one country' gripped many imaginations and became the new Bolshevik battle cry.
Once the Plan went into operation, the economic factors involved in its execution acquired great significance, all the more so because the planners set sail in essentially uncharted waters and often could not foresee the re-
suits of their actions. In particular, according to Gerschenkron, A. Erlich, and certain other scholars, the fantastically rapid collectivization of agriculture came about as follows: while the Plan had called for a strictly limited collectivization, set at 14 per cent, the unexpectedly strong resistance on the part of the peasants led to an all-out attack on individual farming; moreover, the government discovered that the collectives, which finally gave it control over the labor and produce of the peasants, enabled it to squeeze from them the necessary funds for industrial investment. It has been estimated that the Soviet state paid to the collectives for their grain only a distinctly minor part of the price of that grain charged the consumer; the remaining major part constituted in effect a tax. That tax, plus the turnover or sales tax that the Soviet state charged all consumers, together with the ability of the government to keep the real wages down while productivity went up, produced the formula for financing the continuous industrialization of the Soviet Union.
In addition to ideology and economics, other factors entered into the execution of the five-year plans. Many scholars assign major importance to considerations of foreign policy and of internal security and control. Preparation for war, which affected all major aspects of the five-year plans, began in earnest after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, and while Japan was further developing its aggressive policies in the Far East. The stress on internal security and control in the five-year plans is more difficult to document. Yet it might well be argued that police considerations were consistently uppermost in the minds of Stalin and his associates. Collectivization, from that point of view, represented a tremendous extension of Communist control over the population of the Soviet
