The Russian Revolution (22 page)

Like previous oppositions to Stalin, the Right was defeated by the party machine which Stalin controlled. But, in contrast to the earlier leadership struggles, this one involved clear-cut issues of principle and policy. Since these issues were not put to a vote, we can only speculate on the attitude of the party as a whole. The Right's platform involved less danger of social and political upheaval, and did not require party cadres to change the habits and orientation of NEP. On the debit side, the Right was promising much less in the way of achievement than Stalin; and the party in the late 19206 was hungry for achievement, and did not have our retrospective knowledge of what it was going to cost. The Right, after all, was proposing a moderate, small-gains, low-conflict programme to a party that was belligerently revolutionary, felt itself threatened by an array of foreign and domestic enemies, and continued to believe that society could and should be transformed. Lenin had won acceptance for such a programme in 1921. But the Right in 1928-9 had no Lenin to lead it; and the NEP policies of retreat could no longer be justified (as in 1921) by the imminence of total economic collapse and popular revolt.

If the leaders of the Right did not seek to publicize their platform or force a broad party debate on the issues, they may have had good reasons that went beyond their expressed scruples about party unity. The Right's platform was rational and perhaps also (as they claimed) Leninist, but it was not a good platform to campaign on within the Communist Party. In political terms, the Rightists had the kind of problem that would, for example, confront British Conservative leaders who had decided to offer major concessions to the trade unions, or US Republicans who planned to extend Federal controls and increase government regulation of business. Such policies may, for pragmatic reasons, prevail in the closed councils of government (which was the hope and basic strategy of the Right in 1928). But they do not provide good slogans for rallying the party stalwarts.

While the Right, like earlier oppositions, also took up the cause of greater democracy within the party, this had dubious value as a way of winning Communist votes. Local party officials complained that it undermined their authority. In a particularly sharp exchange in the Urals, Rykov was told that the Right seemed to be out to `get the [regional party] secretaries'10-that is, blame them for anything that went wrong and, on top of that, pretend they had no right to their jobs because they were not properly elected. From the standpoint of a middle-level provincial official, the Rightists were elitists rather than democrats, men who had perhaps served too long in Moscow and lost touch with the party's grass roots.

The industrialization drive

To Stalin, as to the foremost modernizer of the late Tsarist period, Count Witte, rapid development of Russia's heavy industry was a prerequisite of national strength and military might. `In the past,' Stalin said in February 1931,

we had no fatherland, nor could we have had one. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, in the hands of the people, we have a fatherland, and we must uphold its independence. Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? 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.

This was a matter of absolute urgency, for the pace of Soviet industrialization would determine whether the socialist fatherland survived or crumbled before its enemies.

To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by British and French capitalists. She was beaten by Japanese barons. All beat her because of her backwardness, because of her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness.... We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we shall go under."

With the adoption of the First Five-Year Plan in 1929, industrialization became the top priority of the Soviet regime. The state agency heading the industrialization drive, the Commissariat of Heavy Industry (successor to the Supreme Economic Council), was led from 1930 to 1937 by Sergo Ordzhonikidze, one of the most powerful and dynamic members of the Stalinist leadership. The First Five-Year Plan focused on iron and steel, pushing the established metallurgical plants of Ukraine to maximum output and constructing massive new complexes like Magnitogorsk in the southern Urals from scratch. Tractor plants also had high priority, not only because of the immediate requirements of collectivized agriculture (made more urgent by the peasants' slaughter of draught animals during the collectivization process) but also because they could be relatively easily converted to tank production in the future. The machine-tool industry was rapidly expanded in order to free the country from dependence on machinery imports from abroad. The textile industry languished, despite the fact that the state had invested quite heavily in its development during NEP and it possessed a large and experienced workforce. As Stalin is said to have remarked, the Red Army would not fight with leather and textiles but with metal.12

The metal priority was inextricably linked with national security and defence considerations but, as far as Stalin was concerned, it seemed to have a significance that went beyond this. Stalin, after all, was the Bolshevik revolutionary who had taken his party name from the Russian word for steel (stal'); and in the early 1930s the cult of steel and pig-iron production exceeded even the emerging cult of Stalin. Everything was sacrificed for metal in the First FiveYear Plan. Indeed, investment in coal, electric power, and railways was so inadequate that fuel and power shortages and transport breakdowns often threatened to bring the metallurgical plants to a standstill. In the view of Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, the Old Bolshevik who headed the State Planning Commission until 1930, Stalin and Molotov were so obsessed with metal production that they tended to forget that the plants were dependent on rail shipments of raw materials and reliable supplies of fuel, water, and electricity.

Yet the organization of supply and distribution was possibly the most formidable task assumed by the state during the First FiveYear Plan. As it had done (unsuccessfully and temporarily) under War Communism a decade earlier, the state took over almost total control of the urban economy, distribution, and trade; and this time the takeover was to be permanent. Curtailment of private manufacturing and trading began in the latter years of NEP, and the process gathered speed with a drive against Nepmen-combining vilification in the press, legal and financial harassment, and numerous arrests of private entrepreneurs for 'speculation'-in 1928-9. By the early 193os, even the artisans and small shopkeepers had been put out of business or forced into state-supervised cooperatives. With the simultaneous collectivization of a substantial part of peasant agriculture, the old mixed economy of NEP was fast disappearing. To the Bolsheviks, the principle of centralized planning and state

control of the economy had great significance, and the introduction of the First Five-Year Plan in 1929 was a milestone on the road to socialism. Certainly it was in these years that the institutional foundations of the Soviet planned economy were laid, although it was a period of transition and experimentation in which the `planning' component of economic growth cannot always be taken too literally. The First Five-Year Plan had a much more tenuous relationship to the actual functioning of the economy than later Five-Year Plans: in fact, it was a hybrid of genuine economic planning and political exhortation. One of the paradoxes of the time was that at the height of the Plan, in the years 1929-31, the state planning agencies were being so ruthlessly purged of Rightists, ex-Mensheviks, and bourgeois economists that they were scarcely able to function at all.

Both before and after its introduction in 1929, the First Five-Year Plan went through many versions and revisions, with competing sets of planners responding in different degrees to pressure from the politicians.13 The basic version adopted in 1929 failed to anticipate mass collectivization of agriculture, vastly underestimated industry's need for labour, and dealt extremely fuzzily with issues like artisan production and trade, where the regime's policy remained ambiguous or unarticulated. The Plan set out production targetsthough in key areas like metal these were repeatedly raised after the Plan had gone into operation-but gave only the vaguest indication of where the resources for increased production were to come from. Neither the successive versions of the Plan nor the final statement of the Plan's achievements bore much relation to reality. Even the title of the Plan turned out to be inaccurate, since it was ultimately decided to complete (or conclude) the First Five-Year Plan in its fourth year.

Industry was exhorted to `overfulfil' the Plan rather than simply to carry it out. This Plan, in other words, was not meant to allocate resources or balance demands but to drive the economy forward pell-mell. The Stalingrad Tractor plant, for example, could best carry out the Plan by producing more tractors than planned, even if this threw the schedules of plants supplying Stalingrad with metal, electrical parts, and tyres into total disarray. Supply priorities were not determined by the written Plan but by a series of ad hoc decisions from the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, the government's Council of Labour and Defence, and even the party's Politburo. Fierce competition surrounded the official list of top-priority (udarnye) enterprises and construction projects, since inclusion meant that suppliers were required to ignore all previous contracts and obligations until the top-priority orders were filled.

But the top priorities were constantly changing in response to crisis, impending disaster, or a new raising of targets in one of the key industrial sectors. `Breaks in the industrialization front', requiring that fresh reserves of men and materials be rushed in, provided an element of drama to the coverage in the Soviet press, and indeed to the everyday life of Soviet industrialists. The successful Soviet manager during the First Five-Year Plan was less like an obedient functionary than a wheeling-and-dealing entrepreneur, ready to cut corners and seize any opportunity to outdo his competitors. The end-fulfilling and overfulfilling the Plan-was more important than the means; and there were cases when plants desperate for supplies ambushed freight trains and commandeered their contents, suffering no worse consequences than an aggrieved note of complaint from the authorities in charge of transport.

However, despite the emphasis on immediate increase in industrial output, the real purpose of the First Five-Year Plan was to build. The giant new construction projects-Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky) Auto, Stalingrad and Kharkov Tractor, Kuznetsk and Magnitogorsk Metallurgical, Dnieper (Zaporozhe) Steel, and many others-swallowed up enormous resources during the First FiveYear Plan, but came into full production only after 1932, under the Second Five-Year Plan (1933-7). They were an investment for the future. Because of the magnitude of the investment, decisions made during the First Five-Year Plan on the location of the new industrial giants were in effect redrawing the economic map of the Soviet Union.

As early as 1925, during Stalin's conflict with the Zinovievite Opposition, the investment issue had played some part in internal party politics, as Stalin's campaigners had made sure that regional party leaders understood the benefits that his industrialization plans would bring to their particular regions. But it was in the last years of the 1920s, with the final First Five-Year Plan decisions imminent, that the Bolsheviks' eyes were really opened to a whole new dimension of politics-regional competition for development allocations. At the Sixteenth Party Conference in 1929, speakers had difficulty keeping their minds on the ideological struggle with the Right because of their intense concern with more practical questions: as one Old Bolshevik wryly noted, `Every speech ends.... "Give us a factory in the Urals, and to hell with the Rights! Give us a power station, and to hell with the Rights!" '14

The party organizations of Ukraine and the Urals were at daggers drawn over the distribution of investment monies for mining and metallurgical complexes and machine-building plants; and their rivalry-which drew in major national politicians like Lazar Kaganovich, formerly party secretary in Ukraine, and Nikolai Shvernik, who headed the Urals party organization before taking over national leadership of the trade unions-was to continue throughout the 1930s. Intense rivalries also sprang up over the location of specific plants scheduled for construction during the First Five-Year Plan. Half a dozen Russian and Ukrainian cities put in bids for the tractor plant ultimately built in Kharkov. A similar battle, probably the first of its kind, had raged from 1926 over the site of the Urals Machine-Building Plant (Uralmash): Sverdlovsk, the ultimate victor, began construction using local funds and without central authorization in order to force Moscow's hand on the location decision.15

Strong regional competition (for example, that between Ukraine and the Urals) often resulted in a double victory-the authorization of two separate plants, one in each region, where the planners' original intention had been to build only a single plant. This was one factor behind the soaring targets and ever-increasing costs characteristic of the First Five-Year Plan. But it was not the only factor, for Moscow's central politicians and planners were clearly in the grip of `gigantomania', the obsession with hugeness. The Soviet Union must build more and produce more than any other country. Its plants must be the newest and the biggest in the world. It must not only catch up with the West in economic development, but surpass it.