A history of Russia

Union, and it was buttressed by such additional measures - again combining economics and control - as the new crucial role of the Machine Tractor Stations, the M.T.S., which will be mentioned later.

The First Five-Year Plan lasted from October 1, 1928, to December 31, 1932, that is, four years and three months. The fact that Soviet authorities tried to complete a five-year plan in four years is a significant comment on the enormous speed-up typical of the new socialist offensive. The main goal of the Plan was to develop heavy industry, including machine-building, and that emphasis has remained characteristic of Soviet industrialization from that time on. According to Baykov's calculation, 86 per cent of all industrial investment during the First Five-Year Plan went into heavy industry. Whole new branches of industry, such as the chemical, automobile, agricultural machinery, aviation, machine tool, and electrical, were created from slight beginnings or even from scratch. Over fifteen hundred new factories were built. Gigantic industrial complexes, exemplified by Magnitostroi in the Urals and Kuznetsstroi in western Siberia, began to

take shape. Entire cities arose in the wilderness. Magnitogorsk, for instance, acquired in a few years a population of a quarter of a million.

The First Five-Year Plan was proclaimed a great success: officially it was fulfilled in industry to the extent of 93.7 per cent in four years and three months. Furthermore, heavy industry, concerned with means of production, exceeded its quota, registering 103.4 per cent while light or consumers' goods industry produced 84.9 per cent of its assigned total. Of course, Soviet production claims included great exaggerations, difficult to estimate because of the limited and often misleading nature of Soviet statistics for the period. To put it very conservatively and without percentages: 'The fact remains beyond dispute that quantitatively, during the years covered by the F.Y.P., industrial production did increase and very substantially.' Quality, however, was often sacrificed to quantity, and the production results achieved varied greatly from item to item, with remarkable overfulfillments of the plan in some cases and underfulfillments in others. Besides, the great industrial spurt was accompanied by shortages of consumer goods, rationing, and various other privations and hardships which extended to all of the people, who at the same time were forced to work harder than ever before. The whole country underwent a quasi-military mobilization reminiscent of War Communism.

But the greatest transformation probably occurred in the countryside. As already mentioned, the collectivization of agriculture, planned originally ' as a gradual advance, became a flood. Tens of thousands of trusted Communists and proletarians - the celebrated 'twenty-five thousand' in one instance, actually twenty-seven thousand - were sent from towns into villages to organize kolkhozes and establish socialism. Local authorities and Party organizations, with the police and troops where necessary, forced peasants into collectives. A tremendous resistance developed. About a million of the so-called kulaks, some five million people counting their families, disappeared in the process, often having been sent to concentration camps in far-off Siberia or Central Asia. A frightful famine swept Ukraine. Peasants slaughtered their cattle and horses rather than bring them into a kolkhoz. Thus from 1929 to 1933 in the Soviet Union the number of horses, in millions, declined from 34 to 16.6, of cattle from 68.1 to 38.6, of sheep and goats from 147.2 to 50.6, and of hogs from 20.9 to 12.2. Droughts in 1931 and 1932 added to the horrors of the transition from private to collectivized farming.

Stalin himself applied the brakes to his own policy after the initial fifteen months. In his remarkable article, 'Dizzy with Success,' published in March 1930, he criticized the collectivizers for excessive enthusiasm and re- emphasized that collectives were to be formed on the voluntary principle, not by force. At the same time he announced certain concessions to

collective farmers, in particular their right to retain a small private plot of land and a limited number of domestic animals and poultry. The new stress on the voluntary principle produced striking results: whereas fourteen million peasant households had joined collective farms by March 1930, only five million remained in collectives in May. But before long their number began to increase again when the authorities resorted to less direct pressure, such as a temporary suspension of taxes and priority in obtaining scarce manufactured goods. By the end of the First Five-Year Plan more than fourteen million peasant households had joined the kolkhoz system. According to one count, at that time 68 per cent of all cultivated land in the Soviet Union was under kolkhoz agriculture, and 10 per cent under sovkhoz agriculture, while only 22 per cent remained for independent farmers. The Plan could well be considered overfulfilled.

A sovkhoz is essentially an agricultural factory owned by the state, with peasants providing hired labor. Although sovkhozes, serving as experimental stations, as enormous grain producers in newly developed regions, and in many other crucial assignments, were more important for the Soviet economy than their number would indicate, Communist authorities refrained from establishing them as the basic form of agricultural organization in the country. Instead they relied on the kolkhoz as the norm for the Soviet countryside. A kolkhoz - kollektivnoe khoziaistvo, collective economy or farm - was owned by all its members, although it had to deliver the assigned amount of produce to the state and was controlled by the state. Significantly, the produce of a collective farm was generally allocated as follows: first, the part required by the state, both as taxes and as specified deliveries at set prices; next, the seed for sowing and the part to serve as payment to the Machine Tractor Station that aided the kolkhoz; after that, members of the collective received their shares calculated on the basis of the 'workdays' - a unit of labor to be distinguished from actual days - that they had put in for the kolkhoz; finally, the remainder went into the indivisible fund of the collective to be used for its social, cultural, and other needs. The members also cultivated their small private plots - and with remarkable intensity and success. The Machine Tractor Stations, finally abolished in 1958, provided indispensable mechanized aid to the collectives, notably at harvest time, helping to co-ordinate the work of different kolkhozes and acting as another control over them. While it might be noted that the Soviet government found it easier to introduce collective farms in those regions where communal agriculture prevailed than in areas of individual proprietors, such as Ukraine, the kolkhoz bore very little resemblance to the commune. Members of a commune possessed their land in common, but they farmed their assigned lots separately, undisturbed, and in their own traditional

way. Organization and regimentation of labor became the very essence of the kolkhoz.

The Second and Third Five-Year Plans

The Second Five-Year Plan, which lasted from 1933 through 1937, and the Third, which began in 1938 and was interrupted by the German invasion in June 1941, continued on the whole the aims and methods of the initial Plan. They stressed the development of heavy industry, completed the collectivization of agriculture, and did their best to mobilize the manpower and other resources of the country to attain the objectives. The Soviet people lived through eight and a half more years of quasi-wartime exertion. Yet these plans also differed in certain ways from the first and from each other. The Second Five-Year Plan, drawn on the basis of acquired knowledge more expertly than the first, tried to balance production to avoid extreme over- or underfulfillment. It emphasized 'mastering the technique,' including the making of especially complicated machine tools, precision instruments, and the like. Also, it allowed a little more for consumers' goods than the first plan did. However, in the course of the Second Five-Year Plan, and especially during the third, military considerations became paramount. Military considerations linked to ideology had of course always been present in the planning of Soviet leaders. From the beginning of industrialization, Stalin and his associates had insisted that they had to build a powerful socialist state quickly, perhaps in a decade, or be crushed by capitalists. In the 1930's the threat became increasingly real and menacing. Soviet leaders did what they could to arm and equip Red forces, and they accelerated the development of industries inland, east of the Volga, away from the exposed frontiers.

Both the Second Five-Year Plan and the third, as far as it went, were again proclaimed successes, and again the official claims, in spite of their exaggeration, had some sound basis in fact. Industry, especially heavy industry, continued to grow. On the basis of official - and doubtful - figures, the Soviet share in world production amounted to 13.7 per cent in 1937, compared to 3.7 in 1929 and to 2.6 for the Russian Empire in 1913. In the generation of electrical power, for example, the Soviet Union advanced from the fifteenth place among the countries of the world to the third, and it was second only to the United States in machine building, tractors, trucks, and some other lines of production. Moreover, the Soviet Union made its amazing gains while the rest of the world experienced a terrible depression and mass unemployment.

In agriculture collectivization was virtually completed and, except for the wilderness, the Soviet countryside became a land of kolkhozes and