Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

alan ball

support on the tenth anniversary of the revolution, Trotsky and Zinoviev were

expelled from the party altogether. Two months later, Trotsky and numerous

followers found themselves exiled to distant parts of the land, in Trotsky’s case

the Central Asian city of Alma-Ata. No longer did the party contain a Left

Opposition of any potency, and, to some observers, NEP had never appeared

more secure.

But just as Stalin had parted company in 1925 with Zinoviev and Kamenev,

he now abandoned Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii to join forces with more

recent arrivals at the party’s summit, men whose ascent owed much to Stalin’s

patronage. Among these new supporters – including Viacheslav Molotov,

Kliment Voroshilov, Sergei Kirov, Anastas Mikoyan and Lazar Kaganovich –

Stalin proceeded to embrace policies in 1928 that matched or exceeded the

militancy demanded by the Left Opposition just a year or two earlier. Thus

began the climactic stage of debate, a struggle in the party over the two policy

options recognised by the Bolsheviks throughout the 1920s. While the cham-

pions of each approach rose and fell (or switched sides) over the years, as did

the emphases placed on speciﬁc issues, the principal dispute remained recog-

nisable and reached the point of starkest contrast between the contending

options in 1928–9. The outcome would put an end to NEP.

By this time, Bukharin’s pronouncements had marked him as the most

prominent advocate of maintaining NEP for an indeﬁnite period, certain to be

measured in years. He could accept such modiﬁcations as slightly higher taxes

on the peasantry, but nothing that would threaten NEP’s original foundation –

including a peasant’s option to dispose of surplus produce at free-market prices

and the opportunity for others to engage in private trade beyond the country-

side. In general, Bukharin and colleagues of similar mind believed that NEP

should continue until the party succeeded in a number of vital tasks. First,

the state had to convince (not force) peasants to join co-operatives or other

forms of collective life. As noted previously, this might be accomplished by

establishing model co-operatives, supplying them generously with consumer

goods and equipment, and letting the peasants see for themselves that the new

organisations yielded a more bountiful life. Then it would not be difﬁcult to

persuade them to join co-operatives and collective farms, thereby enabling the

countryside to make the turn to socialism. Bukharin was conﬁdent about the

eventual triumph of large-scale, socialist practices, but this outcome would

beckon only after the state had learned to manage its own sector of the econ-

omy productively enough to supply and distribute a substantial volume of

goods to the countryside. Until then, NEP’s acceptance of traditional peasant

agriculture would have to continue.

186

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928

So, too, with the toleration of private vendors in cities. The advantages

of ‘socialist’ trade would prove decisive, Bukharin maintained, as state stores

and co-operatives supplied merchandise at the lowest possible prices–apublic

service distinct from the inclination of Nepmen to chargeasmuchasthemarket

could bear. Consumers would ﬂock to the ‘socialist sector’, and private shops

wouldwither forlackof customers. Bukharin did not relishthe Nepmen, and he

could support taxing them more heavily than co-operatives. But he rejected the

adoption of ‘administrative measures’ (such as conﬁscatory taxation, seizure

of goods and arrest) to eliminate private economic activity. Were the state to

liquidate private traders before it could replace them itself, the result would

not be socialism but ‘trade deserts’, a term used to describe locales where few

goods were available.

All of this meant that those inclined to accept NEP indeﬁnitely were also

prepared to accept a modest rate of industrial growth. In the Bolshevik mind,

rapid industrialisation required (1) a largegrain surplus (to feed a mushrooming

proletariat and export in exchange for foreign technology) and (2) investment

decisions that favoured heavy industry as much as possible. Steel mills, coal

mines, hydroelectric projects and machine shops turned out products that

could be used to produce still more factories, while light (consumer goods)

industry did not. Neither of these things – a massive grain surplus and over-

whelming investment in heavy industry – seemed compatible with the New

Economic Policy. NEP anticipated the production of a large quantity of con-

sumer goods, enough to turn state stores into successful competitors with

urban private entrepreneurs and to stock rural co-operatives sufﬁciently to

win the favour of the peasantry. Not only that, NEP took funds from the

state budget (which might otherwise have been devoted to heavy industrial

projects) in the form of payments to obtain peasants’ surplus grain. Both

of these aspects of NEP left the budget with less in the short run for heavy

industry, while failing over the years to accumulate a substantial grain reserve

for the state. To Bukharin and prominent allies like Rykov and Tomskii, none

of this seemed cause for anything more than modifying NEP. The state might

raise taxes on the kulaks, they could agree, but it should also offer peasants

higher prices for the grain they marketed. Such incentives continued to ﬁgure

in the strategies of NEP’s defenders, for they understood that the primacy of

coercion would signal the end of the path taken in 1921.

There were others in the party, however, who favoured a decisive change,

and without further delay. For some with this outlook, NEP seemed to threaten

cultural contamination from diverse sources, including nightclubs, casinos,

jazz and Hollywood ﬁlms common in the nation’s largest cities. Here, capitalist

187

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

alan ball

decadence rather than socialist fervour seemed in the ofﬁng, and a campaign

would soon erupt to generate a proletarian culture suitable for the new soci-

ety said to be close at hand. But the main thrust of NEP’s most formidable

Bolshevik opponents took place along the ‘industrial front’, where critics dis-

missed Bukharin’s course as incompatible with industrialisation at a pace nec-

essary to construct socialism and defend the nation.

Stalin’s voice could be heard most clearly in this chorus, revealing that he

had lost patience with NEP as a means to provide the state with grain to export

in substantial volume. By 1928, developments ‘on the grain front’ indicated

that he was parting company with Bukharin and other former allies. The

preceding year’s harvest had not been poor, but during the last quarter of 1927

the state acquired little more than half the grain it had received during the

corresponding period in 1926. Peasants were withholding supplies from the

market, apparently for a variety of reasons that included the insufﬁcient price

offered by the state and the scarcity of manufactured consumer goods. They

preferred to sell other crops and animal products for which prices were more

favourable, whileretaininggrain to buildup herds of livestock or in anticipation

of better prices to come. At any rate, the party faced a problem that Stalin

seized to promote stern measures more reminiscent of War Communism than

NEP. Local ofﬁcials received instructions to force peasants to ‘sell’ grain to the

state at low prices, and Stalin himself toured Siberia in January–February 1928,

ordering administrators to crack down on peasants hoarding grain. Keeping a

surplus off the market was legal under NEP, but Stalin described it as a crime

(‘speculation’), permitting authorities to conﬁscate the produce in question.

Like-minded Bolshevik leaders touredother grain-producing regions,andtheir

efforts helped net the state two-thirds more grain during the ﬁrst quarter of

1928 than in the same three months of the previous year.

Bolsheviks more devoted to the continuation of NEP were appalled by

the coercive nature of the ‘extraordinary measures’ and by Stalin’s remarks

in Siberia about pushing forward with sweeping collectivisation. Their criti-

cism prompted Stalin to beat a brief verbal retreat. He rejected talk of NEP’s

demise and condemned ‘excesses’ of over-zealous procurement ofﬁcials here

and there. At the same time, he continued to defend his approach to collecting

grain, and when shortages reappeared later in the year, he again supported

the extraction of ‘surpluses’ through forced delivery and conﬁscation. With

every month in 1928 it grew more fanciful to suppose that anyone could

quickly regain the peasants’ trust in NEP, which encouraged party members

to presume that increased pressure remained the only alternative. This was

probably Stalin’s intent all along, but the effect of the ‘extraordinary measures’

188

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928

in any case tended to steer Bolsheviks towards a conclusion that some form of

collectivisation represented the solution to their seemingly chronic difﬁculty

in amassing enough grain for the army, the proletariat and the export market.

Stalin and his new allies dismissed suggestions from Politburo colleagues

to obtain more grain by offering the peasants higher prices and additional

consumer goods. These options, consistent with NEP, would have drained

funds from heavy industry and other portions of the budget. At a Central

Committee plenum in July 1928, Stalin bluntly defended the maintenance of

prices unfavourable to peasants in order to extract ‘tribute’ to support indus-

trialisation. The government’s recent difﬁculties in collecting grain stemmed

not from misguided prices, he explained, but from class struggle spearheaded

by the kulaks, whose opposition had to be vanquished. Nor was the Stalinist

faction prepared to ‘coddle’ the Nepmen much longer. Private entrepreneurs

had no place in socialism, and if socialism was now proclaimed to be close at

hand, the Nepmen must leave the scene in short order. For this to happen in

harmony with NEP, the party would have to invest far more in the production

of consumer goods and a network of state stores (again, at the expense of

heavy industry). With such a course unacceptable to Stalin and his support-

ers, it soon became clear that ‘administrative measures’ rather than economic

competition would be the road taken to liquidate the ‘new bourgeoisie’.

Other groups, never popular with the Bolsheviks but regarded during NEP

as vital for economic recovery, now joined the Nepmen and kulaks as targets

of unsettling rhetoric. The term ‘bourgeois specialist’ – referring to non-party

engineers, economists and other technical experts employed by the state –

surfaced ominously in the press as a label for people allegedly responsible for

shortages and other economic difﬁculties that grew more common with the

onset of rapid industrialisation at the end of the decade. As early as 1928 the

Kremlin staged a trial of ﬁfty-three engineers from the coal industry, accusing

them of sabotaging the mining facilities in which they worked. These proceed-

ings, the well-publicised Shakhty trial, alarmed Bukharin and Rykov among

others, but they could not shield bourgeois specialists from what became a

series of such prosecutions continuing into the 1930s. Once the nation accel-

erated its drive to socialism, Stalin declared, bourgeois counter-revolutionary

elements would, in desperation, intensify their opposition. Let there be no

doubt, he added, that true Bolsheviks possessed the resolve to crush this

sedition.

As struggle in the party ran its course through 1928–9, Stalin’s faction tri-

umphed in part because of his superior command of the party’s apparatus.

As noted above, Stalin’s position and temperament allowed him to advance

189

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

alan ball

the careers of supporters and undermine opponents far more effectively than

did any of his chief rivals – Trotsky ﬁrst, then Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky

together, and ﬁnally Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii. By the end of the decade,

most of Stalin’s new confederates in the party leadership owed their rise largely

to him. He understood the power of patronage and exploited it tirelessly

throughout the decade.

However, Stalin’s defeat of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii did not stem

solely from administrative manoeuvring. He offered the party an alternative

that enjoyed considerable appeal among Bolsheviks – a bold end to the retreat

and concessions of NEP. The government really was failing to boost grain

exports during NEP, and, in fact, by 1927/8 they had dwindled to a meagre

level not only several times lower than in mid-NEP but a tiny fraction of the

grain exported before the First World War. While industrial production had

increased during the ﬁrst ﬁve years of NEP, it had done so largely through the

revitalisation of existing enterprisespreviously damaged or otherwise dormant

for lack of resources. Thereafter, the same rate of industrial growth, to say

nothing of an increase, would require substantially greater investment than

the Soviet regime had managed so far. The government’s experience during the

1920s offered no guarantee that this could be accomplished through reforms

within the framework of the New Economic Policy. If Western scholars have

approached unanimity in deeming a continuation of NEP preferable to the

carnage of the 1930s, Bolsheviks in 1928 had a different perspective, unburdened

by knowledge of their fate under Stalin. For many of them, NEP had failed to

hasten economic modernisation and the arrival of socialism. How long would

Lenin himself have been prepared to accept modest industrial growth, if that

were the best that NEP could offer into the 1930s?

Stalin for one had seen enough, and he readily found party members in

agreement. They invoked the ‘revolutionary-heroic’ tradition of the party,

recallingthe Lenin of the October Revolution rather than the Lenin of 1921.The

time for patient, gradual measures was over, they proclaimed. True Bolsheviks

must now complete the revolution, ﬁnishing the work begun by the party in

1917 and defended heroically by the Red Army during the civil war. ‘There

are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm’, ran a slogan that captured the

tone favoured by the new leadership. While it is impossible to establish what

percentage of party members approved the path urged by Stalin – by no means

all local ofﬁcials jumped to employ the severe grain-collection methods of 1928,

for example – there was certainly room for proﬁtable campaigning against NEP

inside a party devoted to socialism.

190

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928

As 1928 gave way to 1929, Stalin’s grip tightened. In April, Bukharin lost his

positions as editor of Pravda, the party’s ﬂagship daily, and as head of the Com-

intern, an organisation based in Moscowthatdevised strategies for Communist

Parties around the world. By the end of the year he had been expelled from

the Politburo, while new leaders embarked on a series of policies that were

completely incompatible with the party line of 1925. NEP was dead, though

no decree materialised to announce the fact, just as none had appeared in 1921

to proclaim its birth. On occasion, Soviet authors even alleged that a modiﬁed

NEP continued well into the 1930s. More often it was simply ignored, having

been shoved into an unmarked grave by an offensive that featured massive

collectivisation of agriculture and breathtaking industrialisation according to

ﬁve-year plans. Not until the nation lay on its own deathbed half a century

later, with some reformers already casting furtive glances to the capitalist West

for alternatives, would NEP be recalled in the Soviet Union as a worthy path

to socialism. In the meantime, new Stalinist policies became the centrepiece

of a different Soviet model that would be recommended to socialist aspirants

far and wide for decades to come.

191

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Stalinism, 1928–1940

david r. shearer

In the late 1920s, the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under the

leadership of its General Secretary, Joseph Stalin, launched a series of ‘socialist

offensives’, a revolution that transformed the country.Within a few short years,

the USSR bore little resemblance to the country it had been. In the 1920s, the

Soviet Union was a minor industrial power, a poor but resource-rich country,

based on a large but primitive agrarian network of small-hold peasant farms.

By the late 1930s, very few individual farms remained. The country’s agricul-

tural production had been forcibly reorganised on a massive and mechanised

scale. Most of the rural population lived on huge state-managed agrifarm com-

plexes. Through state planning and forced investment, industrial production

had doubled, then tripled and quadrupled. By the beginning of the Second

World War, the Soviet Union had become an industrial military power on the

scale of the most advanced countries. The Great Patriotic War, as the Second

World War was called, accelerated these modernising processes, and brought

about other major changes. The country, which had been nearly 80 per cent

rural in the late 1920s, was, by the early 1950s, becoming increasingly urbanised,

mobile and educated. Literacy rates had soared as the result of intensive state

spending on education. Roads, rail lines, radio and air travel connected the

previously isolated parts of the country. Cultures that had had no language

boasted their own schools, organised national institutions, written literary tra-

ditions and legal status as nations within the Soviet state. From an ethnically

dominant Russian Empire, the Soviet Union was transformed into a state of

constitutionally organised nations. By the time of Stalin’s death in March 1953,

the USSR had become an industrial, military and nuclear giant. It was one

of only two global ‘superpowers’. The Soviet Union’s power was rivalled and

checked only by the power of the United States.

This modernising revolution from above was one of the most remarkable

achievements of the twentieth century, and one of the costliest in human

lives. Stalin’s revolution was full of brutal and shocking contradictions, even

192

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Stalinism, 1928–1940

in such a brutally shocking century as the twentieth. The belief that they were

building socialism motivated party and state leaders with a sincere concern

to construct towns, build roads and schools, to introduce scientiﬁc methods

of farming, to modernise industries and to uplift culture. This same belief

allowed leaders to destroy churches, synagogues and mosques, move popula-

tions wholesale, impoverish and work the population to the point of starvation

and to imprison and shoot massive numbers of people. Soviet leaders claimed

that they were building socialism and human dignity; what they created was an

industrial-military state built, in large part, on the back of a slave labour system

unprecedented in modern history. Stalinist ofﬁcials, with few exceptions, saw

no contradiction in their motives or actions. All were part of a grand histor-

ical mission to construct a new, speciﬁcally socialist, kind of modernity. This

chapter describes the state and society that developed out of Stalin’s revolution

from above.

Industrialisation, collectivisation and class war

To Stalinist leaders, building socialism in one country meant, ﬁrst and fore-

most, modernising and expanding the country’s basic industrial sectors: iron

and steel production, mining, metallurgy and machine building, energy gen-

eration and timber extraction, and, of course, agriculture. During the 1930s,

but especially in the years of the First Five-Year Plan, 1928–32, the Soviet state

poured funds into the construction of heavy industrial projects, a ‘bacchana-

lian’ orgy of planning, spending and construction, as one economist put it.

The results were dramatic, truly heroic on a historical scale, even while enor-

mously wasteful and costly in both human and ﬁnancial terms. These years of

the Soviet industrial revolution have been made famous by the names of some

of the world’s largest construction projects. This was the era of Magnitogorsk,

a metal city of 100,000 workers and families that was raised within the span of

half a decade from the plains of central Siberia. No less dramatic was the rais-

ing of Kuznetsstroi, another metallurgical and machine-building giant. The

hydroelectric dam at Dneprostroi, started in 1928, generated its ﬁrst power in

1934. The Volga River–White Sea canal system was built almost entirely by

the killing machine of forced labour, yet it also stands as a major engineering

feat. Tractor and locomotive manufacturing plants rose or were renovated

and modernised. Military weapons, tanks, ships and aeroplane production

also increased as secret military factories were constructed.

1 Naum Jasny, Soviet Industrialization, 1928–1952 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961).

193

david r. shearer

The litany of statistics chronicling Soviet industrial achievements under

Stalin was and still is impressive. In the Russian Republic, alone, construction of

new energy sources jumped the number of kilowatt hours of energy generated

from 3.2 billion in 1928 to 31 billion in 1940. Coal production increased from

10 to 73 million tons per year, iron ore from 1 to 5

million tons, steel from 2

to 9 million tons. The Soviet Union went from an importer to an exporter of

natural gas, producing 560 million metric tons by 1932.

The drive for socialist industrialisation was impressive, but it was only one

aspect of Stalin’s revolution, one front of the socialist offensive. The second

major front of the socialist offensive was played out in the countryside in the

campaigns to collectivise agriculture. State control of the countryside was cru-

cial, according to Stalinist leaders, if the effort to construct Soviet socialism was

to succeed. It was through the international sale of agricultural surplus that

industrialisation had to be ﬁnanced and that the socialist cities were to be fed,

yet throughout the 1920s, the countryside had been purportedly in the hands

of a petty-bourgeois, anti-Soviet, private farm class. These ‘rich’ peasants, or

kulaks in Bolshevik parlance, held the revolution hostage to the whims of the

market and threatened the socialist sector by withholding grain from the state.

The grain crises of 1927 and 1928 seemed to prove this point. Although the

harvests in those years had been reasonably good, state agencies experienced

serious difﬁculties meeting their procurement quotas. Peasant producers pre-

ferred to sell to private buyers at higher prices than those offered by state

buyers, or they withheld their grain altogether from the urban markets. In any

case, the procurement crises of the late 1920s brought to a head the constraints

on state-sponsored modernisation that faced the regime. Moderates within

the party hierarchy such as Nikolai Bukharin and Mikhail Tomskii argued for

tax and pricing mechanisms to coax grain from the countryside. They warned

against any forced or repressive measures that would strain social and eco-

nomic relations with private producers at a time when the government could

ill afford such problems. They repeated Lenin’s maxim that there be no third

revolution to threaten the NEP truce between workers and peasants, town

and countryside.

Stalin and those around him took a different and increasingly militant view.

They argued that to placate the kulak class would only place the government

and its plans in greater jeopardy. Stalin argued for outright requisitioning of

grain at state prices, and he instituted such methods during personal visits

2 Iu. A. Poliakov et al., Naselenie Rossii v XX veke. Istoricheskie ocherki, vol. i: 1900–1939

(Moscow, 2000), p. 220.

194

Stalinism, 1928–1940

to the Urals and Siberia in early 1928. Moderate party leaders opposed these

policies. They were taken aback by Stalin’s ‘feudal-military’ exploitation of

peasants, and they accused Stalin of taking unilateral action against the party’s

policies of conciliation. This charge was true, but Stalin by then had won over

the majority of the members of the party’s top political bureau, the Politburo.

In February 1929, the General Secretary forced a humiliating showdown with

the moderates in the Politburo and the party’s Central Committee.

Citing claims of popular support from workers and poor peasants, and with

the backing of the party elite, Stalin launched the infamous collectivisation

drive of the First Five-Year Plan period. Mass propaganda campaigns created an

aura of legitimacy, even as Stalinist leaders mobilised local party committees,

political police, internal security forces and even military units and volunteer

gangs from urban factories. These were the shock troops that enforced the

orderto collectivise.In the course of the ensuing several years,using persuasion

and propaganda, but often outright force, the regime methodically destroyed

the system of private land tenure in the country and organised agricultural

production into large, state-administered farming administrations. Peasants

and villages were organised either into collective farms, the kolkhozy, or into

state farm administrations called sovkhozy.Kolkhozyweresupposedlyvoluntary

co-operative farm organisations, whereas sovkhozy were farms owned outright

by the state, which paid peasant farmers as hired labour, a rural proletariat.

The campaign to collectiviseagriculture was harsh, often brutal, and evoked

strong peasant resistance. Ofﬁcial versions did not deny the fact of resistance

but depicted it as part of the class struggle of rich, exploiting kulaks against

socialism. Ofﬁcial versions claimed that the vast majority of poor peasants

supported the regime and collectivisation. The judgement of most scholars,

however, is that resistance was widespread, that there existed a broad peasant

solidarity against the regime, and that collectivisation amounted to a general

war against the countryside, not just a targeted class war against the kulak class

enemy.

However one describes the collectivisation drive, it was horriﬁc in its

costs. Anyone who resisted collectivisation could be, and usually was, branded

a kulak. Police and party ofﬁcials conﬁscated the property and livestock of

these individuals, arrested them and their families and exiled them to penal

3 V. P. Danilov et al. (eds.), Tragediia sovetskoi derevni. Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie. Doku-

mentry i materialy v 5 tomakh, 1927–1939 (Moscow, 2000–3); R. W. Davies, The Socialist

Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1980); Andrea Graziosi, ‘Collectivization, Peasant Revolts, and Gov-

ernment Policies through the Reports of the Ukranian GPU’, Cahiers du Monde russe et

sovi

etique 35, 3 (1994): 437–631; Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and

the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

195