sovkhozes. Slightly less than 250,000 kolkhozes replaced over 25 million individual farms. The famine and other horrors of the First Five-Year Plan did not recur. In fact, agricultural production increased somewhat, and food rationing was abolished in 1935. Still, the economic success of Soviet agricultural policy remained much more doubtful than the achievements of Soviet industrialization. Peasants regularly failed to meet their production quotas. They showed far greater devotion to their small private plots than to the vast kolkhoz possessions. In other ways, too, they remained particularly unresponsive to the wishes of Communist authorities. A full evaluation of Soviet social engineering should also take account of the costs. As one author summarized the salient human aspects of Soviet agricultural policies during the socialist offensive:
As a result of collectivization the number of families on the land diminished from 26,000,000 to 21,000,000. This means that 5,000,000 families or approximately 24,000,000 individuals must have left the countryside. Of these the increase in the towns accounts for one half. Twelve millions are not accounted for. A part of them has undoubtedly perished, the other part has found new possibilities in the Far East, in the Arctic, or in Central Asia.
Any over-all judgment of the first three five-year plans is of necessity a complicated and controversial matter, as the writings of Bergson, Grossman, and other economists clearly indicate. The plans did succeed - and succeed strikingly - in developing industry, particularly heavy industry, and in collectivizing agriculture. Skepticism as to the feasibility of the plans, extremely widespread outside the Soviet Union, turned to astonishment and sometimes admiration. To repeat, not only did production greatly increase, but entire new industries appeared, while huge virgin territories, including the distant and difficult far north, began to enter the economic life of the country. Red armed forces, by contrast with the tsarist army, obtained a highly developed industrial and armaments base, a fact which alone justifies the five-year plans, in the opinion of some critics. Moreover, the entire enormous undertaking was carried out almost wholly by internal manpower and financing, except for the very important contribution of several thousand Western specialists in all fields who were invited to help, and some short-term credit extended to the Soviet government by German and other suppliers during the first years of industrialization. Considered by many as Stalin's chimera, the five-year plans proved to be an effective way - if not necessarily the only or the best way - to industrialize a relatively backward country.
Yet the cost was tremendous. Soviet authorities could accomplish their aims only by imposing great hardships on the people and by mobilizing the country in a quasi-military manner for a supreme effort. The very terminology of the five-year plans, with its iron or coal fronts, shock brigades, and constant communiques, spoke of war. Piece work became common and wage differentials grew by leaps and bounds. The new emphasis on 'socialist competition' culminated in the Stakhanov movement. In 1935 Alexis Stakhanov, a coal miner in the Donets Basin, was reported to have overfulfilled his daily quota by 1400 per cent in the course of a shift hewing coal. 'Stakhanovite' results were soon achieved by other workers in numerous branches of industry. Rewarding the Stakhanovites, whose accomplishments stemmed in different degrees from improved technique, enormous exertion, and co-operation by their fellow workers, the goyernment used their successes to raise general production norms over a period of time. Most workers must have resented this speed-up - some Stakhanovites were actually killed - but they could not reverse it. After the October Revolution, and especially in the '30's, labor unions, to which almost all workers belonged, have served as agencies of the state, to promote its policies and rally the workers behind them, rather than as representatives of labor interests and point of view. Hardships of Soviet life included a desperate shortage of consumers' goods, as well as totally inadequate housing combined with a rigid system of priorities. As a result the black market flourished, and indeed has remained an essential part of the Soviet economic system. Criticisms of the first three five-year plans - in fact, of their successors as well - have also pointed to top- heavy bureaucracy and excessive red tape, to a relatively low productivity per worker and production per inhabitant, to the frequently poor quality of the items produced, and to numerous weaknesses, perhaps outright failure, in agriculture. It can legitimately be asked whether a different regime could have industrialized the country better and with less pain.
For extreme painfulness emerged as a fundamental aspect of the first three five-year plans. While all suffered to some extent, some groups of the population suffered beyond all measure. One such group, as already mentioned, was the kulaks and their families. Another, overlapping but by no means identical with the kulaks, was the inmates of the forced-labor camps. A history of Soviet forced labor remains to be written in full: it was ignored in Soviet publications as well as by such Soviet sympathizers as Dobb in his interesting and useful studies of the Soviet economy. Scholars who tried to reconstruct reality had to do so on the basis of limited and sometimes controversial evidence. Still, after the information provided by numerous former inmates who left the Soviet Union during the Second World War, the researches of such scholars as D. Dallin and Nicolaevsky, the writings of Solzhenitsyn, and especially the material becoming available after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the basic outlines of the Soviet forced-labor system are reasonably clear. Having begun in the early 'thirties the system encompassed millions of human beings on the eve of the Second World War, in spite of the extremely high mortality rate in the camps. Forced labor was used especially on huge construction projects, such as the Baltic-White Sea and other canals, and for hard work under primitive conditions in distant areas, as in the case of the lumber and gold industries. The political police - from 1922 to 1934 known as the G.P.U. and the O.G.P.U. rather than the Cheka, after 1934 as the N.K.V.D. after the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, subsequently as M.V.D. and M.G.B., and after 1954 as K.G.B. - which guarded and administered forced labor, developed veritable concentration-camp empires in the European Russian and Siberian far north, in the Far East, and in certain other areas of the Soviet Union.
The great purge of the 1930's helped to fill forced-labor camps and formed another major, although perhaps unnecessary, aspect of the five-year plans. It also marked Stalin's extermination of all opposition or suspected opposition and his assumption of complete dictatorial power. Although earlier some engineers and other specialists, including foreigners, had been accused of sabotaging or wrecking the industrialization of the country, the real purge began in December 1934 with the assassination of one of the party leaders who was boss in Leningrad, Serge Kirov, and reached high intensity from 1936 to 1938. The purge eventually became enormous in scope; it was directed primarily against Party members, not against the White Guards or other remnants of the old regime as repressive practices had been before.
The assassin of Kirov, proclaimed to be a member of the Left Opposition, was shot, together with about a hundred alleged accomplices. Revelations at the Twenty-second Party Congress strengthened the suspicions of some specialists that Stalin himself was apparently responsible for Kirov's murder. A Party purge followed. While uncounted people disappeared, the three great public trials featured sixteen Bolshevik leaders, notably Zino-viev and Kamenev, in 1936, another seventeen in 1937, and twenty-one more, including Bukharin and Rykov, in 1938. The accused were charged with association with Trotsky, counterrevolutionary conspiracy, 'wrecking,' and treasonable alliance with Soviet enemies abroad. Invariably they confessed to the fantastic charges and in all but four cases received the death penalty. Observers and scholars such as Conquest have been trying since to find reasons for the staggering confessions in everything from torture to heroic loyalty to Soviet communism. The purge spread and spread, affecting virtually all Party organizations and government branches,
the army, where Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other top commanders perished at the same time, and almost every other prominent institution, including the political police itself. It reached its height when Nicholas Ezhov - hence
The period of the Yezhovshchina involved a reign of terror without parallel in Soviet history. Among those arrested, imprisoned, and executed were a substantial proportion of the leading figures in the Party and governmental hierarchy. The Bolshevik Old Guard was destroyed. The roll of Yezhov's victims included not only former oppositionists but many of the most stalwart supporters of Stalin in his protracted struggle with the opposition. No sphere of Soviet life, however lofty, was left untouched. Among the purged Stalinists were three former members of the Politburo… and three candidate members… An overwhelming majority of the members and
