The Soviet leadership, after the departure in
1922 of the Japanese, the last foreign troops
on Soviet territory, was able to fashion and create
Soviet society free from outside interference. The
Allies had withdrawn. The Whites were defeated.
Bolshevik armies had established control over the
Caucasus region, central Asia and the whole of
Siberia during 1920 and 1921. With the end of
the civil war, and Russia’s own foreign war with
Poland – fighting stopped in October 1920 – not
only was Soviet revolutionary power established,
but for two decades, until Hitler’s invasion of
1941, the expected concerted capitalist attack did
not materialise. It never in fact materialised as the
Soviet Union eventually fought Germany in
alliance with capitalist Britain and the US. But the
fear that the half-hearted Allied intervention
immediately after the revolution was not the end
but the precursor of an attempt by the capitalist
world to liquidate the first communist state
powerfully influenced the Soviet Union’s foreign
relations.
To preserve Soviet power every weapon
appeared to be justifiable. Britain and the West
were to be weakened by pursuit of a vigorous
anti-imperialist policy in Asia and the Middle
East. Western communist parties, members of the
Comintern (the First Congress of the Third
International was convened by Lenin in Moscow
in March 1919) were to join the struggle for the
survival of the Soviet Union, however much such
a policy might conflict with a purely national
interest. Simultaneously, foreign relations with
the West were conducted so as to exploit divisions
between them. Arrangements for mutual military
and technical aid were developed with Weimar
Germany after the signature of the Treaty of
Rapallo in April 1922. Such a policy was combined
with the apparently contradictory support
for the German Communist Party’s attacks on the
‘social fascists’ which contributed to the fall of
Weimar and the coming to power of the Nazis.
Even when the German communists became the
first victims of Nazi violence, they held to the
doctrinal correctness of the analysis that the overthrow
of bourgeois socialists had brought the
communist revolution a step closer.
The imminent danger of foreign intervention
was thus as much an illusion of the Soviet leaders
in the 1920s as the expectation of communist revolution
spreading in the West which, as late as
1921, the Soviet leadership still believed was the
only hope of Russia’s survival. But, for anyone living
in Russia in the winter of 1920–1, there could
be no illusion about the country’s virtually total
collapse after six years of war and civil war. Then a
new disaster struck: in the summer of 1921 the
grain crop failed. Added to the millions killed in
war, countless more millions now died of starvation
and disease. This time the West ‘intervened’
in a humanitarian mission of relief. In March
1921, even before the actual famine, Lenin told
the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party: ‘We
are living in such conditions of impoverishment
and ruin that for a time everything must be subordinated
to this fundamental consideration –
at all costs to increase the quantity of goods . . .’
Principal among these goods were food and medicine.
The aid of Hoover’s American Relief
Administration was, therefore, later accepted. Yet,
all such efforts had only a limited effect in the face
of the scale of the disaster. No understanding of
the early years of Soviet rule is possible without an
appreciation of the suffering of the Russian people
amid mounting chaos such as had not
occurred in the history of Europe in modern
times. Foreign military intervention, albeit halfhearted,
contributed to the general breakdown.
Lenin, whose authority towered above that of
his frequently arguing lieutenants, heading a
Communist Party which at first was only small,
sought to establish some sort of stable basis on
which communism could be built. Between 1919
and 1922 the Bolshevik Party became a mass
movement of 700,000 members, by no means all
of whom were still revolutionary. In Lenin’s policies
there was little consistency – they were more
reactions to successive emergencies. During the
civil war the Red Army of 5 million men as well
as the workers in the cities had to be fed. The
term ‘war-communism’ is used to describe the
measures taken during the years from July 1918
to 1921, which were as extreme as was the situation
facing Lenin. A Supreme Council of
National Economy had already been created in
December 1917 to take over such industry and
finance as it considered necessary and to plan centrally
the Soviet economy. After June 1918,
industrial enterprises were rapidly nationalised
and workers and managers subjected to rigid
control. As money became virtually valueless with
the collapse of the economy, theorists saw one
advantage in the misfortune: communism might
be attained not gradually but in one leap; state
industries could now be ‘purely’ planned – the
money economy abolished and with it all private
enterprise and trade.
The key problem of the war-communist period
was how to secure food from the peasants, whose
alliance with the urban proletariat Lenin had
declared to be essential to the success of the revolution.
The value of money had been reduced to
almost nothing; the factories were not producing
goods that could be bartered. The peasants obstinately
clung to the ownership of their land and
refused to join state farms. Lenin at first
attempted to divide the peasants, the poor from
the better off – the kulaks, or exploiters, as they
were called. This no doubt succeeded in spreading
hatred in the villages but it did not yield grain.
Then he wooed the so-called ‘middle peasants’ –
the supposedly less poor (these categorisations
corresponded to policy tactics rather than realities:
only one in a hundred peasant households
employed more than one labourer). Force was
applied since the state could give nothing to the
peasants in exchange for what were defined as
‘surpluses’. With the utmost ruthlessness, detachments
were sent into the countryside to seize
food. Peasants were shot for resisting expropriation.
Villages were searched, peasants left destitute.
Bolshevik punitive expeditions attempted to
overcome peasant resistance and violence. The
excesses of war-communism were encouraged by
Lenin. The only answer he could find as the crisis
deepened in early 1920 was even more ruthless
pressure on the peasants. Those who were
accused of retaining food were condemned as
‘enemies of the people’. The civil war, above all,
and the policies of war-communism resulting
from it, led, however, to the total collapse of what
remained of the Russian agricultural and industrial
economy. Transport had broken down and
there was a large exodus from the starving towns
and idle factories back to the country.
During his years of power, Lenin never
wavered from his insistence on the supreme
authority of the party and centralised control. No
sectional interest of workers or peasants organised
in the form of trade unions should act as a counterpoise
to the party. Power was to be retained by
the centre with iron discipline. In this he was
strongly supported by Trotsky, who wished to
rebuild Russia by mobilising the people under
military discipline. Under the harsh realities of the
civil war and its aftermath Lenin had given up
his earlier views that once the revolution had succeeded
the state would begin to wither away and
socialism would evolve by the spontaneous enthusiasm
and work of the masses. He convinced
himself that it was necessary to replace the revolution
with a one-party state. But as he conceived
it there was flexibility; especially after 1921 ‘nonparty’
specialists were encouraged. The bureaucracy
was an inevitable outcome of the centralised
state, though it deeply worried Lenin during the
last months of his life. He began to alter course
in 1921–2 and simultaneously government employees
were drastically reduced. It was also
Lenin who urged the use of force and terror
where other means failed to achieve the desired
ends. However much he criticised the consequences
of the direction of state policy, the foundations
of the Soviet state had been laid by Lenin.
While it is true that Lenin permitted debate
within and outside the higher echelon of the party
as in newspapers, men of the old guard, such as
Lev Kamenev, Grigori Zinoviev, Aleksei Rykov,
Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky, who differed
on the right policies to be followed, ultimately
had to obey the party line once Lenin had reached
a decision. On the issue whether there could be
any but a one-party state no debate was possible.
The Tenth Party Congress, held in March 1921,
passed the resolution ‘On Party Unity’, which
though it did not stifle all debate and criticism
forbade the formation within the party of any
political groups ‘with separate platforms, striving
to a certain degree to segregate and create their
own group discipline’ and then to publish views
not authorised by the party. The infamous
Paragraph Seven of this resolution empowered
the Central Committee by two-thirds majority to
expel from the party members of the Central
Committee who diverged, and so to banish them
into political exile. The weapon for stifling any
dissident view not favouring the leader or group
of leaders in power had been forged. Stalin later
made full use of it to eliminate anyone he chose
to accuse of factionalism.
In March 1921, simultaneously with the resolution
on party unity, came the about-turn of
Lenin’s policy – the inauguration of the slogan
New Economic Policy (NEP), coined to cover the
dramatic reversal. The conviction that everincreasing
ruthlessness, especially in extracting
food from the peasantry, was threatening the
whole country’s coherence must have been taking
shape for some time. It was a mutiny of the sailors
in the fortress of Kronstadt early in March 1921,
bloodily repressed, which Lenin claimed ‘was the
flash which lit up reality better than anything
else’. But the decision had already been taken by
him following peasant riots and workers’ strikes
in the previous months.
The NEP began when the Tenth Party Congress
passed a resolution replacing the seizure of
surplus food with a less onerous and a properly
regulated ‘tax in kind’. Any further surplus the
peasant could market freely. Three years later in
1924 the tax in kind became a money payment.
Free trading and, with it, a money economy
revived. Small-scale production by not more than
twenty workers was allowed once again. Large
industries continued under state ownership with
few exceptions. The vast majority of production
was by state enterprises or by individual artisans.
Between 1921 and 1926, the mixed industrial
economy, part private part state, recovered so
that by 1926 the level of production of 1913 had
been reached. In agriculture, individual peasants
farmed more than 98 per cent of the land sown.
Agriculture recovered from the low levels of 1921
and 1922, but the amount left over from peasant
consumption was less than in 1913; yet the need
for grain to feed the expanding urban population
and for export to provide capital grew much
faster than the traditional peasant agriculture supplied.
Nor were the peasants imbued with enthusiasm
for socialism despite attempts to arouse a
sense of common solidarity against the better-off
peasants, the kulaks. A peasant farming his land
traditionally, and encouraged to improve his standard
of living by having stimulated in him a desire
for profit, was not likely to accept the ideals of
communism. The more successful a peasant, the
less socialist he became. NEP on the land helped
to save Russia from starvation, but did not
provide the surplus to allow the economy to
advance rapidly.
A complementary element of the more liberal
economic approach of NEP in the 1920s was the
tightening of party discipline and centralism.
Cultural concessions, for instance, were made to
the non-Russian nationalities, but not at the
expense of centralised party and military control.
The Tenth Party Congress of March 1921, which
saw the beginnings of NEP, also, as has been
noted, passed the resolutions against factions
within the party. The swollen Communist Party
itself was purged of some 200,000 members considered
unreliable to the Bolshevik ideals. Lenin
warned that the revolutionary old guard must
hold together through all the transitional phases
of communism, even those like NEP which
marked a retreat from socialist objectives. How
temporary would the retreat have to be? That was
a fundamental and contentious issue. As long as
Lenin remained the indisputable leader, however
much debate and individual criticism took place
within the party, great changes of policy were still
possible without destroying the cohesion of the
party or without producing a savage fight, literally
to the death, between Lenin’s lieutenants.
Lenin’s own premature death so early in the formation
of the state was therefore of enormous
significance.
The struggles of the revolution and war had
sapped Lenin’s strength. Towards the end of
1921 he fell seriously ill. In May 1922 at the age
of fifty-two he suffered a serious stroke which
paralysed his right side. By October he had recovered
sufficiently to resume a partial workload. In
December 1922 his health again deteriorated and
on 21 January 1924 he died. Of particular interest
during his last weeks of active work from the
end of 1922 to 4 January 1923 are the notes he
dictated which together comprise what was called
his ‘testament’. In these memoranda he stressed
the need to strengthen the unity of the Central
Party Committee, and characterised the strengths
and weaknesses of six leading members of the
party. The characterisation of Stalin, ‘who having
become the General Secretary has accumulated
enormous power in his hands and I am not sure
whether he will be able to use this power with
due care’, was especially important in view of the
question who should succeed Lenin. During his
illness he was outraged by Stalin’s attempt to cut
him off from influence in January 1923, a year
before his death. He urged Stalin’s dismissal and
replacement by a new general secretary ‘more tolerant,
more loyal and less capricious’. It was too
late. Lenin was too ill to act as unquestioned
leader any longer. He had also criticised Trotsky,
though describing him as the other leading personality
of the party, for ‘his too far-reaching selfconfidence’
and as too much attracted to pure
administration. What was the purpose of this
critical testament? Lenin was preoccupied by what
would happen after his death. He concluded that
no single one of the Bolshevik leadership could
be designated as his successor. By his frank criticisms
of all his lieutenants he was arguing for his
own solution to the succession. This was to
increase the Central Committee to fifty, even a
hundred persons, by adding industrial workers
and peasants close to the feeling of the rank and
file of the party and for this body to control and
supervise the collective leadership.
Following Lenin’s death no stable collective leadership
took over. Stalin, who had been appointed
general secretary with Lenin’s support in 1922 to
bring order to the organisation of the party, transformed
this important but secondary position
into a vehicle for the advancement of his personal
power. His work for the party before this elevation
had shown him to be ruthless and a good
organiser. To these qualities he added cunning
and a sense of timing in political intrigue. Using
his powers to the full, he promoted to key posts
men who would follow him, and strengthened his
position further by removing others who supported
rivals. Among the old guard, Trotsky was
widely disliked for his arrogance, intellectual brilliance
and showmanship. Stalin aligned himself
with Zinoviev to undermine Trotsky’s influence.
In a little more than five years, he had ousted all
the prominent former leadership. But he was not
Lenin’s undisputed heir; nor did he enjoy the
veneration granted to the late leader. Stalin
encouraged a Lenin cult. He then kept himself at
the top by the ruthless liquidation of all real and
potential rivals who might conceivably challenge
his control. Not until the end of the Great Terror
in 1938 did any challenge to Stalin’s supreme
control become unthinkable. Yet his paranoid fear
of plots and conspiracies beset him to the end of
his life.
Lenin tolerated party discussion; Stalin could
not stifle it in the 1920s as the better-known,
more prominent Soviet leaders still overshadowed
him. He supported a moderate internal economic
policy, upheld NEP and identified himself with
Lenin’s policies after the latter’s death. Appealing
to party unity, while packing key positions with
his supporters, Stalin was ready to take on the
most prestigious of the old Bolshevik leaders. The
big quarrel with Trotsky occurred at the end of
1923 and early 1924 after Trotsky’s attacks on
the old guard. Trotsky was effectively defeated
at the Thirteenth Party Congress in January
1924. Together with Zinoviev, president of the
Comintern, whose power base was the Leningrad
party, and Kamenev, chairman of the Moscow
Soviet, Stalin had already made himself the
leading member of the triumvirate controlling the
party, the key to controlling the country. Trotsky
had published a book, Lessons of October, in which
he bitterly attacked the credentials of Zinoviev
and Kamenev, who had been ‘Right’ Bolsheviks
opposed to the October Revolution in 1917.
In his denunciation Trotsky implied that such
shortcomings were responsible for the failure of
revolution beyond the Soviet Union, for instance
in Germany. The triumvirate countered by stressing
the longstanding quarrel between Trotsky
and Lenin about ‘permanent’ revolution, which
Trotsky had fervently advocated; and Stalin enunciated
the slogan ‘socialism in one country’. Stalin
declared more realistically that the Soviet Union
had survived and claimed that the conditions
existed in Russia for the complete construction of
socialism; this he saw as the primary task. The
policies of communists in other countries, too,
were therefore expected in practice to make this
their primary objective, subordinating national
considerations to the strengthening of the Soviet
Union.
Trotsky and Stalin were not so far apart as their
polemics made it appear. At moments of great
danger, such as the Soviet leaders believed existed
in 1927 and 1928, Trotsky was just as ready as
Stalin to place the safety of the Soviet Union first.
In this respect they were both heirs of Lenin’s
Realpolitik. In the power struggle in the top
echelon of the party, Stalin calculated that a moderate
line would be the most successful, while
Trotsky assumed the mantle of the ardent,
unquenchable revolutionary and the champion of
‘democracy’ within the party. The genuineness of
Trotsky’s democratic sentiments was never tested,
for he never wielded supreme power. He was certainly
no less ruthless than Stalin in his readiness
to subordinate means to an end. But Stalin’s
control of the party machine secured Trotsky’s
gradual elimination. In January 1925 Trotsky lost
the argument of his Lessons of October and the
Central Committee deprived him of his nominal
leadership of the Red Army.
Stalin now pushed from key control two other
members of the Politburo, his fellow triumvirates,
Kamenev and Zinoviev. Instead he allied
with those who fully backed the NEP, Nikolai
Bukharin, a longstanding companion of Lenin and
editor of Pravda, and two other Politburo members,
Aleksei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky. But
Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev still retained their
places on the Politburo, at least until 1926. That
year the three men, calling themselves the United
Opposition, mounted attacks on Comrade Stalin’s
capacity to unite the party and on the economic
state of the country and bureaucracy. Stalin
expelled all three from the Politburo and purged
their supporters. Trotsky’s further attacks on
Stalin, and the organisation of an open demonstration
against the leadership in November 1927
led to his and Zinoviev’s and many of their
followers’ exclusion from the party in December
1927. A year later Trotsky was expelled from
Russia.
Two years later it was the turn of the ‘right’
opposition. Bukharin lost control of the Comintern
at the end of 1928, and in 1929 and 1930
Tomsky and Rykov were replaced. All eventually
died violently, victims of Stalin’s purges of the
mid-1930s. But it is simplistic to reduce the
struggles at the centre of power to Stalin’s completely
cynical manoeuvrings to reach the top.
Three deep concerns formed just a part of the
immense nexus of problems associated with ‘communism
in transition’: transforming a predominantly
peasant society into an industrial power
capable of catching up with the capitalist West,
while keeping the goal of a communist society in
view; at the same time the leadership was anxiously
scanning the international horizon for an
impending attack by the capitalist nations; just as
disastrous was the possibility that their own imperialist
rivalry would start a second world war
involving Russia in the maelstrom. Any one
problem was, in itself, gigantic; together they
were truly baffling. And there were no models to
follow. Marxism was based on revolution in an
advanced industrial nation, not an overwhelmingly
peasant society. Lenin, when confronted
with practical problems, had made bewildering
changes of policy, justifying each with fresh doctrinal
pronouncements. The mark of the dominant
leader was his capacity radically to change
policy and retain power. After Lenin, only Stalin
as it turned out could do that. But this does not
mean that he changed policy merely for the sake
of discrediting his rivals or that he had plotted in
advance first a policy to the ‘right’ and then to
the ‘left’.
Stalin’s own uncertainty about his ability to
hold on to supreme power in the face of the policies
he felt it necessary to pursue is, indeed, the
basic explanation of his murderous purges of the
1930s. He linked the survival of the communist
regime with his own survival as undisputed leader.
He wanted to be regarded as infallible; for proof
he presented an unending stream of wrongdoers
who, in public trials, confessed their errors and
were shot. Their confessions to foreign conspiracies
were intended to underline the mortal
dangers to which the Soviet Union was exposed,
but saved from by Stalin’s vigilance. At the same
time an understanding of Soviet policies is not
possible without the assumption that there were
deep and genuine problems, that more than one
plausible option of action presented itself; and
even granted that Stalin never lost sight of his
tenure of power and would stop at nothing to
maintain it, he was also concerned to discover the
right policy to follow.
Stalin had reached the leadership group
through Lenin’s own selection and Lenin had an
eye for remarkable men to act as the founding
members of the new state. Unlike Lenin and the
rest of the Bolshevik leadership, Stalin spent the
years of preparation not in comfortable and
argumentative exile, but in Russia, in constant
danger and engaged in organising the party when
not in tsarist prison or Siberian exile. In Stalin,
the cobbler’s son born in Georgia in December
1879, Lenin saw a hardened, totally dedicated
revolutionary leader, painstaking, and an effective
organiser. Stalin showed a total disregard for
‘conventions’ of the law and civil rights when they
impeded what he deemed necessary. As a young
revolutionary in tsarist days he was lawless in a
cause; in power he became lawless without
restraint, filling the prisons, the places of execution
and the labour camps in the 1930s and later
with millions of people innocent of any crime
except to arouse Stalin’s suspicions. The apparently
benign, modest and down-to-earth leader –
it was easy for the Stalin cult to portray him as
the father of his people just as the tsars before him
had been – had turned into a monstrous tyrant.
Stalin was a consummate actor who could hide his
true nature and, if he chose, charm those who had
dealings with him, just as he was to charm
Churchill and Roosevelt when the three leaders
met during the Second World War. He was
capable of carefully weighing alternatives, of calculating
the risks and proceeding rationally,
of outwitting his enemies at home and abroad.
Secretive, suspicious, malevolent and lacking
Lenin’s intellect, he made himself into Lenin’s
heir and saw himself as such. His crimes were
immense. His mistakes brought the whole country
close to catastrophe in 1930 and in 1941, yet both
he and the Soviet Union survived. During the
Stalin era, there occurred the decisive shift that
was to propel the Soviet Union from being a backward
country to a state capable of grinding down
and, during the latter part of the Second World
War, overwhelming Germany. He achieved the
industrial and military transformation of Russia,
the creation of tens of thousands of technically
proficient men, of administrators and doctors
from a backward peasant society. The other
legacy: millions of dead, victims of collectivisation,
deportation and the Gulags.
That the New Economic Policy had to be a
‘transitional’ phase in the construction of communism
was obvious, unless communism itself
was to abandon its Marxist goals. NEP had
brought about an amazing recovery but was it
capable of continuing at its previous pace of
growth, after the first five years, given the low
base from which it had started? Would the Soviet
Union not merely catch up with tsarist pre-war
production but decisively move beyond it? Then
how could NEP enable the Soviet Union to
acquire the sinews of the modern industrial state
with an iron and steel industry, machinery and
armaments, improved transportation and adequate
power? A vast network of electric power
stations was one of Lenin’s pet dreams. With a
‘mixed’ economy would too many resources be
swallowed up in providing the consumer with
their needs rather than investing for the future?
Had the essentially tsarist agricultural methods
reached the limit of their productive capacity? On
purely economic grounds, leaving aside ideological
considerations, there were powerful arguments
for a change of policy at the point when NEP
failed to provide for the economic growth desired
by the Bolshevik leadership.
During the winter of 1927 and 1928 the peasants
reacted to increased taxes, low official prices,
threats against the offence of hoarding and simply
a lack of goods to buy by hanging on to their
grain. Industrial investment had already speeded
up industrialisation, the ‘selfishness’ and ‘pettybourgeois’
behaviour of the kulaks, in Stalin’s
judgement, threatened the whole economy.
Violence against the peasant to extract the grain
needed to feed the towns was again resorted to
in ‘emergency’ measures. The peasantry from rich
to poor were hard hit in 1928 and alienated from
the Soviet regime, though it was obviously the
kulaks and better-off peasants who had most grain
and so suffered the most. After the summer of
1928 Stalin faced the prospect of annual crises to
purchase sufficient grain unless some fundamental
changes were effected in dealing with the peasantry
and agricultural productivity. Stalin had
little love for the Russian peasantry, which he
believed was holding the country to ransom.
Industrial expansion was jeopardised by the
crisis in agriculture. If the peasantry were to be
appeased, more goods would need to be released
for their consumption. This was in contradiction
to a policy of catching up rapidly with the
advanced capitalist countries. No Soviet leader
ever lost sight of Russia’s comparative weakness,
which was believed to offer a temptation to the
capitalist nations to attack it. The more relaxed
attitudes of the mid-1920s, which also affected
foreign policy – the slogan here used to describe
Soviet aims was ‘peaceful coexistence’ – came to
an end in 1927 and 1928. The Soviet leadership
was beset by acute new fears that some concerted
onslaught on the Soviet Union was imminent.
The Soviet policy in China of supporting the
nationalist revolution of Chiang Kai-shek had collapsed
when Chiang turned on his former communist
partners. Relations with Britain had
deteriorated, and Britain, France and Poland were
credited with plans to launch an offensive against
the Soviet Union. There was a sense that the
breathing space in Europe and the Far East could
be short. The worldwide depression added a new
element of uncertainty.
We have little indication of Stalin’s thinking
during this or any other period. One can plausibly
surmise that in 1928 and 1929 he was still much
concerned with rivals and criticisms of his policies
and economic developments, which were certainly
not going well. The problem of the change of
course of the economic and social policies of the
Soviet state has been debated by historians and we
may never be able to fathom what perceptions
and plans were Stalin’s at any precise moment.
Certainly a vociferous group of his supporters was
calling for rapid industrialisation and Stalin leant
on them in his struggle with opponents of the policy.
At what point in particular did he regard NEP
as an obstacle to be cleared away if the pace of
Russian industrialisation and its direction were to
conform to his own objectives? If industrialisation
were to be pushed ahead rapidly, the necessary
investment would not significantly come from foreign
loans, or even significantly from exports of
grain, but from the higher productivity of workers
and peasants and a holding back of consumption
by them. In plain English, the industrial advance
was achieved at the sacrifice of their own living
standards, the work being rewarded with only low
real wages. Long-term state planning by the State
Planning Commission was certainly well under
way and resources were increasingly transferred
to large-scale industrial projects. By 1926 the
increasing shortages of goods led to multi-pricing
of the same goods in ‘commercial’ shops or at artificially
low prices but strictly rationed. Despite
rises in wages the actual cost of living rose much
more steeply. By 1933 living standards had
declined precipitously. While there was none of
the unemployment that plagued Western economies
at the time, the great industrial leap forward
was accompanied by mass misery and hunger.
A ‘maximum’ version of the First Five-Year
Plan was adopted by the Sixteenth Party Congress
in 1929. Industrial output was intended to
increase more than twofold and agricultural
output to rise by half. The industrial growth actually
achieved fell far short of such unrealisable
targets. In trying to fulfil them there was huge
waste and confusion. Coercion and regulation
were necessary means to drive industrialisation
forward especially in the primitive regions of
Russia, the Urals and Siberia, where for military
strategic reasons new industrial complexes were
set up. The emphasis was on heavy industry, iron
and steel, and machinery. The First Five-Year
Plan, declared to be fulfilled a year in advance,
actually fell short of its target in most industrial
sections. But great iron and steel works were
being constructed, the gigantic Dnieper dam was
built and the engineering industry greatly
expanded. The basis of a modern industry had
been constructed.
The Second Five-Year Plan (1933–7) brought
improvements for the Russian people. The economic
sacrifices demanded of the people were not
as harsh and there was greater emphasis on producing
goods for consumption. Planning became
more efficient and a greater self-sufficiency was
achieved. After 1937 the massive switch to arms
production once more created new bottlenecks
and shortages. Control over the labour force
became much harsher. Workers were tied in 1940
to their place of work and absenteeism became a
crime. Industrially the Soviet Union, in a decade
and a half, had been transformed and proved
strong enough to withstand the shock of the
German invasion. Statistics should always be considered
with caution and this is especially true of
Soviet statistics. But the figures shown in the table
indicate and reflect the change of Soviet Russia’s
industry. Whether Soviet statistics are to be relied
on is an open question.
The results were in any case impressive, the
human cost equally enormous. Enthusiasm for
building socialism was replaced by terror and
coercion. Ideals of socialist equality did not
inhibit Stalin from decreeing differential rewards.
With much stick, and the carrot of high rewards
for successful skilled piecework, he drove the
mass of new peasant workers in industry to pull
Russia out of the morass. Socialism could not be
built in a society predominantly peasant and backward,
Stalin believed. Nor could a backward
Soviet Union survive, surrounded as it was by
enemies. But the arbitrary murderous excesses of
Stalin’s rule in the 1930s bear no relation to the
achievement of such goals. On the contrary, they
gravely jeopardised progress. In dealing with the
peasantry and agriculture his policies led to disaster.
Here, the ‘revolution from above’ not only
inflicted enormous hardship on the majority of
the population, the peasantry, but also failed in
its purpose to ‘modernise’ agriculture on a scale
similar to industry.
Stalin’s cure for Russia’s backward agriculture
was to transform the small, scattered peasant
holdings into large farms, collectively and cooperatively
farmed. In theory this was sound. In
practice, productivity slumped when the individual
peasant’s personal ownership of his lands and
his livestock was abolished. The peasants did not
voluntarily give up their land and join collective
farms. By 1928 less than three acres in a hundred
of sown land were cultivated by collective or state
farms. At the beginning of that year Stalin organised
from his own secretariat the forcible seizure
of grain as the peasants were unwilling to part
with it for the artificially low prices laid down. It
was a return to the methods of war-communism.
Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, once Stalin’s allies
against the Trotsky ‘left’, as has been seen,
attacked Stalin from May 1928 onwards when
they realised he intended to continue the emergency
measures. Bukharin, in particular, condemned
Stalin’s dictatorial pretensions, declaring:
‘We stand by the principle of collective action and
refuse to accept the principle of control by a
single individual, no matter how great his authority.’
Stalin countered by savagely attacking
Bukharin as a right-wing deviationist. Between
February and July 1929 the political standing of
the three leaders was progressively undermined
and the expulsion from the Politburo of Tomsky
and Bukharin in November 1929 marked the
elimination of their opposition to Stalin’s industrial
and agricultural plans. (Rykov retained his
membership of the Politburo until 1930.)
From the summer of 1929 Stalin issued party
directives to secure more grain for state purchase
at low prices. The kulaks were singled out as the
most prosperous and therefore pressure on them
would, it was thought, yield a good return. Not
only their grain but their farms too began to be
seized. NEP was breaking up. On 7 November
1929 Stalin signalled the drive for forcible collectivisation
at the greatest possible speed. He
characteristically declared that the middle peasants
as well as the poor peasants had turned to
the collective farms. The continuing crisis caused
by the difficulty of getting grain was a crucial
reason for the sudden urgency, but behind
Stalin’s assault also lay a long-felt suspicion of
peasants as reliable allies of the urban proletariat.
Between the Bolsheviks and the peasants there
was a large gap. The notion of petty-peasant proprietorship
simply did not fit into the communist
model of the future classless society. Stalin saw
even the poorest peasant defending his possession
of land and animals as exhibiting the characteristics
of the ‘petty-capitalist class’. As long as the
landed peasant persisted in Russian society, Stalin
believed, a communist state would never be built.
He may have calculated that by ruining the more
prosperous peasants, the kulaks, by defining them
as a class to be destroyed, all the peasants would
be taught the lesson that successful private enterprise
held no future for them. Certainly, party
leaders believed that they could stir up class war
between the poor peasant and the kulak and so
gain some peasant support. ‘Kulak’ was, moreover,
an entirely elastic definition and could be
extended to any peasant; those too obviously poor
could simply be labelled as kulak sympathisers.
Under the cover of the supposed kulak enemy,
land could be seized, peasants expelled and sent by
cattle trucks to Siberia, and the whole peasantry
could be terrorised. Without forcible measures to
overcome the agricultural crisis, Stalin believed,
the acceleration of industrialisation would fail, and
one of his close supporters improbably claimed
that all industrial growth would come to a
standstill halfway through the Five-Year Plan if
industrialisation was not accelerated.
Plans for the acceleration of industrial production
went hand in hand with plans for the acceleration
of collectivisation of the peasant farms.
From the summer of 1929 onwards the peasants
were being pressurised by party representatives in
the villages to join the collective farms. The peasants
reacted with suspicion or outright hostility.
By October 1929 collectives were farming almost
one acre in eleven of sown land. Meanwhile,
forcible procurement of grain by party task forces
over the whole country was securing results. In
the autumn of 1929 Stalin, supported by
Molotov and Kaganovich, determined to break all
resistance to a great leap forward and to the mass
discontent that coercion in the procurement of
grain was producing.
It was in part wishful thinking and in part a
command that collectivisation was to be quickly
achieved regardless of what resistance remained.
In December 1929 mass ‘dekulakisation’ began.
Stalin decreed their ‘elimination as a class’.
Elimination of the individual peasant defined as
kulak did not yet mean death, except in the case
of those categorised as the most active counterrevolutionaries,
but meant the confiscation of his
property and imprisonment or the deportation of
the whole family to Siberia, where with a few
tools they began to farm again. Some kulaks were
allowed to remain in their locality and were integrated
into the collective system. The whole programme
was carried through with the utmost
violence and barbarity; 6 million peasants were
the victims. Many perished through deprivation
or suicide. The miseries of the depression do not
compare with the human disaster that unfolded
in Stalin’s Russia.
The result in the countryside was chaos. More
than half the peasant farmers had been collectivised
by the spring of 1930. As the time
for spring sowing approached, reports from the
countryside came back to Moscow that the forcible
collectivisation was preparing the way for
an unparalleled disaster. There was much peasant
resistance, including uprisings. The new collectives
were unlikely to produce a fraction of the
food produced by the individual peasants before
collectivisation. Stalin, faced with disastrous
failure, compromised. In the face of so great a
failure, his own standing could be jeopardised. He
published an article, ‘Dizzy with Success’. Local
party workers were blamed for the excesses; coercion
was wrong; those peasants who wished to
leave the collective farms could do so. But instead
of the expected few there was a mass exodus;
more than half the peasants left the collectives
and took back some of their land to farm. The
collective farmers retained the best land.
To counter this unexpected turn of events,
Stalin in the summer of 1930 ordered a resumption
of forcible collectivisation. There was no letup
this time. By 1935, 94 per cent of the crop
area of land was collectivised. The results in productivity
were appalling. The peasants slaughtered
their animals; the collectives were inefficient; the
yield of crops dropped and party purges and coercion
could not relieve the food shortages. The
conditions of the early 1930s revived the experiences
of the early 1920s. There were widespread
famines and millions perished. The situation
would have been even worse if Stalin had not
learnt one lesson from the winter of 1929–30 and
the widespread peasant violence and resistance to
collectivisation. The collectivised peasants were
permitted small plots and to own a few animals
from 1930 onwards. After 1932 they were even
allowed to sell food privately over and above the
quota to be delivered to the state at state prices.
The private peasant plot became an important
element in the supply of milk and meat. Agriculture
recovered slowly from the onslaught, but
there was no leap forward as occurred in the
industrial sector. The pre-1928 levels were only
just attained again, though the population had
grown in the meantime. Economically Stalin’s
collectivisation did not solve Russia’s need for
growth of agricultural production before the
German invasion in 1941 dealt a devastating
blow. Even Stalin had to compromise with the
peasantry in allowing some private production
and sale, or face the prospect of permanent
conditions of famine.
The enormous tensions created by Stalin’s
industrial and agricultural policies from 1929 to
1934 were accompanied by a policy of terrorisation
to thwart any possible opposition. Propaganda
sought to raise Stalin to the public status of a demigod,
the arbiter of every activity of society – art, literature,
music, education, Marxist philosophy.
Terror tactics were not new under Soviet rule.
Show trials, which turned those who were constructing
the new Russia into scapegoats for failures,
had begun in 1928. It appears that Stalin’s
power was not absolute between 1928 and 1934
and that the failures, especially in agriculture, were
weakening his position. Perhaps a straw in the
wind was the curious fact that the Seventeenth
Party Congress early in 1934 changed his title
from that of ‘general secretary’ to just ‘secretary’
of the party. Was this a rebuke against his attempt
to gather all power in his hands? Was the leader of
the Leningrad party, Sergei Kirov, who was also a
member of the Politburo and hitherto a Stalin supporter,
among those who attempted to clip Stalin’s
wings? That December 1934 Kirov was murdered,
Stalin was implicated. That he acted as pallbearer at
Kirov’s funeral is no evidence to the contrary. The
first mass terror-wave of arrests and executions followed.
Then there was a pause, just as there had
been with collectivisation. Stalin in 1936 even promulgated
a constitution guaranteeing every conceivable
human and civic right! It was no more
than a façade that misled only the most gullible.
Then the arrests and executions were resumed.
The years from 1936 to 1938 are known as the
Great Terror. At the end, Stalin emerged as the
undisputed dictator whom none could resist.
Stalin turned on the elite of communist society,
the party functionaries, the army officers from the
junior to the commander-in-chief, the technocrats
and managers. The world learnt only a little from
the show trials of the prominent leaders, the
‘fathers’ of the revolution, who were now paraded
to confess publicly their sins, confessions secured
beforehand by torture and threats. Not only they,
but also their wives and associates, were murdered.
Nothing like this had ever occurred before. Stalin
acted with cold and ruthless calculation. The victims
of these purges have never been counted.
Dekulakisation, the famine and the purges claimed
millions of victims. No one was safe. Death, exile
or incarceration in the huge complex of labour
camps, the Gulag, was the fate of anyone who fell
under suspicion. The Gulags were not like the later
Nazi extermination camps but unbelievably brutal,
the guards sadistic. Lenin had started them to
break the spirit of the ‘enemies of the people’.
Stalin expanded the system of forced labour and
torture, inefficient even in extracting work.
Khrushchev admitted to the state abuse in his celebrated
1956 speech. By then more than 18 million
had been herded into these camps and, 15
million survived – 3 million, largely innocents, lost
their lives, families were destroyed, children
orphaned. The brutal reality of Soviet rule was
denied by armchair communists in the West and
admirers of Stalin, until the truth had to be faced
well after the end of the Second World War. The
material loss to Russia of skilled people was incalculable.
The grip of the secret police under the
hated Beria was not loosened until after Stalin’s
death. There were thousands willing to do Stalin’s
bidding and commit all these crimes. He justified
them by claiming there were conspiracies with outside
Western powers, with Japan, Germany, Britain
and France, to sabotage and attack the Soviet
Union. Did he believe it? Stalin thought it
theoretically possible and that was enough.
Stalin had little experience of foreign travel.
Behind his notion of Russia’s correct foreign policy
two assumptions or principles can be discerned:
Russia’s defence in a hostile capitalist world must
come first at all costs; second, the behaviour of
other powers could be deduced by a Leninist
analysis. Not only were these powers motivated by
a joint hostility to the only communist state, but
they were also locked in an imperial struggle for
supremacy among themselves. Thus Soviet theoreticians,
including Stalin in the 1920s, believed in
the likelihood of war between Britain and the US.
Later, in the early 1930s, Stalin hoped that rivalry
in eastern Asia would lead the US to check
Japanese expansion in China. But Soviet hopes
were disappointed by American non-intervention
during the Manchurian crisis of 1931–3.
The Soviet view of the West was grotesquely
distorted. The Western social democrats were cast
in the role of ‘right deviationists’ or ‘social fascists’
from 1929 to 1934, more dangerous than
the real fascists. The Nazis were seen as a shortlived
right-wing excess against which the workers
would soon react. There was a lingering fear
of Poland and its ally, capitalist France, and of
‘hostile’ Britain. Thus, from the West as well
as from Asia, the Soviet Union appeared to be
in continuing and great danger.
From 1934 to 1938 there was some readjustment
of Soviet policy and a rapprochement with
the Western democracies. The Soviet Union was
recognised finally by the US when Roosevelt
agreed to establish diplomatic relations in 1933.
In 1934 the Soviet Union joined the League of
Nations, and the Commissar for Foreign Affairs,
Maxim Litvinov, now preached the need for collective
security against Hitler’s Germany and
Mussolini’s Italian expansionist policies. The genuine
search for peace did not mean, however, that
the Soviet Union was ready to go to war in alliance
with the Western democracies against Germany.
Rather, the Russians wanted to avoid a war breaking
out altogether, and believed a firm stand
would deter Hitler and Mussolini. If it did not, as
it did not in September 1939, the Soviet leaders
were determined to avoid being involved in war
themselves. If there had to be a war – a situation
full of danger for Russia – then at least it should be
confined to a war between the Western powers. As
long as Nazi Germany could be prevented from
turning first on Russia, then the Soviet Union
would remain neutral and appease Germany to
any extent necessary to preserve peace. But the
nightmare of the Soviet leadership was a reverse of
that situation, that France and Britain would stand
aside while Hitler conquered Lebensraum (living
space) in the east. What is more, would the
Ukrainians and Georgians and other non-Russian
nationalities fight for Russia, when the people
were suffering from such terrible communist
repression? While socialism was still in transition,
Russia could not afford war without risking the
very survival of socialism.
The Soviet Union attempted to create a
‘barrier of peace’ by signing non-aggression
treaties with its neighbours, of whom the most
important was Poland. Until the autumn of 1938
Hitler employed no direct violence near Russia’s
borders. In eastern Asia the threat of war was met
by a combination of policies, in the first place by
appeasing Japan: in 1935 Russia sold its interest
in the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese
puppet state of Manchukuo. It was lessened, furthermore,
by encouraging Chiang Kai-shek’s
nationalist resistance to Japan in the hope that
Japan would then be too busy fighting China to
turn on Russia as well. When necessary, however,
the Soviet Union did not hesitate to resist militarily
any direct Japanese attacks on Soviet spheres
of influence, on the People’s Republic of
Mongolia and along the Russo-Chinese frontier.
There was full-scale fighting between Soviet and
Japanese troops in 1938 and in the summer of
1939. These were no mere ‘incidents’. Marshal
Zhukov in 1939 had the advantage of modern
tanks and troops far better armed than the
Japanese. The Japanese suffered a severe defeat
and left behind 18,000 dead. Thereafter, they
avoided open conflict with Russia. The Soviet
Union and Japan, in fact, remained at peace until
it suited Stalin, shortly before Japan’s surrender,
to attack the Japanese in China in 1945.
In the West, the Soviet Union did what it could
to persuade France and Britain to stand up to
Hitler and Mussolini. The menace they presented
to peace and so to the Soviet Union was belatedly
recognised in 1934. The Soviet Union then
signed a treaty of mutual assistance with France in
May 1935 to strengthen the deterrent alignment.
The Soviet Union also joined in the League’s ineffectual
sanctions to deter Mussolini from conquering
Abyssinia. In 1934 the new United Front
tactics were acquiesced in when France itself
seemed in danger of succumbing to fascism. But
at the same time the communist leadership was
always conscious of, and never wished to repeat,
the experiences of the First World War when
Russia was cast in the role of providing military
relief to the West and, in the effort, went down in
defeat. Russian policy aimed to maintain a careful
balance and to avoid war by encouraging the will
of France and Britain to resist. In line with this
overall strategy the Russian help afforded to the
Republican side during the Spanish Civil War was
carefully limited to exclude any possible risk of
war. It was left to the Comintern to organise the
International Brigades to fight as volunteers on
the Republican side. But Soviet technical advisers,
tanks, aircraft and supplies played a role in the war.
The year 1937 saw Stalin’s military purge at its
height. Russia was more unready than ever to face
military attack from the West. The Soviet Union
almost frantically attempted to construct a diplomatic
peace front in 1938. It failed. Britain and
France went to Munich in September and consented
to the partition of Czechoslovakia. The
Russians, meanwhile, had promised to support
the Czechs only to the extent of their limited
treaty obligations. Whatever Russian aid might
have been forthcoming if the Czechs had fought,
it appears certain that Stalin would not have
risked war with Germany. Simultaneously Soviet
diplomats sought to stiffen French and British
resistance to Hitler by warning their governments
that Hitler meant to defeat them. Stalin’s faith in
‘collective security’, probably never strong, did
not survive after the German occupation of
Czechoslovakia in March 1939. It was unlikely
that peace could be preserved much longer
between Hitler and his neighbours, and Stalin’s
prime objective remained to stop the Soviet
Union from going to war. And so after simultaneous
and secret negotiations with France and
Britain on the one hand and Germany on the
other – a double insurance policy – Stalin, having
delayed as long as he dared, concluded a nonaggression
pact with Germany on 23 August
1939. Stalin had calculated correctly and kept the
Soviet Union at peace. The Germans extracted a
price in requiring supplies from the Soviet Union.
The war that began in September 1939, Stalin
believed, afforded the Soviet Union a long
breathing space during which communism would
strengthen the Soviet Union’s capacity to meet
the dangers still to come. It lasted barely two
years.
180 THE CONTINUING WORLD CRISIS, 1929–39
World History
