Dark Continent, page 16
Of course, only a small proportion of peasants had any sort of wealth at all, and only a tiny proportion of farms employed paid workers. “Why are you constantly yelling about kulaks?” the cadres were asked in one village. “We have no kulaks here.” Some of the poorer peasants, whom the regime tried to turn against the richer villagers, could see what was coming: “Now they are confiscating bread from the kulaks; tomorrow they will turn against the middle and poor peasant.” In the spring of 1930 they slaughtered their last cows rather than hand them over; not even the Germans eleven years later would inflict such damage on Soviet cattle stocks.18
According to Soviet figures themselves, grain harvests fell in the 1930s, a clear reflection of the disastrous impact collectivization and coercion had had on the countryside; on the other hand, state grain procurements rose steadily from 10.7 million tons in 1928 to 31.9 million in 1937, or from 14.7 per cent of the total crop to 36.7 per cent. If the figures are unreliable, the general picture is clear enough. The regime had turned its back on those other strategies for industrial development that might have required patience and cooperation with the peasantry, in favour of short-term violence: this brought in the grain it needed but at the cost of long-term damage to Soviet farming, whose consequences for the Union itself would eventually prove fateful.19
During the famine of 1932–3 with its millions of victims—a direct consequence of these policies—police kept foreigners out of the afflicted areas, and kept the victims in by reimposing an internal passport system, like the Tsarist model which Lenin had abolished. But of course many knew what was going on. “Dniepropetrovsk was overrun with starving peasants,” remembered one Party worker. “Many of them lay listless, too weak even to beg around the railway stations. Their children were little more than skeletons with swollen bellies.” He was appalled at what was happening, but his superior saw things differently. “A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime … It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We’ve won the war.”20
At first many people, inside the Party as well as outside, were bewildered by the scale of the turmoil. There were protests at the deportations, and public expressions of sympathy for the “kulaks.” Even workers betrayed “negative attitudes.” “Were Lenin alive,” one remarked, looking at his portrait, “he would have allowed free trade and eased our lot; afterwards, he would have instituted a shift towards collectivization—not by force, but by consent and persuasion.” But this outrage was overlaid by sheer panic, and growing passivity. “Earlier an arrested man was led by two militiamen,” it was reported. “Now one militiaman may lead groups of people, and the latter calmly walk and no one flees.”21
The grain procurement drives of the early 1930s became the training ground for a new generation of Party members, who became accustomed to a level of violence and repression which spread to the rest of Soviet society with the Terror a few years later. Their tendency to see a world of conspiracies, with “wreckers,” “White Russians,” terrorists and saboteurs engaged in a war against the Revolution—already visible in the war scare of 1927—was reinforced. Their strong-arm methods, after all, whipped up the kind of opposition which made such fears seem all too plausible, while official policy created problems, suffering and waste which could not be blamed on their real authors. The deportation of millions of peasants led to the rapid creation of forced-labour colonies, and to the perfection of techniques of population control that Stalin would employ against other class and ethnic minorities—Poles, Chechens, ethnic Germans among them—in the 1930s and 1940s. Last but not least, collectivization opened the way to the headlong industrialization of the first Five-Year Plan.
Forced industrialization was Stalin’s policy. He won the argument over the collectivization of agriculture, and now emphasized his desire for fast industrial growth to push Russia into the Machine Age. At stake was the Bolshevik boast to be creating a modern society. And in a hostile world, which had already tried to snuff out the Revolution at birth, the Soviet Union needed rapid industrialization to safeguard socialism. In February 1931 Stalin made a remarkable prophecy. “Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence?” he asked. “If you do not want this, you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must catch up this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we go under.” Operation Barbarossa was exactly a decade away.22
Stalin’s strategy demanded not merely ruthless control of the domestic food supply but high levels of investment in heavy industry, with consequent pressure upon urban living standards. In theory, the means was to be the Plan; but in reality, the Plan functioned chiefly as an unstable source of stimuli and goals, bearing little relation to resources, and frequently supplemented by high publicity “shock tactics” and “overfulfilment.” This is what explains the pell-mell rate of industrialization at the very time when the functioning of the state planning agencies was disrupted by deep purges, and when regional Party bosses were competing furiously for investment funds.
The striking thing is to what extent the whole frenzied and disorganized process worked. Real output often fell short of the ludicrous targets proposed in the Plan (which had anyway been wound up one year early), but this is less remarkable than the output gains that did take place. Entire new towns—Magnitogorsk, for example, the world’s largest steel plant—were built from nothing; existing metallurgical plants were pushed to their limit. Tractor factories and machine-tool industries developed rapidly to cut down the country’s import needs. All this despite the fact that so much investment was channelled into heavy industry that fuel and transport could not keep up, and generated frequent breakdowns and wastage.
In terms of creating work, the regime’s policy was an unparalleled and extraordinary success. The urban labour force increased from 11.3 million to 22.8 million between 1927–8 and 1932; by 1939 it had risen to 39 million. At the very time when capitalist Europe was deep in the slump, unemployment had been eliminated, large numbers of women were working, and the country actually suffered from a labour shortage. “It cannot be regarded as an accident,” boasted Stalin in 1934, “that the country in which Marxism has triumphed is now the only country in the world which knows no crises and no unemployment, whereas in all the other countries including the fascist countries, crisis and unemployment have been reigning for four years now.”23
Stalin’s policies were creating a new working class, drawn chiefly from the millions of peasants who flocked into the cities in these years, often to escape the new collective farms. Between 1929 and 1933, the number of foremen in industry leapt from 18,700 to 83,800—the vast majority drawn from the ranks of uneducated workers—the total number of managerial and technical personnel from 82,700 to 312,100. Here was indeed the emergence of a New Civilization, though not perhaps in the sense meant by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. A largely peasant society was being electrified, mechanized and conquered by a modernizing regime, but was also taking it over: peasants were being turned into workers, managers and Party cadres. By the end of the 1930s state, Party and economy were all being run by the beneficiaries of this social revolution.24
Of course, the supposed heroes of the Revolution quickly found that they were no freer than anyone else in the all-powerful state and Party machines. When the mostly illiterate and unskilled labourers moved from one job to another, they could be accused of “petty bourgeois spontaneity.” The imposition of labour discipline emerged as a major preoccupation of the regime, and in the face of growing food shortages, rationing and the scarcity of consumer goods, the labour unions were transformed from protectors of the workers into enforcers of labour discipline in the fight against “loafing” and “absenteeism.” The old leadership was dismissed for “right-wing deviation” and the unions were ordered to “face production.” This meant, among other things, ignoring the primitive and dangerous conditions at work.
If building socialism sounded exciting to the droves of Western intellectuals who came to watch, it was harsh and injurious in practice. Despite the worship of the Machine, Soviet industrialization was highly labour-intensive and the low level of technical expertise meant that many machines lay idle while work was done by hand: especially in the first few years, lorries and tractors mattered less than horses and wheelbarrows. But labour-intensive is an abstract term: 10 per cent of the “kulak” forced labourers sent in to construct Magnitogorsk died in the first bitter winter there. Workers building the gigantic hydroelectric power plant at Dneprostroi were little better off: “Barrack dwellers complained of snow drifting through rooms. Tent dwellers endured temperatures below -13 degrees C in the winter and tornado-strength winds whipped tents away in the summer of 1929.” And these hazards were only made worse by the introduction of “socialist emulation,” or competition spearheaded by “shock workers” and the hated Stakhanovites.25
The entire effort required heavy pressure upon private savings—through the sale of government bonds—and consumer spending. Individual wants were subordinated to the needs of the collectivity—a trend which elicited both grumbling and a feeling of selflessness. Bread rationing was imposed in 1929 and the consumption of meat and dairy products fell. Only in 1935 was there some improvement. The cities were growing all the time—the urban population doubled between 1926 and 1939—making the perennial housing shortage much worse. Living space norms per person in Moscow fell by one third between 1929 and 1931. The hunger for better housing became just one of the reasons why people entered the Party, before the Party apparatus itself was purged so ruthlessly in the mid-1930s.
But the pressures of Stalinist industrialization were not confined to cramped living quarters: the years of the first Five-Year Plan also witnessed the explosive development of the camp system. Historically, forced labour had been of crucial importance for the economic development of much of the Americas and of the Tsarist empire. Stalin carried this process further than ever before. In 1929 the OGPU’s concentration camps were renamed “labour camps” and were given an explicit economic function. Starting with the mass arrests during collectivization, and fluctuating in intensity throughout the 1930s, the security organs gained control of millions of prisoners in a complex network of prisons, “corrective labour camps,” labour colonies and special settlements: latest estimates put the total number of prisoners as rising from 2.5 million in 1933 to 3.3 million on the eve of the German invasion in 1941.26
Forced labour played a significant part in the overall industrialization drive: on the eve of the Second World War, the NKVD (OGPU’s successor) was responsible for around 25 per cent of all building work, and dominated construction work in the Urals, Siberia and the Far East; a secret-police official publicly praised his organization’s camps as “pioneers in the cultural development of our remote peripheries.” Specific commodities located in these regions—gold and other metals, timber and, later, munitions—depended on slave labour. Forced labour also helped construct the White Sea-Baltic canal, one of the regime’s propaganda triumphs of the early 1930s. Special settlers were allocated to new industrial sites like Magnitogorsk. By 1939 there were some 107,000 guards working in NKVD camps and colonies alone.27
Unlike capitalism, whose view of the world was essentially harmonious and benign, communism saw itself as embattled and beleaguered. Enemies outside had tried to stamp out the Revolution at birth; those within had tried to lead the Party astray through their factionalism and “deviations.” Coinciding with the height of repression and the onset of the Terror, Soviet industrialization took place in a conspiratorial world of “saboteurs” and “counter-revolutionary plots.” From the 1928 trial of foreign engineers onwards, technical experts, managers and Party bosses worked under the threat of arbitrary punishment: failure, personal rivalry, or even a sudden change in the leadership’s line might be enough to disgrace them. Tens of thousands of educated professionals were sent to the camps. The need to train a new generation of managers became a priority for the regime, but also an opportunity for social advancement for a younger generation. Stalinism thus meant terror and repression, but also upward mobility and exciting new life chances which compared strikingly with the relatively static and hierarchical structure of Tsarist society: between 1928 and 1933, some 770,000 Party members alone are reckoned to have moved up from the working class into white-collar and administrative jobs.28
Today it is natural to castigate Westerners like H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw or the Webbs for skating over the nastier and more brutal aspects of Stalinism, and for confusing Soviet propaganda and reality. Yet at a time when capitalism appeared to be committing suicide, Stalin’s Russia formed a striking contrast to the West—an image of energy, commitment, collective achievement and modernity—the more alluring for being so little understood. The few outspoken and knowledgeable critics, like the former Croat communist Ante Ciliga—whose book In the Land of the Great Lie appeared in 1938—found their exposés largely ignored.29
In part this credulity reflected what one historian terms “the phenomenal will to believe in utopia” which pervaded inter-war Europe. But it also reflected the West’s gradual detachment from the realities of Soviet life. Soviet contacts with the rest of Europe in the 1920s had been substantial—in technological, scientific and cultural affairs if not in finance and trade. Teams of American, German and British engineers provided technical advice, while some of Europe’s most distinguished architects and town planners, including Le Corbusier and Ernst May, competed to plan Moscow and other cities. But with the 1930s show trials—whose defendants included Western engineers and businessmen—these contacts dwindled and travel in and out of the country became more difficult. As the Soviet “economic miracle” forged ahead, Soviet realities disappeared from Europe’s view and the country closed in on itself.
It was, above all, the rise of Hitler which made it hard to evaluate Russia objectively. With Nazi Germany emerging as the main threat to democracy in Europe, much of the centre and Left in western Europe combined in a largely pro-Soviet anti-fascism: “Support of the Soviet Union at the present juncture is (as the one hope of averting war) of such overwhelming importance,” the British publisher Victor Gollancz warned the writer H. N. Brailsford in 1937, “that anything that could be quoted by the other side should not be said.” For many European intellectuals, the Soviet Union thus became a mirror, reflecting their own obsessions, their hopes and fears of what Nazism held in store.30
NATIONAL RECOVERY
Nowhere was the dazzling Soviet achievement watched with more concern than in crisis-torn central and eastern Europe. “In business and banking circles in Berlin,” reported the British ambassador in early 1931, “the chief topic of conversation has been the menace represented by the progress made by the Soviet Union in carrying out the Five-Year Plan, and the necessity of some serious effort being made by the European countries to put their house in order before Soviet economic pressure becomes too strong.”31
Britain was unable to provide the necessary leadership. Liberal capitalists talked as though living in an earlier century, and free trade—the British mantra—was an unconvincing and outdated response. Told at Geneva to cut trade barriers and allow in cheap grain from Canada and Argentina, the Yugoslav foreign minister replied bitterly that this was possible “provided they sacrificed four-fifths of their population.” The only difference, he went on, between the free-trade policy proposed by Britain and Stalin’s Five-Year Plan was “that you do not shoot the population, but starve them.”32
Quite fortuitously, though, the collapse of free trade revealed some alternative and unexpected paths out of depression that capitalist countries could follow. Economic nationalism in the 1930s turns out to have been rather more successful than historians have allowed, and many countries did better producing for themselves than they had done struggling to get back on to the gold standard and coping with international competition in the 1920s. Self-sufficiency, to be sure, had its costs. It burdened consumers with expensive home-made goods, but then by the same token it encouraged producers. So did debt standstills which liberated indebted farmers and industrialists alike and boosted domestic demand. The price producers paid for these relatively positive developments was increasing state control. With the abandonment of laissez-faire, governments suddenly found it necessary to decide where they wanted the exchange rate; they were drawn into trade policy and the allocation of foreign exchange; at home they began to plan output, to foster producers’ cartels and intervene in the development and location of new concerns. Thus quite independently of ideology, self-sufficiency altered the relationship between state and private initiative. Capitalist nations took over the idea of planning and state control from the Bolsheviks, and watered it down: the slump prompted the emergence of state-led national capitalism.
In the short term, domestic recovery and industrial growth were impressive. Protected by higher tariffs and non-convertible currencies, prices stopped falling, and employment picked up. Industries aimed at the domestic market such as textiles, chemicals and power generation all grew rapidly, while farming too recovered with the aid of state marketing boards which bought in crops at guaranteed prices. Between 1932 and 1937 industrial output soared by 67 per cent in Sweden and 48 per cent in the UK, while in gold-obsessed Poland, France and Belgium it stagnated. In Nazi Germany—helped by compulsory labour service, rigid control of wages, work creation schemes and a campaign against working women—unemployment fell from 5.6 million to 0.9 million in five years; by 1939 there was full employment.
