Tragedy and Hope
A History of the World in Our Time
By Carroll Quigley
PART EIGHT
Part Eight: International Socialism and the Soviet Challenge
Chapter 23: The International Socialist Movement
The international Socialist movement was both a product of the nineteenth century and a revulsion against it. It was rooted in some of the characteristics of the century, such as its industrialism, its optimism, its belief in progress, its humanitarianism, its scientific materialism, and its democracy, but it was in revolt against its laissez faire, its middle-class domination, its nationalism, its urban slums, and its emphasis on the price-profit system as the dominant factor in all human values. This does not mean that all Socialists had the same beliefs or that these beliefs did not change with the passing years. On the contrary, there were almost as many different kinds of Socialism as there were Socialists, and the beliefs categorized under this term changed from year to year and from country to country.
Industrialism, especially in its early years, brought with it social and economic conditions which were admittedly horrible. Human beings were brought together around factories to form great new cities which were sordid and unsanitary. In many cases, these persons were reduced to conditions of animality which shock the imagination. Crowded together in want and disease, with no leisure and no security, completely dependent on a weekly wage which was less than a pittance, they worked twelve to fifteen hours a day for six days in the week among dusty and dangerous machines with no protection against inevitable accidents, disease, or old age, and returned at night to crowded rooms without adequate food and lacking light, fresh air, heat, pure water, or sanitation.
These conditions have been described for us in the writings of novelists such as Dickens in England, Hugo or Zola in France, in the reports of parliamentary committees such as the Sadler Committee of 1832 or Lord Ashley's Committee in 1842, and in numerous private studies like In Darkest England by General William Booth of the Salvation Army. Just at the end of the century, private scientific studies of these conditions began to appear in England, led by Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London or B. Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty, a Study of l own Life.
The Socialist movement was a reaction against these deplorable conditions of the working masses. It has been customary to divide this movement into two parts at the year 1848, the earlier part being called "the period of the Utopian Socialists" while the later part has been called "the period of scientific Socialism." The dividing line between the two parts is marked by the publication in 1848 of The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This work, which began with the ominous sentence, "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism," and ended with the trumpet blast, "Workers of the world, unite!" is generally regarded as the seed from which developed, in the twentieth century, Russian Bolshevism and Stalinism. Such a view is undoubtedly an oversimplification, for the development of Socialist ideology is full of twists and turns and might well have grown along quite different paths if the history of the movement itself had been different.
The history of the Socialist movement may be divided into three periods associated with the three Socialist Internationals. The First International lasted from 1864 to 1876 and was as much anarchistic as Socialistic. It w as finally disrupted by the controversies of these two groups. The Second International was the Socialist International, founded in 1889. This became increasingly conservative and was disrupted by the Communists during World War I. The Third, or Communist, International was organized in 1919 by dissident elements from the Second International. .As a result of the controversies of these three movements, the whole anticapitalist ideology, which began as a confused revolt against the economic and social conditions of industrialism in 1848, became sorted out into four chief schools. These schools became increasingly doctrinaire and increasingly bitter in their relationships.
The basic division within the Socialist movement after 1848 was between those who wished to abolish or reduce the functions of the state and those who wished to increase these functions by giving economic activities to the state. The former division came in time to include the anarchists and the syndicalists, while the latter division came to include the Socialists and the Communists. In general the former division believed that man was innately good and that all coercive power was bad, with public authority the worst form of such coercive power. All of the world's evil, according to the anarchists, arose because man's innate goodness was corrupted and distorted by coercive power. The remedy, they felt, was to destroy the state. This would lead to the disappearance of all other forms of coercive power and to the liberation of the innate goodness of man. The simplest way to destroy the state, they felt, would be to assassinate the chief of the state; this would act as a spark to ignite a wholesale uprising of oppressed humanity against all forms of coercive power. These views led to numerous assassinations of various political leaders, including a king of Italy and a president of the United States, in the period 1895-1905.
Syndicalism was a somewhat more realistic and later version of anarchism. It was equally determined to abolish all public authority, but did not rely on the innate goodness of individuals for the continuance of social life. Rather it aimed to replace public authority by voluntary associations of individuals to supply the companionship and management of social life which, according to these thinkers, the state had so signally failed to provide. The chief of such voluntary associations replacing the state would be labor unions. According to the syndicalists, the state was to be destroyed, not by the assassination of individual heads of states, but by a general strike of the workers organized in labor unions. Such a strike would give the workers a powerful esprit de corps based on a sense of their power and solidarity. By making all forms of coercion impossible, the general strike would destroy the state and replace it by a flexible federation of free associations of workers (syndicates).
Anarchism's most vigorous proponent was the Russian exile Michael Bakunin (1814-1876). His doctrines had considerable appeal in Russia itself, but in western Europe they were widely accepted only in Spain, especially Barcelona, and in parts of Italy where economic and psychological conditions were somewhat similar to those in Russia. Syndicalism flourished in the same areas at a later date, although its chief theorists were French, led by Georges Sorel (1847-1922).
The second group of radical social theorists was fundamentally opposed to the anarcho-syndicalists, although this fact was recognized only gradually. This second group wished to widen the power and scope of governments by giving them a dominant role in economic life. In the course of time, the confusions within this second group began to sort themselves out, and the group divided into two chief schools: the Socialists and the Communists. These two schools were further apart in organization and in their activities than they were in their theories, because the Socialists became increasingly moderate and even conservative in their activities, while remaining relatively revolutionary in their theories. However, as their theories gradually followed their activities in the direction of moderation, in the period of the Second International (1889-1919), violent controversies arose between those who pretended to remain loyal to the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and those who wished to revise these ideas in a more moderate direction to adapt them to what they considered to be changing social and economic conditions. l he strict interpreters of Karl Marx came to be known as Communists, while the more moderate revisionist group came to be known as Socialists. The rivalries of the two groups ultimately disrupted the Second International as well as the labor movement as a whole, so that anti-labor regimes were able to come to power in much of Europe in the period 1918-1939. This disruption and failure of the working-class movement is one of the chief factors in European history in the twentieth century and, accordingly, requires at least a brief survey of its nature and background.
The ideas of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and of his associate Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were published in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and in their three-volume opus, Das Kapital (1867-1894). Although they were aroused by the deplorable conditions of the European working classes under industrialism, the chief sources of the ideas themselves were to be found in the idealism of Hegel, the materialism of the ancient Greek atomists (especially Democritus), and the theories of the English classical economists (especially Ricardo). Marx derived from Hegel what has come to be known as the "historical dialectic." This theory maintained that all historical events were the result of a struggle between opposing forces which ultimately merged to create a situation which was different from either. Any existing organization of society or of ideas (thesis) calls forth, in time, an opposition (anti-thesis). These two struggle with each other and give rise to the events of history, until finally the two fuse into a new organization (synthesis). This synthesis in turn becomes established as a new thesis to a new opposition or antithesis, and the struggle continues, as history continues.
A chief element in Marxist theory was the economic interpretation of history. According to this view, the economic organization of any society was the basic aspect of that society, since all other aspects, such as political, social, intellectual, or religious, reflected the organization and powers of the economic level.
From Ricardo, Marx derived the theory that the value of economic goods was based on the amount of labor put into them. Applying this idea to industrial society where labor obtains wages which reflect only part of the value of the product they are making, Marx decided that labor was being exploited. Such exploitation was possible, he believed, because the working classes did not own the "instruments of production" (that is, factories, land, and tools) but had allowed these, by legal chicanery, to fall into the hands of the possessing classes. In this way, the capitalistic system of production had divided society into two antithetical classes: the bourgeoisie who owned the instruments of production and the proletariat who lived from selling their labor. The proletariat, however, were robbed of part of their product by the fact that their wages represented only a portion of the value of their labor, the "surplus value" of which they were deprived going to the bourgeoisie as profits. The bourgeoisie were able to maintain this exploitative system because the economic, social, intellectual, and religious portions of society reflected the exploitative nature of the economic system. The money which the bourgeoisie took from the proletariat in the economic system made it possible for them to dominate the political system (including the police and the army), the social system (including family life and education), as well as the religious system and the intellectual aspects of society (including the arts, literature, philosophy, and all the avenues of publicity for these).
From these three concepts of the historical dialectic, economic determinism, and the labor theory of value, Marx built up a complicated theory of past and future history. He believed that "all history is the history of class struggles." Just as in antiquity, history was concerned with the struggles of free men and slaves or of plebians and patricians, so, in the Middle Ages, it was concerned with the struggles of serfs and lords, and, in modern times, with the struggles of proletariat and bourgeoisie. Each privileged group arises from opposition to an earlier privileged group, plays its necessary role in historical progress, and is, in time, successfully challenged by those it has been exploiting. Thus the bourgeoisie rose from exploited serfs to challenge successfully the older privileged group of feudal lords and moved into a period of bourgeois supremacy in which it contributed to history a fully capitalized industrial society but will be challenged, in its turn, by the rising power of the laboring masses.
To Marx, the revolution of the proletariat was not only inevitable but would inevitably be successful, and would give rise to an entirely new society with a proletariat system of government, social life, intellectual patterns, and religious organization. The "inevitable revolution" must lead to an "inevitable victory of the proletariat" because the privileged position of the bourgeoisie allowed them to practice a merciless exploitation of the proletariat, pressing these laboring masses downward to a level of bare subsistence, because labor, having become nothing but a commodity for sale for wages in the competitive market, would naturally fall to the level which would just allo\v the necessary supply of labor to survive. From such exploitation, the bourgeoisie would become richer and richer and fewer and fewer in numbers, and acquire ownership of all property in the society while the proletariat would become poorer and poorer and more and more numerous and be driven closer and closer to desperation. Eventually, the bourgeoisie would become so few and the proletariat would become so numerous that the latter could rise up in their wrath and take over the instruments of production and thus control of the whole society.
According to this theory, the "inevitable revolution" would occur in tile most advanced industrial country because only after a long period of industrialism would the revolutionary situation become acute and would the society itself be equipped with factories able to support a Socialist system. Once the revolution has taken place, there will be established a "dictatorship of the proletariat" during which the political, social, military, intellectual, and religious aspects of society will be transformed in a Socialist fashion. At the end of this period, full Socialism will he established, the state will disappear, and a "classless society" will come into existence. At this point history will end. This rather surprising conclusion to the historical process would occur because Marx had defined history as the process of class struggle and had defined the state as the instrument of class exploitation. Since, in the Socialist state, there will be no exploitation and thus no classes, there will be no class struggles and no need for a state.
In 1889, after the First International had been disrupted by the controversies between anarchists and Socialists, a Second International had been formed by the Socialists. This group retained its allegiance to Marxist theory for a considerable period, but even from the beginning Socialist actions did not follow Marxist theory. This divergence arose from the fact that Marxist theory did not provide a realistic or workable picture of social and economic developments. It had no real provision for labor unions, for workers' political parties, for bourgeois reformers, for rising standards of living, or for nationalism, yet these became, after Marx's death, the dominant concerns of the working class. Accordingly, the labor unions and the Social-Democratic political parties which they dominated became reformist rather than revolutionary groups. They were supported by upper-class groups with humanitarian or religious motivations, with the result that the conditions of life and of work among the laboring classes were raised to a higher level, at first slowly and reluctantly, but, in time, with increasing rapidity. So long as industry itself remained competitive, the struggle between industrialists and labor remained intense, because any success which the workers in one factory might achieve in improving their wage levels or their working conditions would raise the costs of their employer and injure his competitive position with respect to other employers. But as industrialists combined together after 1890 to reduce competition among themselves by regulating their prices and production, and as labor unions combined together into associations covering many factories and even whole industries, the struggle between capital and labor became less intense because any concessions made to labor would affect all capitalists in the same activity equally and could be covered simply by raising the price of the product of all factories to the final consumers.
In fact, the picture which Marx had drawn of more and more numerous workers reduced to lower and lower standards of living by fewer and fewer exploitative capitalists proved to be completely erroneous in the more advanced industrial countries in the twentieth century. Instead, what occurred could be pictured as a cooperative effort by unionized workers and monopolized industry to exploit unorganized consumers by raising prices higher and higher to provide both higher wages and higher profits. This whole process was advanced by the actions of governments which imposed such reforms as eight-hour days, minimum-wage laws, or compulsory accident, old age, and retirement insurance on whole industries at once. As a consequence, the workers did not become worse off but became much better off with the advance of industrialism in the twentieth century.
This tendency toward rising standards of living also revealed another Marxist error. Marx had missed the real essence of the Industrial Revolution. He tended to find this in the complete separation of labor from ownership of tools and the reduction of labor to nothing but a commodity in the market. The real essence of industrialism was to be found in the application of nonhuman energy, such as that from coal, oil, or waterpower, to production. This process increased man's ability to make goods, and did so to an amazing degree. But mass production could exist only if it were followed by mass consumption and rising standards of living. Moreover, it must lead, in the long run, to a decreasing demand for hand labor and an increasing demand for highly trained technicians who are managers rather than laborers. And, in the longer run, this process would give rise to a productive system of such a high level of technical complexity that it could no longer be run by the owners but would have to be run by technically trained managers. Moreover, the use of the corporate form of industrial organization as a means for bringing the savings of the many into the control of a few by sales of securities to wider and wider groups of investors (including both managerial and laboring groups) would lead to a separation of management from ownership and to a great increase in the number of owners.
All these developments were quite contrary to the expectations of Karl Marx. Where he had expected impoverishment of the masses and concentration of ownership, with a great increase in the number of workers and a great decrease in the number of owners, with a gradual elimination of the middle class, there occurred instead (in highly industrialized countries) rising standards of living, dispersal of ownership, a relative decrease in the numbers of laborers, and a great increase in the middle classes. In the long run, under the impact of graduated income taxes and inheritance taxes, ... the great problem of advanced industrial societies became ... the exploitation of unorganized consumers (of the professional and lower-middle-class levels) by unionized labor and monopolized managers acting in concert. The influence of these last two groups on the state in an advanced industrial country also served to increase their ability to obtain what they wished from society as a whole.
As a consequence of all these influences, the revolutionary spirit did not continue to advance with the advance of industrialism, as Marx had expected, but began to decrease, with the result that the more advanced industrial countries became less and less revolutionary. Moreover, what revolutionary spirit did exist in advanced industrial countries was not to be found, as Marx had expected, among the laboring population but among the lower middle class (so-called "petty bourgeoisie"). The average bank clerk, architect's draftsman, or schoolteacher was unorganized, found himself oppressed by organized labor, monopolized industry, and the growing power of the state, and found himself caught in the spiral of rising costs resulting from the efforts of his three oppressors to push the costs of social welfare and steady profits on to the unorganized consumer. The petty bourgeois found that he wore a white collar, had a better education, was expected to maintain more expensive standards of personal appearance and living conditions, but received a lower income than unionized labor. As a consequence of all this, the revolutionary feeling existing in advanced industrial countries appeared among the petty bourgeoisie rather than among the proletariat, and was accompanied by psychopathic overtones arising from the suppressed resentments and social insecurities of this group. But these dangerous and even explosive feelings among the petty bourgeoisie took an anti-revolutionary rather than a revolutionary form and appeared as nationalistic, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, and anti-labor-union movements rather than as anti-bourgeois or anticapitalist movements such as Marx had expected.
Unfortunately, as economic and social developments in advanced industrial countries moved in the un-Marxian directions we have mentioned, the unionized laborers and their Social Democratic political parties continued to accept the Marxist ideology or at least to utter the old Marxist war cries of "Down with the capitalists!" or "Long live the revolution" or "Workers of the world, unite!" Since the Marxist ideology and the Marxist war cries were more easily observed than the social realities they served to conceal, especially when labor leaders sought all publicity for what they said and profound secrecy for what they did, many capitalists, some workers, and almost all outsiders missed the new developments completely and continued to believe that a workers' revolution was just around the corner. All this served to distort and to confuse people's minds and people's actions in much of the twentieth century. The areas in which such confusions became of great significance were in regard to the class struggle and to nationalism.
We have pointed out that the class struggles between capitalists and the laboring masses were of great importance in the early stages of industrialism. In these early stages the productive process was more dependent on hand labor and less dependent on elaborate equipment than it became later. Moreover, in these early stages, labor was unorganized (and thus competitive), while capitalists were un-monopolized (and thus competitive). As the process of industrialization advanced, however, wages became a decreasing portion of productive costs, and other costs, especially the costs of equipment for mass production, for the technical management required by such equipment, and for the advertising and merchandising costs required for mass consumption, became more and more important. All of these things made planning of increasing significance in the productive process. Such planning made it necessary to reduce the number of uncontrolled factors in the productive process to a minimum while seeking to control as many of these factors as possible. An industry which had hundreds of millions of dollars (or even billions) in equipment and plant, as did the steel industry, automobiles, chemicals, or electrical utilities, had to be able to plan, in advance, the rate and the amount of usage that equipment would receive. This need led to monopoly, which was, essentially, an effort to control both prices and sales by removing competition from the market. Once such competition had been removed from the market, or substantially reduced, it became both possible and helpful for labor to be unionized.
Unionized labor helped planning by providing fixed wages for a fixed period into the future and by providing a better trained as well as a more highly disciplined labor force. Moreover, unionized labor helped planning by establishing the same wages, conditions, hours (and thus costs) on an industry-wide basis. In this way unionized labor and monopolized industry ceased to be enemies, and became partners in a planning project centered on a very expensive and complex technological plant. The class struggle in Marxian terms largely disappeared. The one exception was that, in a planned industry, the managerial staff could compare wage costs with fixed capital costs and might decide, to the resentment of labor, to replace a certain amount of labor by a certain amount of new machinery. Labor tended to resent this and to oppose it unless consulted on the problem. The net result was that rationalization of production continued, and advanced industrialized countries continued to advance in spite of the contrary influence of the monopolization of industry which made it possible, to some extent, for obsolete factories to survive because of decreased market competition.
The effects of nationalism on the Socialist movement was of even greater significance. Indeed, it was so important that it disrupted the Second International in 1914-1919. Marx had insisted that all the proletariat had common interests and should form a common front and not fall victim to nationalism, which he tended to regard as capitalistic propaganda, seeking, like religion, to divert the workers from their legitimate aims of opposition to capitalism. The Socialist movement generally accepted Marx's analysis of this situation for a long time, arguing that workers of all countries were brothers and should join together in opposition to the capitalist class and the capitalist state. The Marxian slogans calling on the workers of the world to form a common front continued to be shouted even when modern nationalism had made deep inroads on the outlook of all workers. The spread of universal education in advanced industrial countries tended to spread the nationalist point of view among the working classes. The international Socialist movements could do little to reverse or hamper this development. These movements continued to propagate the internationalist ideology of international Socialism, but it became more and more remote from the lives of the average worker. The Social Democratic parties in most countries continued to embrace the international point of view and to insist that the workers would oppose any war between capitalist states by refusing to pay taxes to support such wars or to bear arms themselves against their "brother workers" in foreign countries.
How unrealistic all this talk was became quite clear in 1914 when the workers of all countries, with a few exceptions, supported their own governments in the First World War. In most countries only a small minority of the Socialists continued to resist the war, to refuse to pay taxes, or to serve in the armed forces, or continued to agitate for social revolution rather than for victory. This minority, chiefly among the Germans and Russians, became the nucleus of the Third, or Communist, International which was formed under Russian leadership in 1919. The Left-wing minority who became the Communists refused to support the war efforts of their various countries, not because they were pacifists as the Socialists were but because they were anti-nationalist. They were not eager to stop the war as the Socialists were, but wished it to continue in the hope that it would destroy existing economic, social, and political life and provide an opportunity for the rise of revolutionary regimes. Moreover, they did not care who won the war, as the Socialists did, but were willing to see their own countries defeated if such a defeat would serve to bring a Communist regime to power. The leader of this radical group of violent dissident Socialists was a Russian conspirator, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin (1870 1924). Although he expressed his point of view frequently and loudly during the war, it must be confessed that his support, even among extremely violent Socialists, was microscopic. Nevertheless, the fortunes of war served to bring this man to power in Russia in November 1917, as the leader of a Communist regime.
Chapter 24: The Bolshevik Revolution to 1924
The corruption, incompetence, and oppression of the czarist regime was forgotten at the outbreak of war in 1914 as most Russians, even those who were sent into battle with inadequate training and inadequate weapons' rallied to the cause of Holy Mother Russia in an outburst of patriotism. This loyalty survived the early disasters of 1914 and 1915 and was able to rally sufficiently to support the great Brusilov offensive against Austria in 1916. But the tremendous losses of men and supplies in this endless warfare, the growing recognition of the complete incompetence and corruption of the government, and the growing rumors of the pernicious influence of the czarina and Rasputin over the czar served to destroy any taste that the Russian masses might have had, for the war. This weakening of morale was accelerated by the severe winter and semi-starvation of 1916-1917. Public discontent showed itself in March 1917, when strikes and rioting began in Petrograd. Troops in the capital refused to suppress these agitations, and the government soon found itself to be helpless. When it tried to dissolve the Duma, that body refused to be intimidated, and formed a provisional government under Prince Lvov. In this new regime there was only one Socialist, Minister of Justice Alexander Kerensky.
Although the new government forced the abdication of the czar, recognized the independence of Finland and Poland, and established a full system of civil liberties, it postponed any fundamental social and economic changes until the establishment of a future constituent assembly, and it made every effort to continue the war. In this way it failed to satisfy the desires of large numbers of Russians for land, bread, and peace. Powerful public feeling against efforts to continue the war forced the resignation of several of the more moderate members of the government, including Prince Lvov, who was replaced by Kerensky. The more radical Socialists had been released from prison or had returned from exile (in some cases, such as Lenin, by German assistance); their agitations for peace and land won adherents from a much wider group than their own supporters, and especially among the peasantry, who were very remote from Socialist sympathies or ideas but were insisting on an end to the war and a more equitable system of land ownership..
In St. Petersburg and Moscow and in a few other cities, assemblies of workers, soldiers, and peasants, called soviets, were formed by the more radical Socialists in opposition to the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik group, under Lenin's leadership, put on a powerful propaganda campaign to replace the Provisional Government by a nationwide system of soviets and to adopt an immediate program of peace and land distribution. It cannot be said that the Bolshevik group won many converts or increased in size very rapidly, but their constant agitation did serve to neutralize or alienate support for the Provisional Government, especially among the soldiers of the two chief cities. On November 7, 1917, the Bolshevik group seized the centers of government in St. Petersburg and was able to hold them because of the refusal of the local military contingents to support the Provisional Government. Within twenty-four hours this revolutionary group issued a series of decrees which abolished the Provisional Government, ordered the transfer of all public authority in Russia to soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants, set up a central executive of the Bolshevik leaders, called the "Council of People's Commissars," and ordered the end of the war with Germany and the distribution of large land-holdings to the peasants.
The Bolsheviks had no illusions about their position in Russia at the end of 1917. They knew that they formed an infinitesimal group in that vast country and that they had been able to seize power because they were a decisive and ruthless minority among a great mass of persons who had been neutralized by propaganda. There was considerable doubt about how long this neutralized condition would continue. Moreover, the Bolsheviks were convinced, in obedience to Marxist theory, that no real Socialist system could be set up in a country as industrially backward as Russia. And finally, there was grave doubt if the Western Powers would stand idly by and permit the Bolsheviks to take Russia out of the war or attempt to establish a Socialist economic system. To the Bolsheviks it seemed to be quite clear that they must simply try to survive on a day-to-day basis, hope to keep the great mass of Russians neutralized by the achievement of peace, bread, and land, and trust that the rapid advent of a Socialist revolution in industrially advanced Germany would provide Russia with an economic and political ally which could remedy the weaknesses and backwardness of Russia itself. [At this stage Germany was already a secret ally.]
From 1917 to 1921 Russia passed through a period of almost incredible political and economic chaos. With counterrevolutionary movements and foreign interventionist forces appearing on all sides, the area under Bolshevik control was reduced at one time to little more than the central portions of European Russia. Within the country there was extreme economic and social collapse. Industrial production was disorganized by the disruption of transportation, the inadequate supply of raw materials and credit, and the confusions arising from the war, so that there was an almost complete lack of such products as clothing, shoes, or agricultural tools. By 1920 industrial production in general was about 13 percent of the 1913 figure. At the same time, paper money was printed so freely to pay for the costs of war, civil war, and the operation of the government that prices rose rapidly and the ruble became almost worthless. The general index of prices was only three times the 1913 level in 1917 but rose to more than 16,000 times that level by the end of 1920. Unable to get either industrial products or sound money for their produce the peasants planted only for their own needs or hoarded their surpluses. Acreage under crops was reduced by at least one-third in 1916-1920, while yields fell even more rapidly, from 74 million tons of grain in 1916 to 30 million tons in 1919 and to less than 20 million tons in 1920. The decrease in 1920 resulted from drought; this became so much worse in 1921 that the crops failed completely. Loss of life in these two years of famine reached five million, although the American Relief Administration came into the country and fed as many as ten million persons a day (in August 1922).
In the course of this chaos and tragedy the Bolshevik regime was able to survive, to crush counterrevolutionary movements, and to eliminate foreign interventionists. They were able to do this because their opponents were divided, indecisive, or neutralized, while they were vigorous, decisive, and completely ruthless. The chief sources of Bolshevik strength were to be found in the Red Army and the secret police, the neutrality of the peasants, and the support of the proletariat workers in industry and transportation. The secret police (Ckeka) was made up of fanatical and ruthless Communists who systematically murdered all real or potential opponents. The Red Army was recruited from the old czarist army but was rewarded by high pay and favorable food rations. Although the economic system collapsed almost completely, and the peasants refused to supply, or even produce, food for the city population, the Bolsheviks established a system of food requisitions from; the peasants and distributed this food by a rationing system which rewarded their supporters. The murder of the imperial family by the Bolsheviks in July 1918 removed this possible nucleus for the counterrevolutionary forces, while the general refusal of these forces to accept the revolutionary distribution of agricultural lands kept the peasants neutral in spite of the Bolshevik grain requisitions. Moreover, the peasants were divided among themselves by the Bolshevik success in splitting them so that the poorer peasants banded together to divert much of the burden of grain requisitions onto their more affluent neighbors.
The most acute problem facing the revolutionary regime at the end of 1917 was the war with Germany. At first the Bolsheviks tried to end the fighting without any formal peace, but the Germans continued to advance, and the Bolsheviks were compelled to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918). By this treaty Russia lost all the western borderlands, including Poland, the Ukraine, and the Baltic areas. The German forces tried, with little success, to obtain economic resources from the Ukraine, and soon advanced far beyond the boundaries established at Brest-Litovsk to occupy the Don Valley, the Crimea, and the Caucasus.
In various parts of Russia, notably in the south and the east, counter-revolutionary armies called "Whites" took the field to overthrow the Bolsheviks. The Cossacks of the Don under L. G. Kornilov, Anton Denikin, and P๋tr Wrangel occupied the Caucasus, the Crimea, and the Ukraine after the Germans withdrew from these areas. In Siberia a conservative government under Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak was set up at Omsk and announced its intention to take over all of Russia (late 1918). A group of 40,000 armed Czechoslovaks who had deserted from the Habsburg armies to fight for Russia turned against the Bolsheviks and, while being evacuated to the east along the Trans-Siberian Railway, seized control of that route from the Volga to Vladivostok (summer 1918).
Various outside Powers also intervened in the Russian chaos. An allied expeditionary force invaded northern Russia from Murmansk and Archangel, while a force of Japanese and another of Americans landed at Vladivostok and pushed westward for hundreds of miles. The British seized the oil fields of the Caspian region (late 1918), while the French occupied parts of the Ukraine about Odessa (March 1919)..
Against these various forces the Bolsheviks fought with growing success, using the new Red Army and the Cheka, supported by the nationalized industrial and agrarian systems. While these fought to preserve the revolutionary regime within Russia, various sympathizers were organized outside the country. The Third International was organized under Grigori Zinoviev to encourage revolutionary movements in other countries. Its only notable success was in Hungary where a Bolshevik regime under B้la Kun was able to maintain itself for a few months (March-August 1919).
By 1920 Russia was in complete confusion. At this point the new Polish government invaded Russia, occupying much of the Ukraine. A Bolshevik counterattack drove the Poles back to Warsaw where they called upon the Entente Powers for assistance. General Weygand was sent with a military mission and supplies. Thus supported, Poland was able to re-invade Russia and impose the Treaty of Riga (March 1921). This treaty established a Polish-Russian boundary 150 miles east of the tentative “Curzon Line” which had been drawn along the ethnographic frontier by the Western Powers in 1919. By this act Poland took within its boundaries several millions of Ukrainians and White Russians and ensured a high level of Soviet-Polish enmity for the next twenty years.
Much of the burden of this turmoil and conflict was imposed on the Russian peasantry by the agricultural requisitions and the whole system of so-called "War Communism." As part of this system not only were all agricultural crops considered to be government property but all private trade and commerce were also forbidden; the banks were nationalized, while all industrial plants of over five workers and all craft enterprises of over ten workers were nationalized (1920). This system of extreme Communism was far from being a success, and peasant opposition steadily increased in spite of the severe punishments inflicted for violations of the regulations. As counterrevolutionary movements were suppressed and foreign interventionists gradually withdrew, opposition to the system of political oppression and "War Communism" increased. This culminated in peasant uprisings, urban riots, and a mutiny of the sailors at Kronstadt (March 1921). Within a week a turning point was passed; the whole system of "War Communism" and of peasant requisitioning was abandoned in favor of a "New Economic Policy" of free commercial activity in agricultural and other commodities, with . the reestablishment of the profit motive and of private ownership in small industries and in small landholding. Requisitioning was replaced by a system of moderate taxation, and the pressures of the secret police, of censorship, and of the government generally were relaxed. As a result of these tactics, there was a dramatic increase in economic prosperity and in political stability. This improvement continued for two years, until, by late 1923, political unrest and economic problems again became acute. At the same time, the approaching death of Lenin complicated these problems with a struggle for power among Lenin's successors.
Because the political organization of the Bolshevik regime in its first few years was on a trial-and-error basis, its chief outlines were not established until about 1923. These outlines had two quite different aspects, the constitutional and the political. Constitutionally the country was organized (in 1922) into a Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR). The number of these republics has changed greatly, rising from four in 1924 and eleven in the 1936-1940 period to fifteen in the 1960's. Of these, the largest and most important was the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which covered about three-quarters of the area of the whole Union with about five-eighths of the total population. The constitution of this RSFSR, drawn up in 1918, became the pattern for the governmental systems in other republics as they were created and joined with the RSFSR to form the USSR. In this organization local soviets, in cities and villages, organized on an occupational basis, elected representatives to district, county, regional, and provincial congresses of soviets. As we shall see in a moment, these numerous levels of indirect representation served to weaken any popular influence at the top and to allow the various links in the chain to he controlled by the Communist political party. The city soviets and the provincial congresses of soviets sent representatives to an All Russian Congress of Soviets which possessed, in theory, full constitutional powers. Since this Congress of Soviets, with one thousand members, met no more than once a year, it delegated its authority to an All-Russian Central Executive Committee of three hundred members. This Executive Committee, meeting only three times a year, entrusted day-to-day administration to a Council of People's Commissars, or Cabinet, of seventeen persons. When the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was formed in 1923 by adding other republics to the RSFSR, the new republics obtained a somewhat similar constitutional organization, and a similar system was created for the whole Union. The latter possessed a Union Congress of Soviets, large and unwieldy, meeting infrequently, and chosen by the city and provincial soviets. This Union Congress elected an equally unwieldy All-Union Central Executive Committee consisting of two chambers. One of these chambers, the Council of the Union, represented population; the other chamber, the Council of Nationalities, represented the constituent republics and autonomous regions of the Soviet Union. The Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR was transformed, with slight changes, into a Union Council of Commissars for the whole Union. This ministry had commissars for five fields (foreign affairs, defense, foreign trade, communications, and posts and telegraphs) from which the constituent republics were excluded, as well as numerous commissars for activities which were shared with the republics.
This system had certain notable characteristics. There was no separation of powers, so that the various organs of government could engage in legislative, executive, administrative, and, if necessary, judicial activities. Second, there was no constitution or constitutional law in the sense of a body of rules above or outside the government, since constitutional laws were made by the same process and had the same weight as other laws. Third, there were no guaranteed rights or liberties of individuals, since the accepted theory was that rights and obligations arise from and in the state rather than outside or separate from the state. Last, there were no democratic or parliamentary elements because of the monopoly of political power by the Communist Party.
The Communist Party was organized in a system similar to and parallel to the state, except that it included only a small portion of the population. At the bottom, in every shop or neighborhood, were unions of party members called "cells." Above these, rising level on level, were higher organizations consisting, on each level, of a party congress and an executive committee chosen by the congress of the same level. These were found in districts, in counties, in provinces, in regions, and in the constituent republics. At the top was the Central Party Congress and the Central Executive Committee chosen by it. As years went by, the Central Party Congress met more and more rarely and then merely approved the activities and resolutions of the Central Executive Committee. This committee and its parallel institution in the state (Council of People's Commissars) were dominated, until 1922, by the personality of Lenin. His eloquence, intellectual agility, and capacity for ruthless decision and practical improvisation gave him the paramount position in both party and state. In May 1922, Lenin had a cerebral stroke and, after a series of such strokes, died in January 1924. This long-drawn illness gave rise to a struggle, for control of the party and the state apparatus, within the party itself. This struggle, at first, took the form of a union of the lesser leaders against Trotsky (the second most important leader, after Lenin). But eventually this developed into a struggle of Stalin against Trotsky and, finally, of Stalin against the rest. By 1927 Stalin had won a decisive victory over Trotsky and all opposition.
Stalin's victory was due very largely to his ability to control the administrative machinery of the party behind the scenes and to the reluctance of his opponents, especially Trotsky, to engage in a showdown struggle with Stalin lest this lead to civil war, foreign intervention, and the destruction of the revolutionary achievement. Thus, while Trotsky had the support of the Red Army and of the mass of party members, these were both neutralized by his refusal to use them against Stalin's control of the party machinery.
The party, as we have said, remained a minority of the population, under the theory that quality was more important than quantity. There were 23,000 members in March 1917, and 650,000 in October 1921; at this latter date a purge began which reduced the party rolls by 24 percent. Subsequently, the rolls were reopened, and membership rose to 3.4 million by 1940. The power to admit or to purge, held in the hands of the Central Executive Committee, completely centralized control of the party itself; the fact that there was only one legal party and that elections to positions in the state were by ballots containing only one party, and even one name for each office, gave the party complete control of the state. This control was neither weakened nor threatened by a new constitution, of democratic appearance and form, which came into existence in 1936.
In 1919 the Central Executive Committee of nineteen appointed two subcommittees of five each and a secretariat of three. One of the subcommittees, the Politburo, was concerned with questions of policy, while the other, the Orgburo, was concerned with questions of party organization. Only one man, Stalin, was a member of both of these; in April 1922, a new secretariat of three was named (Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Valerian Kuibyshev) with Stalin as secretary-general. From this central position he was able to build up a party bureaucracy loyal to himself, purge those who would be most opposed to his plans, or transfer to remote positions those party members whose loyalty to himself was not beyond question. At the death of Lenin in January 1924, Stalin was the most influential party member, but still lurked in the background. At first he ruled as one of a triumvirate of Stalin, Grigori Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev, all united in opposition to Trotsky. The last was removed from his position as war commissar in January 1925, and from the Politburo in October 1926. In 1927, at Stalin's behest, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party. Zinoviev was later restored to membership but in 1929 Trotsky was deported to exile in Turkey. By that time Stalin held the reins of government firmly in his own hands.
Chapter 25: Stalinism, 1924-1939
As Stalin gradually strengthened his internal control of the Soviet Union after Lenin's death in 1924, it became possible to turn, with increasing energy, to other matters. The New Economic Policy, which Lenin had adopted in 1921, performed so successfully that the Soviet Union experienced a phenomenal recovery from the depths to which "War Communism" had dragged it in 1918-1921.
Unfortunately for the economic theorists of the Soviet Union, the NEP was not really a "policy" at all, and it certainly was not Communism. By reestablishing a new monetary system based on gold, in which one of the new gold rubles was equal to 50,000 of the old, inflated paper rubles, a firm financial basis was provided for recovery. Except for a continuance of government regulation in international trade and in large-scale heavy industry, a regime of freedom was permitted. Agricultural production rose, commercial activities flourished, and the lighter industrial activities devoted to consumers' goods began to recover. Distinctions of wealth reappeared among the peasants, the richer ones (called "kulaks") being regarded with suspicion by the regime and with envy by their less fortunate neighbors. At the same time, those who made their fortunes in commerce (called "nepmen") were sporadically persecuted by the regime as enemies of Socialism. Nonetheless, the economic system flourished. Acreage under cultivation rose from 148 million acres in 1921 to 222 million in 1927; grain collections, after the famine of 1922 had passed, approximately doubled in 1923-1927; coal production doubled in three years, while production of cotton textiles quadrupled. As a consequence of such recovery, the Russian economic system in 1927 was, once again, back to its 1913 level, although, since population had gone up by ten million persons, the per capita income was lower.
In spite of the economic recovery of the NEP, it gave rise to important problems. Just as the free agricultural economy produced kulaks, and the free commercial system produced nepmen, so the mixed industrial system had undesirable consequences. Under this mixed system industries concerned with national defense were under direct state control; heavy industry was controlled by monopolistic trusts, which were owned by the state, but operated under separate budgets and were expected to be profitable; small industry w as free. One bad result of this was that small industry was squeezed in its efforts to obtain labor, materials, or credit, and its products were in scarce supply at high prices. Another result was that agricultural prices, being free and competitive, fell lower and lower as agricultural production recovered, but industrial prices, being monopolistic, or in short supply, remained high. The result was a "scissors crisis," as it is called in Europe (or "parity prices," as it is called in America). This meant that the goods farmers sold were at low prices, while the goods they bought were at high prices, and scarce. Thus, in 1923, agricultural prices were at 58 percent of the 1913 level, while industrial prices were at 187 percent of their 1913 level, so that peasants could obtain only one-third as much manufactured goods for their crops as they had been able to obtain in 1913. By withholding credit from industry, the government was able to force factories to liquidate their stocks of goods by lowering prices. As a consequence, by 1924 industrial prices fell to 141 percent of 1913, while agricultural prices rose to 77 percent of 1913. The peasant's position was improved from one-third to one-half of his 1913 position, but at no time did he regain his 1913 parity level. This gave rise to a great deal of agrarian discontent and to numerous peasant disturbances during the latter part of the NEP.
Lenin had insisted that the weakness of the proletariat in Russia made it necessary to maintain an alliance with the peasantry. This had been done during the period of state capitalism (November 1917-June 1918), but the alliance had been largely destroyed in the period of "War Communism" (June 1918-April 1921). Under the NEP this alliance was reestablished, but the "scissors crisis" once again destroyed it. Then it was reestablished only partially. Stalin's victory over Trotsky and his personal inclination for terroristic methods of government led to decisions which marked the end of these cycles of peasant discontent. The decision to build Socialism in a single country made it necessary, it was felt, to emphasize the predominance of heavy industry in order to obtain, as quickly as possible, the basis for the manufacture of armaments (chiefly iron, steel, coal, and electrical power projects). Such projects required great masses of labor to be concentrated together and fed. Both the labor and the food would have to be drawn from the peasantry, but the emphasis on heavy industrial production rather than on light industry meant that there would be few consumers' goods to give to the peasantry in return for the food taken from them. Moreover, the drain of manpower from the peasantry to form urban labor forces would mean that those who continued to be peasants must greatly improve their methods of agricultural production in order to supply, with a smaller proportion of peasants, food for themselves, for the new urban laborers, for the growing party bureaucracy, and for the growing Red Army which was regarded as essential to defend "Socialism in a single country.".
The problem of obtaining increasing supplies of food from fewer peasants without offering them consumers' industrial goods in exchange could not, according to Stalin, be worked in a peasant regime based on freedom of commerce, as under the NEP of 1921-1927, or in one based on individual farmers, as in the "War Communism" of 1918-1921; the former of these required that the peasants be given goods in exchange while the latter could be made a failure by peasant refusals to produce more food than was required by their own needs. The NEP could not find a solution to this problem. In spite of the closing of the scissors in 1923-1927, industrial prices remained higher than farm prices, peasants were reluctant to supply food to the cities since they could not get the cities' products they wanted in return, and the amount of peasants' grain which was sold remained about 13 percent of the grain raised in 1927 compared to 26 percent in 1913. Such a system might provide a high standard of living for the peasants, but it could never provide the highly industrialized basis necessary to support "Socialism in a single country."
The new direction which Russia's development took after 1927 and which we call "Stalinism" is a consequence of numerous factors. Three of these factors were (1) the bloodthirsty and paranoiac ambitions of Stalin and his associates, (2) a return of Russia to its older traditions, but on a new level and a new intensity, and (3) a theory of social, political, and economic developments which is included under the phrase "Socialism in a single country." This theory was embraced with such an insane fanaticism by the rulers of the new Russia, and provided such powerful motivations for Soviet foreign and domestic politics, that it must be analyzed at some length.
The rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky in the mid-1920's was fought with slogans as well as with more violent weapons. Trotsky called for "world revolution," while Stalin wanted "Communism in a single country." According to Trotsky, Russia was economically too weak and too backward to be able to establish a Communist system alone. Such a system, all agreed, could not exist except in a fully industrialized country. Russia, which was so far from being industrialized, could obtain the necessary capital only by borrowing it abroad or by accumulating it from its own people. In either case, it would be taken, in the long run, from Russia's peasants by political duress, in the one case being exported to pay for foreign loans and, in the other case, being given, as food and raw materials, to the industrial workers in the city. Both cases would be fraught with dangers; foreign countries, because their own economic systems were capitalistic, would not stand idly by and allow a rival Socialistic system to reach successful achievement in Russia; moreover, in either case, there would be a dangerously high level of peasant discontent, since the necessary food and raw materials would have to be taken from Russia's peasantry by political duress, without economic return. This followed from the Soviet theory that the enmity of foreign capitalist countries would require Russia's new industry to emphasize heavy industrial products able to support the manufacture of armaments rather than light industrial products able to provide consumers' goods which could be given to the peasants in return for their produce.
The Bolsheviks assumed, as an axiom, that capitalistic countries would not allow the Soviet Union to build up a successful Socialistic system which would make all capitalism obsolete. This idea was strengthened by a theory, to which Lenin made a chief contribution, that "imperialism is the last stage of capitalism." According to this theory, a fully industrialized capitalistic country enters upon a period of economic depression which leads it to embrace a program of warlike aggression. The theory insisted that the distribution of income in a capitalistic society would become so inequitable that the masses of the people would not obtain sufficient income to buy the goods being produced by the industrial plants. As such unsold goods accumulated with decreasing profits and deepening depression, there would be a shift toward the production of armaments to provide profits and produce goods which could be sold and there would be an increasingly aggressive foreign policy in order to obtain markets for unsold goods in backward or undeveloped countries. Such aggressive imperialism, it seemed to Soviet thinkers, would inevitably make Russia a target of aggression in order to prevent a successful Communist system there from becoming an attractive model for the discontented proletariat in capitalistic countries. According to Trotsky, all these truths made it quite obvious that "Socialism in a single country" was an impossible idea, especially if that single country was as poor and backward as Russia. To Trotsky and his friends it seemed quite clear that the salvation of the Soviet system must be sought in a world revolution which would bring other countries, especially such an advanced industrial country as Germany, to Russia's side as allies.
While the internal struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was wending its weary way in 1923-1927, it became quite clear not only that world revolution was impossible and that Germany was not going either to a Communist revolution or an alliance with the Soviet, it also became equally clear that "oppressed colonial" areas such as China were not going to ally with the Soviet Union. "Communism in a single country" had to be adopted as Russia's policy simply because there was no alternative.
Communism in Russia alone required, according to Bolshevik thinkers, that the country must be industrialized with breakneck speed, whatever the waste and hardships, and must emphasize heavy industry and armaments rather than rising standards of living. This meant that the goods produced by the peasants must be taken from them, by political duress, without any economic return, and that the ultimate in authoritarian terror must be used to prevent the peasants from reducing their level of production to their own consumption needs, as they had done in the period of "War Communism" in 1918-1921. This meant that the first step toward the industrialization of Russia required that the peasantry be broken by terror and reorganized from a capitalistic basis of private farms to a Socialistic system of collective farms. Moreover, to prevent imperialist capitalistic countries from taking advantage of the inevitable unrest this program would create in Russia, it was necessary to crush all kinds of foreign espionage, resistance to the Bolshevik state, independent thought, or public discontent. These must be crushed by terror so that the whole of Russia could be formed into a monolithic structure of disciplined proletariat who would obey their leaders with such unquestioning obedience that it would strike fear in the hearts of every potential aggressor.
The steps in this theory followed one another like the steps of a geometrical proposition: failure of the revolution in industrially advanced Germany required that Communism be established in backward Russia; this demanded rapid industrialization with emphasis on heavy industry; this meant that the peasants could not obtain consumers' goods for their food and raw materials; this meant that the peasants must be reduced by terroristic duress to collective farms where they could neither resist nor reduce their levels of production: this required that all discontent and independence be crushed under a despotic police state to prevent foreign capitalistic imperialists from exploiting the discontent or social unrest in Russia. To the rulers in the Kremlin the final proof of the truth of this proposition appeared when Germany, which had not gone Communist but had remained capitalistic, attacked Russia in 1941.
A historian, who might question the assumptions or the stages in this theory, would also see that the theory made it possible for Bolshevik Russia to abandon most of the influences of Western ideology in Marxism (such as its humanitarianism, its equality, or its anti-militarist, anti-state bias) and allow it to fall back into the Russian tradition of a despotic police state resting on espionage and terror, in which there was a profound gulf in ideology and manner of living between the rulers and the ruled. It should also be evident that a new regime, such as Bolshevism was in Russia, would have no traditional methods of social recruitment or circulation of elites; these would be based on intrigue and violence and would inevitably bring to the top the most decisive, most merciless, most unprincipled, and most violent of its members. Such a group, forming around Stalin, began the process of establishing "Communism in a single country" in 1927-1929, and continued it until interrupted by the approach of war in 1941. This program of heavy industrialization was organized in a series of "Five-Year Plans," of which the first covered the years 1928-1932.
The chief elements in the First Five-Year Plan were the collectivization of agriculture and the creation of a basic system of heavy industry. In order to increase the supply of food and industrial labor in the cities, Stalin forced the peasants off their own lands (worked by their own animals and their own tools) onto large communal farms, worked cooperatively with lands, tools, and animals owned in common, or onto huge state farms, run as state-owned enterprises by wage-earning employees using lands, tools, and animals owned by the government. In communal farms the crops were owned jointly by the members and were divided, after certain amounts had been set aside for taxes, purchases, and other payments which directed food to the cities. In state farms the crops were owned outright by the state, after the necessary costs had been paid. In time, experience showed that the costs of the state farms were so high and their operations so inefficient that they were hardly worthwhile, although they continued to be created.
The shift to the new system came slowly in 1927-1929 and then was put violently into full operation in 1930. In the space of six weeks (February-March 1930) collective farms increased from 59,400, with 4,400,000 families, to 110,200 farms, with 14,300,000 families. All peasants who resisted were treated with violence; their property was confiscated, they were beaten or sent into exile in remote areas; many were killed. This process, known as "the liquidation of the kulaks" (since the richer peasantry resisted most vigorously), affected five million kulak families. Rather than give up their animals to the collective farms, many peasants killed them. As a result, the number of cattle was reduced from 30.7 million in 1928 to 19.6 million in 1933, while, in the same five years, sheep and goats fell from 146.7 million to 50.2 million, hogs from 26 to 12.1 million, and horses from 33.5 to 16.6 million. Moreover, the planting season of 1930 was entirely disrupted, and the agricultural activities of later years continued to be disturbed so that food production decreased drastically. Since the government insisted on taking the food needed to support the urban population, the rural areas were left with inadequate food, and at least three million peasants starved in 1931-1933. Twelve years later, in 1945, Stalin told Winston Churchill that twelve million peasants died in this reorganization of agriculture.
To compensate for these setbacks, large areas of previously uncultivated lands, many of them semiarid, were brought under cultivation, mostly in Siberia, as state farms. Considerable research was done on new crop varieties to increase yields, and to utilize the drier lands of the south and the shorter growing season in the north. As a consequence, the area under cultivation increased by 21 percent in 1927-1938. However, the fact that the Soviet population rose, in the same eleven years, from 150 million to 170 million persons, meant that the cultivated acreage per capita rose only from 1.9 to 2.0 acres. The use of semiarid lands required a considerable extension of irrigation; thus there was an increase of about 50 percent in the acreage irrigated in the decade 1928-1938 (from ro.6 million acres to 15.2 million acres). Some of these irrigation projects combined irrigation with the generation of electricity by waterpower, and provided improved water transportation facilities, as in our Tennessee Valley Authority; this was true of the famous project at Dnepropetrovsk on the lower Dnieper River, which had a capacity of half ,a million kilowatts ( 1935).
The reduction in farm animals, which was not made up by 1941, combined with the efforts to develop heavy industry, resulted in increased use of tractors and other mechanized equipment in agriculture. The number of tractors rose from 26.7 thousand in 1928 to 483.5 thousand in 1938, while in the same decade the percentage of plowing done by tractors increased from I percent to 7, percent. Harvesting was increasingly done by combines, the number of these increasing from almost none in 1928 to 182,000 in 1940. Such complicated machinery was not owned by the collective farms but by independent machine-tractor stations scattered about the country; they had to be hired from these as they were needed. The introduction of mechanized farming of this type was not an unmixed success, as many machines were ruined by inexperienced help and the costs of upkeep and fuel were very high. Nevertheless, the trend toward mechanization continued, partly from a desire to copy the United States and partly from a rather childish enthusiasm for modern technology. These two impulses combined, at times, to produce a "gigantomania," or enthusiasm for large size rather than for efficiency or a satisfactory way of life. In agriculture this gave rise to many enormous state farms of hundreds of thousands of acres which were notoriously inefficient. Moreover, the shift to such large-scale mechanized agriculture, in contrast to the old czarist agriculture organized in scattered peasant plots cultivated in a three-year, fallow-rotation system, greatly increased such problems as spreading drought, losses to insect pests, and decreasing soil fertility, requiring the use of artificial fertilizers. In spite of all these problems, Soviet agriculture, without ever becoming successful or even adequate, provided a steadily expanding base for the growth of Soviet industry, until both were disrupted by the invasion of Hitler's hordes in the summer of 1941.
The industrial portion of the First Five-Year Plan was pursued with the same ruthless drive as the collectivization of agriculture and had similar spectacular results: impressive physical accomplishment, large-scale waste, lack of integration, ruthless disregard of personal comfort and standards of living, constant purges of opposition elements, of scapegoats, and of the inefficient, all to the accompaniment of blasts of propaganda inflating the plan's real achievements to incredible dimensions, attacking opposition groups (sometimes real and frequently imaginary) within the Soviet Union, or mixing scorn with fear in verbal assaults on foreign "capitalist imperialist" countries and their secret "saboteurs" within Russia.
The First Five-Year Plan of 1928-1932 was followed by a Second Plan of 1933-1937 and a Third Plan of 1938-1942. The last of these was completely disrupted by the German invasion of June 1941, and had, from the beginning, undergone periodic modifications which changed its targets in the direction of an increased emphasis on armaments because of the rising international tensions. Because of the inadequacies of the available Soviet statistics, it is not easy to make any definite statements about the success of these plans. There can be no doubt that there was a great increase in the physical output of industrial goods and that this output was very largely in capital equipment rather than in consumers' goods. It is also clear that much of this advance was uncoordinated and spotty and that, while Soviet national income was rising, the standard of living of the Russian peoples was declining from its 1928 level.
The following estimates, made by Alexander Baykov, will give some idea of the ... Soviet economic system in the period 1928-1940:
1928 1940
Coal (million tons) 35.0 166.0
Oil (million tons) 11.5 31.1
Pig iron (million tons) 3.3 15.0
Steel (million tons) 4.3 18.3
Cement (million tons) 1.8 5.8
Electric power (billion kw.) 5.0 48.3
Cotton textiles (million meters) 2742.0 3700.0
Woolen textiles (million meters) 93.2 120.0
Leather shoes (million pairs) 29.6 220.0
Railroad freight (billion ton-kilometers) 93.4 415.0
Total population (millions) 150.0 173.0
Urban population (estimated percentage) 18.0% 33.0%
Employed persons (millions) 11.2 31.2
Total wage payments (millions of rubles) 8.2 162.0
Grain crops (millions of hectoliters) 92.2 111.2
There can be little doubt that this ... industrialization made it possible for the Soviet system to withstand the German assault in 1941. At the same time the magnitude of the achievement produced great distortions and tensions in Soviet life. Millions of persons moved from villages to cities (some of these entirely new) to find inadequate housing, inadequate food, and violent psychological tensions. On the other hand, the same move opened to them wide opportunities in ... education, for themselves and for their children, as well as opportunities to rise in the social, economic, and party structures. As a consequence of such opportunities, class distinctions reappeared in the Soviet Union, the privileged leaders of the secret police and the Red Army, as well as the leaders of the party and certain favored writers, musicians, ballet dancers, and actors, obtaining incomes so far above those of the ordinary Russian that they lived in quite a different world. The ordinary Russian had inadequate food and housing, was subject to extended rationing, having to stand in line for scarce consumers' items or even to go without them for long periods, and was reduced to living, with his family, in a single room, or even, in many cases, to a corner of a single room shared with other families. The privileged rulers and their favorites had the best of everything, including foods and wines, the use of vacation villas in the country or in the Crimea, the use of official cars in the city, the right to live in old czarist palaces and mansions, and the right to obtain tickets to the best seats at the musical or dramatic performances. These privileges of the ruling group, however, were obtained at a terrible price: at the cost of complete insecurity, for even the highest party officials were under constant surveillance by the secret police and inevitably would be purged, sooner or later, to exile or to death.
The growth of inequality was increasingly rapid under the Five-Year plans and was embodied in law. All restrictions on maximum salaries were removed; variations in salaries grew steadily wider and were made greater by the non-monetary privileges extended to the favored upper ranks. Special stores were established where the privileged could obtain scarce goods at low prices; two or even three restaurants, with entirely different menus, were set up in industrial plants for different levels of employees; housing discrimination became steadily wider; all wages were put on a piecework basis even when this was quite impractical; work quotas and work minimums were steadily raised. Much of this differentiation of wages was justified under a fraudulent propaganda system known as Stakhanovism.
In September 1935, a miner named Stakhanov mined 102 tons of coal in a day, fourteen times the usual output. Similar exploits were arranged in other activities for propaganda purposes and used to justify speedup, raising of production quotas, and wage differences. At the same time, the standard of living of the ordinary worker was steadily reduced not only by raising quotas but also by a systematic policy of segmented inflation. Food was purchased from the collective farms at lo\v prices and then sold to the public at high prices. The gap between these two was steadily widened year by year. At the same time the amount of produce taken from the peasants was gradually increased by one technique or another. When collective farms had to shift to tractors and combines these were taken from the farms themselves and centralized in machine-tractor stations controlled by the government. They had to be hired at rates which approached one-fifth of the total output of the collective farm. One of the chief sources of governmental income was a turnover tax (sales tax) on consumers' goods; this varied from item to item, but was generally about 60 percent or more. It was not imposed on producers' goods, which were, on the contrary, subsidized to the extent of half the government's expenditures. Price segmentation was so great that in the period 1927-1948 consumers' prices went up thirty-fold, wages went up eleven-fold, while prices of producers' goods and armaments went up less than threefold. This served to reduce consumption and to falsify the statistical picture of the national income, standards of living, and the breakdown between consumers' goods, capital goods, and armaments.
As public discontent and social tensions grew in the period of the Five-Year plans and the collectivization of agriculture, the use of spying, purges, torture, and murder increased out of all proportion. Every wave of discontent, every discovery of inefficiency, every recognition of some past mistake of the authorities resulted in new waves of police activity. When the meat supplies of the cities almost vanished, after the collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930's, more than a dozen of the high officials in charge of meat supplies in Moscow were arrested and shot, although they were in no way responsible for the shortage. By the middle 1930's the search for "saboteurs" and for "enemies of the state" became an all-enveloping mania which left hardly a family untouched. Hundreds of thousands were killed, frequently on completely false charges, while millions were arrested and exiled to Siberia or put into huge slave-labor camps. In these camps, under conditions of semi-starvation and incredible cruelty, millions toiled in mines, in logging camps in the Arctic, or building new railroads, new canals, or new cities. Estimates of the number of persons in such slave-labor camps in the period just before Hitler's attack in 1941 vary from as low as two million to as high as twenty million. The majority of these prisoners had done nothing against the Soviet state or the Communist system, but consisted of the relatives, associates, and friends of persons who had been arrested on more serious charges. Many of these charges were completely false, having been trumped up to provide labor in remote areas, scapegoats for administrative breakdowns, and to eliminate possible rivals in the control of the Soviet system, or simply because of the constantly growing mass paranoidal suspicion which enveloped the upper levels of the regime. In many cases, incidental events led to large-scale reprisals for personal grudges far beyond any scope justified by the event itself. In most cases these "liquidations" took place in the cells of the secret police, in the middle of the night, with no public announcements except the most laconic. But, in a few cases, spectacular public trials were staged in which the accused, usually famous Soviet leaders, were berated and reviled, volubly confessed their own dastardly activities, and, after conviction' were taken out and shot.
These purges and trials kept the Soviet Union in an uproar and kept the rest of the world in a state of continuous amazement throughout the period of the Five-Year plans. In 1929 a large group of party leaders who objected to the ruthless exploitation of the peasantry (the so-called "Rightist opposition"), led by the party's most expert theoretician of the Marxist ideology, Nikolai Bukharin, was purged. In 1933 about a third of the members of the party (at least a million names) were expelled from the party. In 1935, following upon the murder of a Stalinist supporter, Serge Kirov, by the secret police, many of the "Old Bolsheviks," including Zinoviev and Kamenev, were tried for treason. The following year, just as the Spanish Civil War was beginning, the same group were tried once more as "Trotskyists" and were shot. A few months later another large group of "Old Bolsheviks," including Karl Radek and Grigori Pyatakov, were tried for treason and executed. Later in that same year (1937) evidence that the Soviet army leaders had been in communication with the German High Command was sent from the German secret police, through Bene, the president of Czechoslovakia, to Stalin. These communications had been going on since before 1920, were an open secret to careful students of European affairs, and had been approved by both governments as part of a common front against the Western democratic Powers; nevertheless this information was used as an excuse to purge the Red Army of most of its old leaders, while eight of the highest generals, led by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevski, were executed. Less than a year later, in March 1938, the few remaining Old Bolsheviks were tried, convicted, and executed. These included Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov (who had succeeded Lenin as president of the Soviet Union), and G. Yagoda (who had been head of the secret police).
For every leader who was publicly eliminated by these "Moscow Treason Trials" thousands were eliminated in secret. By 1939 all of the older leaders of Bolshevism had been driven from public life and most had died violent deaths, leaving only Stalin and his younger collaborators, such as Molotov and Voroshilov. All opposition to this group, in action, word, or thought, was regarded as equivalent to counterrevolutionary sabotage and aggressive capitalistic espionage.
Under Stalinism all Russia was dominated by three huge bureaucracies: of the government, of the party, and of the secret police. Of these, the secret police was more powerful than the party and the party more powerful than the government. Every office, factory, university, collective farm, research laboratory, or museum had all three structures. When the management of a factory sought to produce goods, they were constantly interfered with by the party committee (cell) or by the special department (the secret police unit) within the factory. There were two networks of secret-police spies, unknown to each other, one serving the special department of the factory, while the other reported to a high level of the secret police outside. Most of these spies were unpaid and served under threats of blackmail or liquidation. Such "liquidations" could range from wage reductions (which went to the secret police), through beatings or torture, to exile, imprisonment, expulsion from the party (if a member), to murder. The secret police had enormous funds, since it collected wage deductions from large numbers and had millions of slave laborers in its camps to be rented out, like draft animals on a contract basis, for state construction projects. Whenever the secret police needed more money it could sweep large numbers of persons, without trial or notice, into its wage deduction system or into its labor camps to be hired out. It would seem that the secret police, operating in this fashion, were the real rulers of Russia. This was true except at the very top, where Stalin could always liquidate the head of the secret police by having him arrested by his second in command in return for Stalin's promise to promote the arrester to the top position. In this way the chiefs of the secret police were successively eliminated; V. Menzhinsky was replaced by Yagoda in 1934, Yagoda by Nikolai Yezhov in 1936, and Yezhov by Lavrenti Beria in 1938. These rapid shifts sought to cover up the falsifications of evidence which these men had prepared for the great purges of the period, each man's mouth being closed by death as his part in the elimination of Stalin's rivals was concluded. To keep the organization subordinate to the party, none of the leaders of the secret police was a member of the Politburo before Beria, and Beria was completely Stalin's creature until they perished together in 1953.
It would be a grave mistake to believe that the Soviet system of government, with its peculiar amalgam of censorship, mass propaganda, and ruthless terror, was an invention of Stalin and his friends; it would be equally erroneous to believe that this system is a creation of Bolshevism; the truth is that it is a part of the Russian way of life and has a tradition going back through czarism to Byzantianism and to caesarism. In Russia itself it has typical precedents in Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Paul I, or Alexander III. The chief changes were that the system, through the advance of technology, of weapons, of communications, and of transportation, became more pervasive, more constant, more violent, and more irrational. As an example of its irrationality we might point out that policy was subject to sudden reversals, which not only were pursued with ruthless severity, but under which, once policy had shifted, those who had been most active in the earlier official policy were liquidated as saboteurs or enemies of the state for their earlier activities as soon as the policy was changed. In the late 1920's officials in the Ukraine had to speak Ukrainian; in a few years those who did were persecuted for seeking to disrupt the Soviet Union. As leaders were shifted, each demanded 100 percent loyalty, which became an excuse for liquidation by a successor as soon as the leader changed. The reversals in policy toward the peasants created many victims, as did the violent reversals in foreign policy. Soviet-German relations shifted from a basis of friendship in 1922-1927 to one of most violent animosity in 1933-1939, changed to patent friendship and cooperation in 1939-1941, to be followed by violent animosity again in 1941. These reversals of policy were difficult for the heavily censored Russian people to follow; they were almost impossible for Soviet sympathizers or members of Communist parties in foreign countries to follow; and they were very dangerous to the leaders of the Soviet system, who might find themselves under arrest today for having followed a different (but official) policy a year previously.
Yet in spite of all these difficulties, the Soviet Union continued to grow in industrial and military strength in the decade before 1941. In spite of low standards of living, racking internal tensions, devastating purges, economic dislocations, and large-scale waste and inefficiency, the industrial basis of Soviet power continued to expand. Nazi Germans, and the outside world in general, were more aware of the tensions, purges, dislocations, and inefficiency than they were of the growing power, with the result that all were amazed at the Soviet Union's ability to withstand the German assault which began on June 22, 1941.
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