The Penguin History of Modern Russia

in accordance with the number of ‘labour days’ he or she had contributed to the farming year.

And so the kolkhoz was defined as occupying a lower level of socialist attainment than the sovkhoz. In the long run the official expectation was that all kolkhozes would be turned into sovkhozes in Soviet agriculture; but still the kolkhoz, despite its traces of private self-interest, was treated as a socialist organizational form.

In reality, most kolkhozniki, as the kolkhoz members were known, could no more make a profit in the early 1930s than fly to Mars. Rural society did not submit without a struggle and 700,000 peasants were involved in disturbances at the beginning of 1930.²⁴ But the resistance was confined to a particular village or group of villages. Fewer large revolts broke out in Russia than in areas where non-Russians were in the majority: Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, Ukraine and parts of Siberia. Yet the official authorities had advantages in their struggle against the peasants which had been lacking in 1920–22.²⁵ In the collectivization campaign from the late 1920s it was the authorities who went on the offensive, and they had greatly superior organization and fire-power. Peasants were taken by surprise and counted themselves lucky if they were still alive by the mid-1930s. Battered into submission, they could only try to make the best of things under the new order imposed by the Soviet state.

An entire way of life, too, was being pummelled out of existence. The peasant household was no longer the basic social unit recognized by the authorities. Grain quotas were imposed on the collective farm as a whole, and peasants were given their instructions as individuals rather than as members of households.

Industrial workers were fortunate by comparison. Except during the famine of 1932–3, their consumption of calories was as great as it had been under the NEP. But although conditions were better in the towns than in the countryside, they were still very hard. The quality of the diet worsened and food rationing had to be introduced in all towns and cities: average calory levels were maintained only because more bread and potatoes were eaten while consumption of meat fell by two thirds. Meanwhile wages for blue-collar jobs fell in real terms by a half in the course of the Five-Year Plan.²⁶ Of course, this is not the whole story. The men and women who had served their factory apprenticeship in the 1920s were encouraged to take evening classes and secure professional posts. Consequently many existing workers obtained material betterment through promotion. About one and a half million managers and administrators in 1930–33 had recently been elevated from manual occupations.²⁷

This was also one of the reasons why the working class endured the Five-Year Plan’s rigours without the violent resistance offered by peasant communities. Another was that most of the newcomers to industry, being mainly rural young men who filled the unskilled occupations, had neither the time nor the inclination to strike for higher wages; and the OGPU was efficient at detecting and suppressing such dissent as it arose. Go-slows, walk- outs and even occasional demonstrations took place, but these were easily contained.

Of course, Stalin and OGPU chief Yagoda left nothing to chance. The OGPU scoured its files for potential political opponents still at large. Former Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were hunted out even though their parties had barely existed since the 1922 show-trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. But whereas Lenin had trumped up charges against genuinely existing parties, Stalin invented parties out of the air. A show-trial of the imaginary ‘Industrial Party’ was staged in November 1930. The defendants were prepared for their judicial roles by an OGPU torturer; they were mainly persons who had worked for the Soviet regime but had previously been industrialists, high-ranking civil servants or prominent Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. In 1931 a trial of the fictitious ‘Union Bureau’ of the Menshevik party was organized. Trials were held in the major cities of Russia and the other Soviet republics. Newspapers were stuffed with stories of professional malefactors caught, arraigned and sentenced.

Stalin glorified the changes in the political environment by declaring that the party had ‘re-formed its own ranks in battle order’. Administrators with ‘suspect’ class origins or political opinions were sacked from their jobs. Workers were hallooed into denouncing any superiors who obstructed the implementation of the Five-Year Plan. A witch-hunt atmosphere was concocted. For Stalin used the party as a weapon to terrify all opposition to his economic policies. He needed to operate through an institution that could be trusted to maintain political fidelity, organizational solidity and ideological rectitude while the Soviet state in general was being transformed and reinforced. In the late 1920s only the party could fulfil this function.

But the party, too, needed to be made dependable. Expulsions started in May 1929, resulting in a loss of eleven per cent of the membership. A recruitment campaign began at the same time, and the party expanded its number of members from 1.3 million in 1928 to 2.2 million in 1931.²⁸ Party secretaries at the various local levels were the Politburo’s local chief executives. Republican party leaders were handpicked by the Politburo for this role; and in the RSFSR Stalin constructed a regional tier in the party’s organizational hierarchy which brought together groups of provinces under the reinforced control of a single regional committee.²⁹ Thus the Mid-Volga Regional Committee oversaw collectivization across an agricultural region the size of the entire United Kingdom. Party secretaries had been virtually the unchallengeable economic bosses in the localities since the middle of the Civil War. But there was also a large difference. In the 1920s private agriculture, commerce and industry had been widespread; under the Five-Year Plan only a few corners of non-state economic activity survived.

Yet still the central leadership could not regard the party with equanimity. The picture of over-fulfilled economic plans painted by the newspapers involved much distortion. And where there was indeed over-fulfilment, as in steel production, its quality was often too poor for use in manufacturing. Wastage occurred on a huge scale and the problem of uncoordinated production was ubiquitous. The statistics themselves were fiddled not only by a central party machine wishing to fool the world but also by local functionaries wanting to trick the central party machine. Deceit was deeply embedded in the mode of industrial and agricultural management.

It has been asserted that shoddy, unusable goods were so high a proportion of output that official claims for increases in output were typically double the reality. If the increase in output has been exaggerated, then perhaps Stalin’s forced-rate industrialization and forcible mass collectivization were not indispensable to the transformation of Russia into a military power capable of defeating Hitler in the Second World War. An extrapolation of the NEP’s economic growth rate into the 1930s even suggests that a Bukharinist leadership would have attained an equal industrial capacity. This is not the end of the debate; for as the First Five-Year Plan continued, Stalin diverted investment increasingly towards the defence sub-sector. Nearly six per cent of such capital was dedicated to the Red Army’s requirements: this was higher than the combined total for agricultural machines, tractors, cars, buses and lorries.³⁰ It was easier for Stalin to bring this about than it would have been for Bukharin who wanted peasant aspirations to be taken into account.

Yet Bukharin would have ruled a less traumatized society, and been more able to count on popular goodwill. Bukharin’s perceptiveness in foreign policy might also have helped him. Stalin’s guesses about Europe were very faulty. In the German elections of 1932 the communists were instructed to campaign mostly against the social- democrats: Hitler’s Nazis were to be ignored. There were comrades from Berlin such as Franz Neumann who questioned Stalin’s judgement. But Stalin calmly replied: ‘Don’t you think, Neumann, that if the nationalists come to power in Germany, they’ll be so completely preoccupied with the West that we’ll be able to build up socialism in peace?’³¹ Stalin’s judgement did not lack perceptiveness: he correctly anticipated that Hitler would stir up a deal of trouble for the Allies who had imposed the Treaty of Versailles — and since the end of the Great War it had been Britain and France, not Germany, which had caused greatest trouble to Soviet political leaders.

Yet when due allowance is made, his comment underestimated the profound danger of Nazism to the USSR and to Europe as a whole. It also displayed the influence of Leninist thinking. Lenin, too, had asserted that the German extreme right might serve the purpose of smashing up the post-Versailles order;³² he had also stressed that Soviet diplomacy should be based on the principle of evading entanglement in inter-capitalist wars. The playing of one capitalist power against another was an enduring feature of Soviet foreign policy.³³ This does not mean that Lenin would have been as casual as Stalin about Adolf Hitler. Yet as socialism was misbuilt in the USSR, silence was enforced by the Politburo about the risks being taken with the country’s security.

Stalin had tried to root out every possible challenge to both domestic and foreign policies. His suspicions were not without foundation. Many party and state functionaries had supported his rupture with the NEP without anticipating the exact policies and their consequences. Most of them had not bargained for famine, terror and Stalin’s growing personal dictatorship. Small groupings therefore came together to discuss alternative policies. Beso Lominadze and Sergei Syrtsov, one-time supporters of Stalin, expressed their disgruntlement to each other in