Industrialisation and collectivisation were two sides of the same coin. The state needed to seize grain for export in order to finance the expansion of mining and manufacturing output. Stalin left no one in the Kremlin in doubt about this.
He barked out the case for driving the economic transformation at a frenetic pace in a speech to a conference of industrial officials and managers on 4 February 1931:31
To slacken the tempos would be to fall behind. And the backward get beaten. We don’t want to be beaten. No, that’s not what we want. The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish– lords. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: ‘You are wretched, you are abundant, you are mighty, you are powerless, Mother Russia.’
The language had an emotional intensity he had not used since Lenin’s funeral. The sonorous phrases hit home like a hammer. The patriotic appeal was unmistakable. The simple metaphor of ‘beating’, repeated again and again, conveyed the urgency of the struggle ahead.
Stalin warned his audience: ‘Such is the law of the exploiters: beat the backward and the weak. The wolf’s law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak — so you are in the wrong and therefore you can be beaten and enslaved.’32 The solution, he insisted, was irresistible:33
We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must close that gap in ten years. Either we do this or we’ll be crushed.
This is what our obligations before the workers and peasants of the USSR dictate to us.
He had no doubt about what could be achieved. At a May Day reception in 1933 he was to declare:34
If the Russians are armed with tanks, aircraft and a marine fleet, they’re invincible, invincible.
But they cannot advance badly armed in the absence of technology, and the whole history of old Russia is summed up in this.
The Leader’s voice in his 1931 speech to the industrial officials and managers had confirmed that there would be no vacillation. The course of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation had been set and there would be no deviation from it. Leader, party and state were wholly determined to reach the plotted destination. Firmness and courage were required. But Stalin was confident. In a sentence that was quickly picked up by official propagandists he declared: ‘There are no fortresses that could not be stormed by Bolsheviks.’ Looking across the audience, he moved to the finale of his speech:35
We have carried out a series of the hardest tasks. We have overthrown capitalism. We have constructed large-scale socialist industry. We have turned the middle peasant on to the path of socialism. We’ve done the most important thing from the viewpoint of construction. There’s still a little left to do: to learn technology and to master science. And when we do that, we’ll have tempos which at present we daren’t even dream about.
And we’ll do that if we really want to!
Stalin was a bureaucrat, conspirator and killer and his politics were of a monstrous species. Yet he was also inspiring. Nobody listening to him on that occasion could fail to be impressed by his performance.
He was summoning his subordinates, in the republic and the provinces as well as in Moscow, to effect a gigantic political and economic transmutation. He knew that he could not know everything that went on. He was adept at getting thousands of officials to show the required zeal by setting out a general policy or handing down fixed delivery quotas. Many subordinates were appalled by the ‘excesses’. But many others — out of conviction, fear or ambition — co-operated eagerly. Once the project had been formulated in 1928–9, officialdom in all Soviet institutions competed with each other to obtain a share of the increased resources. They also aspired to the power and privileges dangled as a bait in front of them. The direction of policy had been made abundantly clear and they wanted to take advantage of the journey about to be embarked upon.36
His summons was successful. The First Five-Year Plan, scheduled to last to the end of 1933, was completed a year ahead of schedule. National income had nearly doubled since the tax-year 1927–8. Gross industrial output had risen by a remarkable 137 per cent. Within industry, the output of capital goods registered a still more impressive increase of 285 per cent. The total employed labour force had soared from 11.3 million under the New Economic Policy to 22.8 million. The figures have to be treated with caution. Stalin and his associates were never averse to claiming more for their achievements than they should have done; and indeed they themselves derived information from lower echelons of party and government which systematically misled them. Disruption was everywhere in the economy.37 Ukraine, south Russia and Kazakhstan were starving. The Gulag heaved with prisoners. Nevertheless the economic transformation was no fiction. The USSR under Stalin’s rule had been pointed decisively in the direction of becoming an industrial, urban society. This had been his great objective. His gamble was paying off for him, albeit not for his millions of victims. Magnitogorsk and the White Sea–Baltic Canal were constructed at the expense of the lives of Gulag convicts, Ukrainian peasants and even undernourished, overworked factory labourers.
25. ASCENT TO SUPREMACY
Stalin had once paraded before the party as the paladin of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. As Party General Secretary he had ordered searches of the archives and exposed every disagreement between his enemies — Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin — and Lenin. Stalin himself had fallen out badly with Lenin in 1922–3. Yet when Trotski’s American supporter Max Eastman published documents on that dispute in 1925, Stalin got the Politburo to command Trotski to reject them as forgeries. Implicitly he was making the claim that he alone loyally tended the flame of Lenin’s memory.
Prudence held him back from announcing the NEP’s abandonment. In economics, moreover, there was more than a hint of Trotski’s ideas in his new measures. Better for Stalin to pretend that he was building up the legacy of Lenin. At the same time, though, he wanted to assert his status as supreme party leader. It was no longer enough to appear as his master’s voice: Stalin had to impose his own persona. A fine chance came with his fiftieth-birthday celebrations in December 1929.1
He behaved imperiously. Earlier he had been renowned for his common touch and had seemed so ‘democratic’ in comparison with most other party leaders.2 A young Nikita Khrushchev never forgot the impression Stalin made on him at the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925. His Ukrainian delegation asked Stalin to have his photograph taken with them. Petrov the photographer shouted instructions about the pose he wanted. Stalin quipped: ‘Comrade Petrov loves to order people around. He orders people around even though that’s now prohibited here. No more ordering people around!’3 Khrushchev and his friends were entranced: Stalin appeared one of their own sort. It was a proletarian revolution, they thought, and a working-class fellow was
