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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Episode 10.102: Dizzy with Success
After the Troika of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev ousted Trotsky from the inner circle of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin immediately turned and aligned with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky to oust his erstwhile allies Zinoviev and Kamenev. We ended last week with the defeat of the United Opposition at the end of 1927. And this week, Stalin’s little Politburo quadrille will continue without interruption. As soon as he dispatched Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, Stalin turned on a dime, and iced out Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky.
This latest turn, however, would be about more than just power games inside that thin stratum of the Communist ruling class. Ditching the right wing of the party, Stalin will storm to the left, and force through economic and social reform so massive they transcended the meaning of the word reform. This would turn out to be nothing less than a full blown social revolution. A revolution from above, to fulfill in a matter of years what friends and enemies, allies and rivals, supporters and critics, believers and skeptics, all thought would take a generation if not a century or more to accomplish: transforming Russia from a land of backward peasants into an advanced industrial superpower.
Before 1917, Russian agriculture was famously, infamously, backward. Peasant communes owned land collectively, but doled it out to individual families in strips. A single family’s allotment of land was not even contiguous, but instead spread out all over the place. A strip here, a strip over there; it was grossly inefficient. And this is to say nothing in the fact that the methods, tools, and habits of Russian peasants had changed very little over the centuries. A medieval peasant would’ve felt right at home in most Russian villages in the early 20th century. Grain was sown and reaped by hand with the help of some scraggly farm animals. Now granting a few exceptions here and there, the industrial revolution had just not come to Russian agriculture. Their production per acre was among the worst in the world. Most peasants never rose above farming for bare subsistence, and if they did, it was only to meet taxes and obligations imposed by the tsar and the landed aristocracy. The grain surplus that fed the hungry cities and gave the tsar a little something to sell on the international market mostly came from noble estates, where land was consolidated and worked by hired rural laborers, specifically to produce crops for the market.
The leaders of Russia had always been well aware of the sorry state of their economic productivity. Going all the way back to the Crimean War, the tsar’s ministers understood their grossly inefficient agricultural sector and their almost non-existent industrial sector had become an existential threat to their power. Russia believed itself a great power, the natural peer of Britain, France, Germany, and Austria, destined among other things to eventually defeat the Ottoman Empire and rule Eurasia. But those other powers advanced in great leaps and bounds in the latter half of the 19th century, while Russia’s economic, military, and political inadequacies were put on display for all to see.
This is why the serfs had been freed in the 1860s, why Sergei Witte had gotten the green light to pursue rapid industrialization in the 1890s, why Pyotr Stolypin got the green light to pursue the total transformation of Russian agriculture after the revolution of 1905. The Witte boom gave the Russian Empire something resembling in industrial base, but Stolypin’s land reforms had proved much less successful, as they faced tenacious resistance from peasants hostile to his vision of individual landed proprietors working hard in the pursuit of individual profit.
Stolypin’s reform project was undone first by his assassination, then by the upheavals of World War I, and then buried by the Revolution of 1917. For the peasants, the revolution had only ever meant one thing: the land is ours now. Far from the dramatic stages of the revolution — the Winter Palace, the Smolny Institute, and the Kremlin — the peasants carried out their own revolution on their own terms. They claimed the greatest estates owned by the aristocracy and the church and the tsar and redistributed it to themselves as they saw fit. In the chaos of 1917, no political power in Russia could have stopped this peasant revolution, even if they had wanted to. It’s why Lenin and the Bolsheviks so quickly promulgated the Land Decree confirming the peasant’s land seizures in plain and simple terms. There was no sense alienating the peasants right out the gate. The Bolsheviks were in no position to alter the course of this land revolution.
Yet.
Now we know that deeply cynical motives lay behind the Land Decree because “all land to the peasants” was never the Bolshevik way. The agricultural platform of the Bolshevik Party had always called for mass nationalization of property, followed by the merging of atomized communes into large modern farms owned by the state, operated for the benefit of all, producing the material abundance socialism and communism required. This is one of the issues that set the Bolsheviks apart from the Mensheviks and the SRs during the years of emigre quarreling. The Mensheviks and the SRs really did favor a program of “land to the peasants,” not land to the state. It was why, come October 1917, they spluttered so incredulously as Lenin copied and pasted the SR land program. They knew he didn’t believe in “all land to the peasants” because he had spent fifteen years attacking the program of “all land to the peasants.”
But Lenin’s object was power. Consistency is a consolation prize for losers.
The chaos of the Civil War prevented the Bolsheviks — now Communists — from carrying out their ultimate objectives. They just had to hope the peasants would continue producing enough food surpluses to feed the cities and the Red Army. In the early days of 1918, Lenin and other senior Communists believe the peasants might volunteer to work twice as hard and grow vast surplus to feed the revolution. And from what I’ve read of their notes and correspondence, they were genuinely put out such voluntary exertions were not forthcoming, when in exchange for those efforts, the Communists offered them… nothing. With no intermediate option and no time to devise one, the Communists turned directly from encouraging voluntary efforts to demanding grain at gunpoint. Their armed food detachments violently crashed around the Russian countryside taking all the grain in livestock and leaving behind only trauma and bodies.
As the Civil War wrapped up in 1920 and 1921, the effects of War Communism were stark. Russian agricultural production was worse than it had ever been. There was drastically less land under cultivation, yields were meager, surpluses non-existent. There were no reserves at all. The Communists ruled an empire of subsistence farmers who then fell victim to a catastrophic famine in 1921 and 1922. This was one of the major impetuses for the NEP — the belated acknowledgement that they had to offer the peasants some incentive to work harder and grow more. In this case, it would be the right to sell their surpluses for profit, to use that profit, to invest in more land or better tools. To use it to buy manufactured goods or imports from abroad. After the abject bottoming out that was the famine of 1921-1922, agricultural yields improved in the 1920s until they were back up to the level they had been before World War I. The Soviet Union saw its peak harvest in 1925-1926, coming in at about 77 million tons of grain.
But individual landed proprietors growing crops for profit wasn’t communism. It wasn’t even the SR or Menshevik program. It was just capitalism, plain and simple. For all their struggles in a decade of socialist revolution, the Communist Party found itself totally upside down, defending a growing population of rural capitalists, private property owners, and individual profit seekers. This is what had driven the Left Opposition so crazy about the NEP, when the political conflicts of the 1920s weren’t reducible merely to personality conflict. Why is the Politburo of the Communist Party so dead set on protecting capitalists? I mean, you unfocus your eyes a little bit, and it becomes difficult to see the difference between Stolypin’s program in 1907 and the official Communist Party line of 1927. Is this really what we came here to do?
The Left Opposition’s reward for raising such obvious concerns about the very identity of the Party and the revolution was to be declared counter-revolutionaries and expelled from the Party. Trotsky, the greatest living Communist of them all, and second all-time only to Lenin himself, was banished to Kazakhstan. Then he’d be deported to Turkey, on his way to a life of permanent exile spent wherever he could find someone willing to host the most dangerous revolutionary in the world.
On the industrial front, things weren’t much better. As we know from the jillion odd episodes of this series on the Russian Revolution, the origins of Russian industrialization lay way back in the 1890s, when Russia strategically aligned with France and then Britain. In exchange for the Russians planting an army on Germany’s eastern flank, the French provided loans that allowed Russia to buy the latest industrial technologies, machines, and parts, then hire foreign engineers and managers to help them build and maintain factories, mines, and railroads. These loans were not only backed by the Russian army though, and tsarist Russia exported close to ten million tons of grain a year, much of it from the Ukrainian breadbasket, these agricultural exports providing the economic profits to pay their debts to the French and the British.
The industrialization of Russia proceeded rapidly in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, bringing rapid social economic and political changes that so explosively fueled the Revolution of 1905. But though the industrial growth of the Russian Empire was practically exponential year over year, it was only because they started from such humble beginnings. The working classes of Russia doubled, triple, quadrupled, but they were still a tiny handful compared to their peers in Britain, France, Germany, and Austria. They were tiny compared to their own population. The entire population of the industrial working class and the Russian Empire was just a few percentage points in a vast ocean of rural peasants. And we know that most of them were peasants themselves, passing fluidly from factory to farm and back again, following business cycles and growing seasons like migrating birds, heading south for the winter and north for the summer. It will remain forever a great historical irony that the first great communist revolution succeeded in this land of farmers.
But simplistic historical irony aside, World War I did double overnight the size of the Russian working classes and crammed them tightly into the centers of political power. It’s not actually that hard to grasp why the Russian proletariat was able to exercise such a disproportionate influence on events. I mean seriously, how many times have we seen a couple thousand bakers randomly throw up barricades in Paris and overthrow entire regimes, quote unquote French revolutions that most of the French population didn’t even find out about until like a week later? Overwhelming pressure brought to bear on pressure points is what matters in a revolution.
But. After peaking in 1915 and 1916 and 1917, Russian industry collapsed. The end of the war, the chaos of the Civil War, the economic blockades, the loss of financing, the lack of exports, the scarcity of raw materials and fuel, the shutdown of mines, the total collapse of the rail system, all combined to collapse Russian industry. The recently formed legions of industrial workers handed in their hammers and returned to their sickles, the communist revolution ultimately turning workers into peasants, rather than peasants into workers.
Grappling with the devastated industrial sector was a huge concern for the Communist Party in the 1920s. As with the Land Decree, the party abandoned as quickly as possible their professed program of democratized factories run by and for the workers. All power to the Soviets and all that. The exigencies of the Civil War and the priority of bare survival in a world surrounded by hostile powers left little room for idealism. The factories of Russia had to be run efficiently. Make things. Meet quotas. That meant a return to the old days of bosses, managers, and highly trained specialists calling the shots. The workers would be left with nothing to do but follow orders and wonder what the revolution had even been for. But, wonder about it, hopefully not talk too much about it — that might get the Cheka knocking on the door.
The market turn of the NEP only cemented these old systems of industrial organization. Factories, mines, and railroads were nominally owned by the state, but leased to private firms to direct and manage, a strange bedfellows partnership of revolutionary communists and industrial capitalists, hopefully to their mutual benefit. This too is what the Left Opposition had been on about through the 1920s. What the heck are we even doing? Is this really what we came here to do? We’re communists!
But industrial capacity did grow in the 1920s. Factories came back online, mines reopened, railroads were repaired. Normalization of relations with Britain and Germany and France opened back up opportunities for import, export, and financing. In 1928, the industrial working class numbered close to 3 million spread across 2000 nationalized factories, just a little bit more than their numbers in 1913. After ten years of war and revolution, they were finally back where they started.
But this was a big problem for the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, because where they started was still way behind everyone else. Not only that, while the Soviet Union merely crawled back to where they had been before World War I, their rivals in the west were leaping beyond their pre-1914 industrial levels. The USSR was behind, and every day, falling further behind.
The NEP was supposed to solve these problems, to be the bridge to the communist future of mass abundance and shared prosperity. The NEP was supposed to boost agricultural production, which would boost industrial production, which would further boost agricultural production. But it was slow going, and it was supposed to be slow going. According to Bukharin, they just had to accept the snail’s pace and work with it. Incremental growth would come over years and decades, but they would grow.
But just as Stalin delivered the killing stroke to the Left Opposition in late 1927, he was reading alarming reports that they weren’t growing. They were in fact facing a serious shortfall in grain procurements. They were millions of tons short of expectations. This would cause destabilizing scarcity in the cities and in the army. Then more immediate procurement numbers in November and December 1927 proved to be even more alarming. They were down 50% from the same time last year. From a high of 77 million tons in 1925 and 1926, the harvest of 1926-1927 would fall to 73 million tons. The harvest of 1927-1928 would subsequently fall to around 70 million. The Soviet Union was heading back into widespread food scarcity. With his rivals on the left defeated politically, Stalin was now free to pick up their economic policies to deal with the crisis. And given everything everyone had said about everyone else since the death of Lenin, Stalin’s turn would be shockingly abrupt.
As late as November 1927, Stalin gave a speech where he said, “To pursue a policy of discord with the majority of the peasantry means to start a civil war in the village, making it difficult to supply our industry with peasant raw materials, disrupt the supply of agricultural products to the working class, undermine the very foundations of our industry.”
But while touring western Siberia in late January 1928, a scant two months later, Stalin gave a secret speech to local party officials that signaled his intention to do exactly what he had just said it would be crazy to do: pursue a policy of discord with the majority of the peasantry. In this address, he said, “what is the strength of the Kulak? Not in the fact he was born strong, nothing of the kind, but in the fact that his farming is of a large scale.”
And this was the key. The prosperous peasants did not prosper because of individual initiative or an entrepreneurial spirit or an admirable work ethic, as old Stolypin had believed, but the material fact of the size and scale of their operations. Consolidated farms worked with modern equipment yielded higher production. This is something the Bolsheviks had always believed. Improvised responses to various crises over the years had left the Communists presiding over the consolidation of agriculture they sought, but under the auspices of individual proprietors. Now Stalin was saying, no more.
“We are a Soviet country,” he said. “We want to implant a collective economy, not solely in industry, but in agriculture. There remains only the path of developing large scale farms of a collective type.” And this would be the new edict. He said, “Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into collective farms for us is the only path.”
This speech marked the beginning of collectivization, a policy, which as I said at the beginning, would be so massive that it transcends the meaning of the word reform. Stalin now aimed for nothing less than the complete transformation of traditional Russian peasant life. The end of traditional Russian peasant life. When all is said and, collectivization is arguably the most revolutionary thing that happened since the revolution began. Everything else that’s fallen into place since 1917 has produced an autocratic political system running a network of appointed bureaucrats, backed by a strong professional army and insidious secret police, overseeing a multinational empire, trying to industrialize and modernize. I mean, I know I’m intentionally papering over differences to make this point, but still, it’s a point worth making. There are lots and lots of cultural, political, and economic continuities between tsarist Russia and Soviet Russia. Men make their own history, but they do not make it in circumstances of their choosing, et cetera, et cetera.
There never is, and never was, and never will be, a cataclysmic year zero. It’s a revolutionary myth. But this? Collectivization? This comes pretty close.
To the extent that Stalin abruptly changed policy, it was to return to his roots as a lifelong Bolshevik, to rebrace policies that Bolsheviks had pursued since before the Revolution of 1905. The NEP was the deviation. Collectivization was a return to form. If you’ll recall in the episodes about War Communism, the Bolsheviks had briefly tried to establish state owned and managed collective farms, but the schemes were effectively abandoned, as they realized they were making history, but not in circumstances of their choosing. After the revolution, the peasants owned more than 3 million square kilometers divided into about 25 million individual holdings. To the extent that collectivization was taking place, it was undertaken by individual households under the NEP. In 1922, consolidated farms accounted for about 2% of all rural land. By 1927, that number was up to 25%. But it was individually held. Meanwhile, only about 1% of land in the Soviet Union remained publicly collectivized in any discernible way.
So in the collectivization, Stalin now saw it would take time, patience, and perseverance. And once Stalin move towards collectivization filtered through the party, Soviet planners figured they could get that 1% number to maybe 15% after five years. Full collectivization in a generation, maybe two. But anything faster than that would be crazy. It would be impossible.
Following this logic, at first the pace of collectivization was slow. Through 1928 and 1929, the collectivization plan was barely even acknowledged as official state policy. But it was now policy. And it had specific goals: first and foremost, it was meant to improve agricultural production. The grain procurement crisis of 1927 and 1928 was a shot across the bow. The Soviet Union was now seven years into the NEP, and it was still struggling to feed itself. Stalin took it for granted collectivized farms would be more productive, especially once they were provided with the latest farm machinery and run with the latest scientific practices. Indeed, beyond simply producing enough food to eat, the further assumption was that the vast surplus is created by collectivized farms could be sold on the international market, providing funds to pay for more industrialization, which would in turn make more and better machines that would further improve agricultural yields. It was, on paper, a never ending feedback loop of increasing abundance and prosperity. The communist revolution finally, delivering on its promises.
Now, if we look back to the 1890s, we can see this is in many ways a return to the Witte Program. Use agricultural exports to finance rapid industrialization. But it wasn’t just the old Witte Program with a red star pinned to its cap. There was a political component that was very, very important. Despite the positions he had taken in the turf wars with the Left Opposition during the 1920s, Stalin was not insensible to the political threat posed by the growing class of prosperous peasants the NEP was openly fostering, the great Kulak boogeyman of the Communist Party imagination. Prosperous farmers were almost by definition class enemies of the Communist Party, and their reconciliation with the Soviet regime was tissue thin. The more Kulak wealth grew, the more influence they would have over state policy, the more independent they would become of state control, and the more likely they would be to challenge Communist Party supremacy.
And then of course, in the final analysis, there is an ideological component to collectivization. It would mark the elimination of private property, individual ownership, and exploitive profiteering. They were, after all, communists. Maybe it was time to start acting like it.
Initially there was a vague hope collectivization could come about peacefully, with peasants persuaded to voluntarily combine their land, tools, livestock, families, and embrace a new way of life. But the party also expected the necessity of threats, of course, and coercion, especially against the group that had prospered the most and therefore had the most to lose: the Kulaks.
Now, Kulak had always been a vague term, a loose pejorative rather than a strict economic category. But the platonic Kulak owned a large consolidated farm, had plenty of livestock, multiple barns and houses, and most importantly, hired labor. That, more than anything else, was the ideological definition of the Kulak as a rural capitalist: owners of the means of production who hired wage workers and then sold the fruits of that labor for personal profit. Seizing Kulak property would accomplish the economic, political, and ideological goals of collectivization in one fell swoop, and as such, they expected resistance. To achieve these critical goals in the face of expected resistance, Stalin let loose the secret police, who were now rebranded from the Cheka into the GPU.
They targeted Kulaks under Article 107 of the Soviet Constitution, which prohibited grain speculating. The GPU would go around accusing Kulak households of illegally hoarding grain in a time of scarcity. Sometimes it was true, sometimes it was false, sometimes there were reasonable explanations and sometimes not, but the systematic result was that by the early spring of 1928, the GPU had made about 16,000 arrests throughout the USSR. Grain was confiscated, property seized, heads of household sentenced to prison; all their neighbors put on notice that this was the punishment for resistance. And this was only the beginning.
Collectivization of farms was only the agricultural component of Stalin’s great socioeconomic revolution from above. It was meant to support and drive the other great component of the plan, the industrial component. As we discussed two episodes back, the Left Communist theorist, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, preached the necessity of rapid industrialization. As Stalin surveyed the Soviet Union’s place in the world in 1928, he suddenly took up Preobrazhensky’s ideas wholeheartedly, even after kicking Preobrazhensky out of the party for having said it in the first place.
But in short, the USSR was falling behind. And this was not merely about losing some international contest to see who can make the most widgets in a single fiscal quarter, it was about the political and military security of the Soviet Union. Now, as you may know, Stalin was himself personally quite a paranoid guy, but the Communist Party in general saw themselves surrounded and besieged by hostile forces eager to crush them, this had been their mentality since the beginning of the revolution, since before the revolution. There were new enemies like French and British and American capitalists, old enemies like Germany, Poland, and Turkey, all of whom they imagined to be forever knocking at the gates. Out in the far east, Japan was clearly preparing to make major moves in Manchuria. Stalin and the other leaders of the Party fully expected there to be another great war. Industrial capacity was war-making capacity, so to industrialize was a matter not just of economic growth, but national security.
So in late 1928 and early 1929, the Party rolled out the Five Year Plan, or what we now call the First Five Year Plan because there will be more than one of them. The First Five Year Plan was essentially a set of declared benchmarks for every sector of industry: this many more factories, that much more electrical capacity, this many more tractors, that many more miles of railroad track. Now all the goals in the First Five Year Plan were set insanely and impossibly high — like, let’s grow the GDP by 20% every year non-stop. Entire industries, factories, mines, electrical plants, telephone lines were set to be built from scratch. Entire cities were expected to rise from bare ground overnight. And no amount of, um, sir, this is crazy, would dial back expectations. The only way to keep your job, your place in the Party, and possibly stay outta prison, was to deliver.
So the first year of the First five Year Plan chugged, along with a kind of nervous energy, as officials and managers and workers and engineers tried to keep pace with expectations from the top, which sometimes meant doing the work, and sometimes meant falsifying records, double counting inventory, cranking out obviously defective merchandise to make it look like they were hitting their targets. Stalin himself urged them all on with a kind of relentlessly paranoid fear of what would happen if they failed. The rush to industrialize was always presented in terms of breaking a military siege. The survival of Russia, the Soviet Union, and the revolution was always at stake. In July 1930, he gave a speech where he said, “Either we will vanquish and crush them, the exploiters, or they will vanquish and crush the workers and peasants of the USSR.”
The following year, he made this point again: “We are a hundred years behind the advanced countries,” he said. “We must make good this gap in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us. The slogan always and everywhere was “we must catch and overtake the west.” To naysayers, they would brag, “there is no fortress the Bolsheviks cannot storm.” So everything from simple nuts and bolts to steel blast furnaces and power plants were put on impossible-to-meet quotas, under the logic that if you aim for the moon, even if you don’t make it, you’ll go pretty far. Forgetting, perhaps, that if you aim for the moon and fall short, you might also die in the endless vacuum of space. Or the gulags. Whichever.
Now there’s no telling what would’ve come of the Five Year Plan, whether it would have been sustainable at all or collapsed under the weight of its only-on-paper successes, had it not been for the great boon to Soviet fortunes that landed in their lap at the end of the 1920s: the Great Depression. Here, finally, was the fatal crisis of capitalism Marx had long predicted. The Great Depression was an absolute boon to the PR fortunes of the Soviet union. We are the future, they are the past. And look at them, they’re dying just like we said they would.
But beyond the propaganda hay they were able to make of the Great Depression on a more practical level, western businesses suddenly started taking calls from Soviet officials. Now, even during the NEP years, foreign companies had not been eager to do business in or with the Soviet Union. Western banks were not interested in financing their projects or issuing them loans, the investments were simply too risky. Plus, Soviet officials made no secret of their intention to overthrow western capitalism by violent revolution, so western capitalists weren’t eager to do business with them. But now all the western capitalists were essentially bankrupt, and suddenly ideological differences ceased to matter. When Soviet officials came round in the early 1930s saying, hey, we wanna buy what you’re selling or, hey, you want to help us build a power plant up in the Ural mountains, you took that call. Everyone from the Ford Motor Company to Caterpillar to DuPont and a bunch of others signed deals to help build up industry in Russia. They provided technology, expertise, and materials to build the USSR showcases of the Five Year Plan. Steel plants and power plants, production facilities for cars and trucks. They re-equipped factories to build tractors. Nothing helped build Communist industry better, faster, and cheaper than the complete and utter ruination wrought by the Great Depression.
And though the targets of the Five Year Plan were absurd, and there was at least some degree of Potemkin village style flimflammery out there, the ultimate gains were undeniable. During the whole of the Five Year Plan, the Soviet Union built or rebuilt a thousand new factories. Before World War I Russia produces zero machine tools of their own; by 1930, they were cranking out 20,000 a year. The full-time working class population then doubled and doubled again. And by the end of it, 12 million rural peasants had been resettled in cities or industrial areas. Moscow grew from 2 million inhabitants to nearly 4 million. In terms of raw industrial capacity, the USSR was on its way to becoming second only to the United States in the world. But there was an ugly underbelly to all this: endemic waste, accidents, environmental destruction, inefficiencies, undertrained, under-skilled workers and managers attempted everything at a breakneck pace, so there were injuries and there were mistakes. There were deaths. The products they made to hit quota were often qualitatively terrible, and even then quotas were missed regularly. One tractor factory was supposed to produce 2000 tractors in the third quarter of 1930, and instead they managed to make only 43, and even these weren’t any good. An American engineer on site said that after 70 hours of work, they’ll just fall apart.
But joking aside, the Five Year Plan was no joke. For all its costs, human, environmental, and economic, for all its waste and inefficiencies, for all its absurdities and cruelties and nonsense, the industrialized Russia that would head into World War II and the Cold War may have been born during the Witte Boom, but it fully came of age during the Five Year Plans. Stalin laid this all out boldly in November 1929, when he wrote an article about Russia’s great turn:
We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization to socialism, [he wrote] leaving behind the age old Russian backwardness. We are becoming a country of metal, a country of automobiles, a country of tractors, and when we have put the USSR on an automobile, the peasant on a tractor, let the worthy capitalists who boast so much of their civilization, try to overtake us. We shall yet see which countries may be then classified as backward and which are advanced.
Or as the Emperor Augustus may have put it, Stalin intended to find Russia a country of dirt, and leave it a country of steel.
Now you may be asking yourself, what did Bukharin think about all this? He had after all spent years in close alliance with Stalin successfully blocking anything that resembled agricultural collectivization and rapid industrialization. So how can Stalin just now up and do this? Well, the new appointees to the Politburo to replace there are now exiled comrades were all Stalin’s men, and they voted as Stalin wanted.
Bukharin was at first in disbelief, and he tried to reason his way through it. He argued, “collective farms, which will only be built over several years, will not carry us. We will be unable to provide them with working capital and machines right away.” And as we’ll see, he wasn’t wrong about that. But Bukharin found himself occupying the seat once occupied by Trotsky and Zinoviev and Kamenev. Cut out of the decision making loop, Bukharin was also caught in the same trap that had befallen his former comrades. He wouldn’t breach Party rules to publicly oppose the Politburo’s decisions. He gagged himself. He muzzled himself. He publicly went along with Stalin to avoid accusations of engaging in forbidden factionalism, but it was all in vain. Stalin started calling Bukharin and his allies “right deviationists,” whose policies, which had been the Party line for years, were now suddenly reactionary and counter-revolutionary. They were accused of being “a capitulation group, advocating not for the liquidation of capitalist elements of the city and countryside, but for their free development.” Which, Bukharin could only say, yeah, that was the point of the NEP, you agreed with me like a week ago.
But eventually, Bukharin slipped up. Kamenev revealed to Stalin that Bukharin had come around to enlist him in possibly joining a new anti-Stalin group. And the writing was on the wall. By the end of 1929, Bukharin was voted off the Politburo entirely. The next year his comrade Rykov suffered the same fate. Now, they weren’t expelled from the Party, but they were in the political wilderness, cast out by Stalin, who was now completely and permanently cementing his position as the autocratic heir of Lenin.
Meanwhile out on the agricultural front, the ramping up of the Five Year Plan and the expulsion of the right deviationists coincided with a more aggressive push for collectivization. Far more aggressive. Sadistically aggressive.
Now through the end of 1929, only about 7 or 8% of households had been collectivized. And though Kulaks were targeted for arrest and confiscation and harassment, it wasn’t carried out with a kind of all encompassing brutality yet. This all changed in November and December 1929. It was no longer enough to merely target Kulaks. They had to be eliminated.
At a meeting of agrarian delegates in December 1929, Stalin spoke ominous words that Pravda published two days later. Grain yields were still too low and agricultural production had to be improved. So Stalin asked, “What is the solution? And then he answered: the solution is to make agriculture large scale, make it capable of accumulation, of expanding production, and in this way, transform the agricultural base of the economy.”
Well, okay, that’s nothing new though, that’s what he started saying in early 1928. But then Stalin also said, “We have gone over from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the Kulak to eliminating the Kulaks as a class.” a few days later, memos went round to the secret police asking for proposals, suggestions, and plans on how to intern a lot of people all at once, how to round people up and move them quickly, how to build and run labor camps. Subordinates were encouraged to be creative.
Stalin then issued secret circulars to local party agents of a new policy we call Dekulakization, using criminal courts, local police, secret police, Party activists and regular soldiers, if necessary, to force the peasants to collectivize, to completely dispossess the Kulaks as a class, so that they simply no longer existed. As for the millions to be identified as Kulaks, they would be rounded up and deported to industrial sites or mines up in the Urals or way out in Siberia. While laying these plans, the Party also called for activist volunteers from the ranks of the urban working class to go to the countryside and encourage villagers to voluntarily join collective farms. They got tens of thousands of volunteers to fan out across the Soviet Union in early 1930 to pitch the peasants on collective farms. And so, I’ll be darned, look at that. We’ve come full circle. Fifty years later, and we’ve got a bunch of revolutionary socialists once again going to the people.
There were a few differences though. These cadres, which were eventually known as the Twenty-Five Thousanders, because they wound up being about 25,000 of them, were not total strangers to the villages. Most of them had been born peasants and only later joined the industrial workforce. So, this wasn’t about weirdo strangers coming to town, it was about sons and daughters returning home. And they were, of course, not there to challenge the state, or to call for its overthrow, but rather to enforce its will. They descended on the countryside in January and February 1930 in preparation for the coming spring. And one of them made the very simple pitch: those who want to join the collective farm sign up with me, those who do not want to join, sign up with the police chief. Anyone who resisted or talked back or refused might be beaten up, their property trashed, subject to all manner of abuse, including rape, including murder.
Meanwhile, the police made upwards of 140,000 arrests between January 1st and April 15th, 1930 alone. The conduct of the Twenty-Five Thousanders, plus the secret police’s agents zealous rush to meet deportation quotas, sparked quite a backlash, as you can imagine. Peasants resisted as much as they possibly could, as they always did; so much so that Stalin tactically retreated in March of 1930, writing an article titled Dizzy With Success. In this article, he chastised the conduct of the collectivization agents. With a dead straight face, he wrote:
The collective farm must not be imposed by force. That would be stupid and reactionary.
Then Stalin asked:
How could there have arisen in our midst such blockheaded exercises in “socialization,” such ludicrous attempts to overleap oneself, attempts which aim at bypassing classes in the class struggle, and which in fact bring grist to the middle of our class enemies?
Once again, Stalin answered himself:
It could have arisen only as a result of the blockheaded belief of a section of our Party: “We can achieve anything!”, “There’s nothing we can’t do!”
They could have arisen only because some of our comrades have become dizzy with success and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision.
It’s almost as if Stalin was talking about himself. But he wasn’t. He was engaging in one of Stalin’s favorite pastimes, finding other people to blame for his mistakes.
But by briefly letting up the pressure on the peasants, they felt free to take Comrade Stalin at his word. Those who had “volunteered,” quit the collective farms and the proportion of collective households almost immediately dropped from 56% on March 1st to just 24% by the middle of summer. And so Stalin reissued orders to go back to threats and arrests and deportations. And he would not waiver from this line again. According to official statistics — and here official means, probably kind of sketchy — by the end of 1930, about 33% of the land was collectivized, and Stalin issued bold demands for that to double and triple practically overnight. He said by the end of 1931, we should be at 80% collectivization in the most fertile regions of the Soviet Union, and at least 50% everywhere else. Then, his people went out and did it.
In total, by the end of 1931, about 67% of the land was collectivized; by the end of 1932, it was 77%; by the end of 1933, it was 83%; and by the end of the 1930s, practically all the land in the Soviet Union had been collectivized. At least on paper. At least according to the official statistics.
As collectivization expanded, so too did the definition of Kulak. The number of actually rich, actually prosperous peasants had never been that large. But officials still had arrest and deportation quotas to meet. So now everyone with an extra cow, a slightly better shovel, or some store-bought consumer goods now qualified as a Kulak. Police agents also hit on the novelty of calling people ‘henchman of the Kulaks,’ which counted just about anybody, anyone who took wages to work, or refused to turn in a neighbor to the police, or who just irritated a local official. They were all now classified as henchmen of the Kulak, themselves up for arrest and confiscation and deportation. Police sweeps became vast, with little oversight or control or attention. All told, about 5 million people would find themselves dekulakized, and a total of about 30,000 heads of various households were not just deported, but summarily executed.
So the question is, where did those five million people go? You can’t just stash five million people under a rug someplace. But. You already know the answer. Because this is the dawn of the gulags, labor camps that sprouted up throughout the most desolate and godforsaken parts of the Soviet Union. The arrested and dispossessed, sometimes individuals, sometimes whole family, sometimes whole villages, were loaded onto cattle trains and taken across the country and redeposited in these camps. Now in the beginning, this was just about removal and internment, but as it coincided with the industrial Five Year Plan, some creative comrade suggested that the Kulak swine could be put to good work. They could build factories, work mines, clear and build roads. So, they became de facto slave labor. And they built metallurgical combines and tractor plants and other glorious monuments to the Five Year Plan. Living conditions were horrendous. Those who even survived the journey to the camps died of starvation and disease and exposure. Those who tried to flee were subject to recapture, abuse, punishment, and execution. Eventually a government department had to be created to oversee this growing network of labor camps, and the agency was called the Chief Administration of the Camps, a name that was shortened to the acronym in Russian, GULag, from whence the camps take their name.
Deported peasants resisting collectivization form the first population of the camps. But as we’ll see more especially next week, the gulags became the repository of all identifiable enemies of the state: intellectuals, scientists, writers, artists, anyone who might make a peep about anything. And so during the years of collectivization in the Five Year Plans, the regime developed a penchant for political show trials. What had begun with the Trial of the SRs in 1922, and which would be brought to sublime perfection during the purges and terrors of the later 1930s, went through an intermediate period of refinement in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The main targets of these show trials were anyone who resisted or criticized regime policy, or who happened to be a convenient scapegoat at a convenient moment. Mainly this meant engineers, statisticians, scientists, and project managers, anyone who still carried the taint of bourgeois capitalism or who had begun their careers under the old regime, all those technical experts who had been brought back to prominence by the NEP were now brutally smacked down.
So at regular intervals, newspapers would trumpet the latest revelation about the latest batch of secret enemies who had been caught trying to sabotage the Soviet Union. They were all called wreckers, as in people trying to wreck the economy to weaken the state. There was the Shakhty Trial against some mining engineers in 1928 accused of blowing up a coal mine that had in fact been scheduled for detonation for safety reasons. There was the Academic Trial of 1929 to 1931, which targeted researchers and professors. There was a thing called the Industrial Party Trial of 1930, where some scientists and engineers were accused of plotting the overthrow of the government. There was a thing called Menshevik Trial of 1931, which targeted statisticians inside the State Planning Office who were accused of trying to sneak Menshevik policies in through the back door. There was this Springtime Affair of 1931, which discovered thousands of enemies in the army and navy, mostly officers who had served in the armies and navies of the tsar. The message to the public was always the same: there were foreign powers hell bent on overthrowing the Soviet Union, who suborned these inside wreckers and saboteurs to soften up Russia by exploding economic dynamite. Confessions would be extracted by the use of torture and threats to family members. They then confessed their crimes in open court, and the sentences were a term in prison, but sometimes it was straight up execution. All of this would be publicized in the papers. And then a few months later, a new shocking revolution would lead to a new trial of new conspirators.
Most of it was nonsense. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, every major power in the world had been sucker punched in the gut by the Great Depression. They were not hell bent on overthrowing the Soviet Union. In the Industrial Party Case, defendants were accused of collaborating with two specific anti-communist Russian emigres, both of whom had died years earlier. The prosecutors also accused them of trying to elevate this other guy to be the head of state of a new bourgeois republic, except he too was long dead. But that didn’t matter. It was guilty verdicts all around. Off to the gulag you go. Except for you. It’s the firing squad for you.
Now, incredibly none of this — the collectivization, the arrests, the deportations, the labor camps, the absurd show trials — were the worst humanitarian disaster to hit the Soviet Union during these years. For that, we need to turn to our old friend… famine.
Whatever collectivization’s alleged theoretical benefits, the immediate effect was total disaster. At the end of 1930, economic planners believed the USSR’s agricultural production would push over a hundred million tons of grain. This huge jump would be the result of collectivization and mechanization and modernization. But instead, Bukharin turned out to be right. Even with the industrial push of the Five Year Plan, the promised equipment was never delivered to the collective farms. Or if it was, it just broke down. All these farms were also badly mismanaged. There was no scientific rigor or use of the latest techniques. All the most experienced farmers, all the people who were up on those latest techniques? Well, they’d all been loaded into cattle cars. Then, 1931 opened with an unseasonably cold spring, followed by a summer drought, which means crop failure.
Now for the whole of the Soviet Union, a normal good harvest would be somewhere in the high 70 million tons a year. In 1931, it wound up being somewhere between 57 and 65. Stalin himself appears to have believed that collectivization and mechanization would solve all the grain production problems, and he both deluded himself and was deluded by reports he was given by his subordinates, because he’d created a disinformation trap for himself, by encouraging his subordinates, to delude him, out of fear of displeasing him.
In response, Stalin did what Stalin did best: blame anyone but Stalin. Stalin blamed the grain shortages on… Kulak sabotage. He accused them of hoarding grain and destroying livestock. He accused them of being saboteurs and wreckers deliberately trying to destroy the revolution. And this is when the arrests and deportations related to collectivization really went into overdrive. But this didn’t fix the grain shortage, or save anyone from famine. The government tried to shift grain around to hard hit areas, but they steadfastly refused to call for international aid, as Lenin had done during the famine of 1921-1922. All told, about 40 million people were affected by the food shortages and mortality rates skyrocketed. The centers of the famine were similar to the famine of 1921-1922: the Ukraine, the Don River, the Northern Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. When things got really bad in 1932, all the government could do was issue a law imposing the death penalty on anyone caught hoarding or stealing grain, any amount of grain. That included children trying to pick edible bits from already cleared fields.
The famine of 1931-1932 turned out to be even worse than the earlier famine. Something like 8 to 12 million people died from starvation or starvation related diseases. It was, in short, a horrific catastrophe. And so, far from ushering in a golden age of abundant prosperity, Stalin’s policies were now immediately responsible for millions of deaths. Now, granted, some of this is natural causes — the cold and the heat and the drought — but nothing turns natural disasters into humanitarian disasters faster than political malfeasance, and Stalin was a master of political malfeasance.
One of the other great legacies of the famine was a new system of internal passports for travel inside the Soviet Union. To contain people in affected areas, allegedly to prevent them from spreading diseases and taxing resources in other areas, the regime started issuing travel papers, internal passports. Now, the Soviet government had already imposed various kinds of internal travel bans over the years, and the police had gotten pretty good at drag nets and chasing people trying to escape from the collective farms or the gulags. But now it was all systematized and regularized. And the way it went at first is that people who lived in towns or cities, or who were workers or members of the bureaucracy, got passports. Peasants did not. And without the passports, they couldn’t travel. This meant they couldn’t legally leave their homes. And it didn’t take long for them to openly speak of the obvious implications of this new system: they were serfs again. They were bound to the land, forbidden to leave. They were trapped for eternity unless some lord now styling himself a Communist Party official, gave them permission. Almost exactly seventy years since the Emancipation of the Serfs, and they were right back where they started. Long live the revolution.
Now the famine of 1931 and 1932 was very bad, but it was particularly bad in two places of note: Ukraine, and what is today Kazakhstan. The total population of what was then the Kazakh Autonomous Republic was about 6.5 million people. And of those, somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 million died. In a year. That is an appalling and grotesque percentage of the population. In Ukraine, the death toll was around 3 and a half or 4 million from a total population of 33 million. In Ukraine, this famine is referred to as Holodomor, derived from “to kill by famine” or “the terror famine.” The idea is that in Ukraine’s case, the famine was not just an accident or negligence, but a deliberate policy by Stalin’s government. It was meant as punishment to break the Ukrainians for their years of bucking Communist Party authority.
Now that historical question of whether it’s deliberate murder or negligent homicide is an ongoing debate, now more than ever. Some historians say Stalin screwed over everyone without any particular target, in mind. Others can point to a systematic tendency to deny aid to Ukraine, to blacklist certain areas from help, to export grain from Ukraine to other places, that all adds up to a pretty clear picture. Now it’s above my pay grade to render judgment on all this, but what is not up for debate is that Stalin’s policies killed a lot of Ukrainians. The only thing that’s up for debate is whether this was the result of stupid, indifferent cruelty from a stupid, indifferent, and cruel man, or deliberate and sadistic mass murder, committed by a sadistic mass murderer.
So this period of the late 1920s and early 1930s, from say 1928 to 1932, is referred to as the Great Turn. And as I said, the combination of forced collectivization and the Five Year Plan produced a socioeconomic revolution that no revolution had up to that point really come close to achieving. I mean, the French Revolution didn’t accomplish anything like this. Stalin imposed a whole new way of life for over a hundred million people, peasants and workers who now found themselves living in a brand new world. But the cost was, and is appalling. Tens of millions of dead. Millions more arrested and deported to labor camps. Everyone else, reeling from the trauma. And the benefits hardly justified the price. Collectivization was a failure on its own terms. Russian agriculture remained poor and inefficient. And the peasant revolution was crushed. They were now rebound to the land. They were serfs again. Meanwhile, the industrial leap was real, but man, there are other better ways to industrialize. The history of any industrial revolution involves horrific abuses of people, an enormous cruelty and suffering, Stalin beats ’em all on that score. He makes Carnegie and Rockefeller look like Mother Teresa
Next week will be our final episode on the Russian Revolution series as Stalin himself writes the final chapter of the revolutionary period in Russia. Having imposed this great revolution from above with his new cadre of supporters who were entirely dependent on his patronage to stay in power and stay alive, it was time to purge all the old Bolsheviks and anyone else who might threaten his rule.
Because what are you gonna do? Have a great revolution without a great terror?