mrmikhail
22nd November 2011, 06:14
Here is a read for you:
Chapter 1
WHAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED
1.The principal indices of industrial growth
2.Comparative estimates of these achievements
3.Production per capita of the population
1.
The Principal Indices of Industrial Growth
Owing to the insignificance of the Russian bourgeoisie, the democratic tasks of backward Russia -- such as liquidation of the
monarchy and the semi-feudal slavery of the peasants -- could be achieved only through a dictatorship of the proletariat. The
proletariat, however, having seized the power at the head of the peasant masses, could not stop at the achievement of these
democratic tasks. The bourgeois revolution was directly bound up with the first stages of a socialist revolution. That fact was not
accidental. The history of recent decades very clearly shows that, in the conditions of capitalist decline, backward countries are
unable to attain that level which the old centers of capitalism have attained. Having themselves arrived in a blind alley, the highly
civilized nations block the road of proletarian revolution, not because her economy was the first to become ripe for a socialist
change, but because she could not develop further on a capitalist basis. Socialization of the means of production had become a
necessary condition for bringing the country out of barbarism. That is the law of combined development for backward
countries. Entering upon the socialist revolution as "the weakest link in the capitalist chain" (Lenin), the former empire of the
tzars is even now, in the 19th year after the revolution, still confronted with the task of "catching up with and outstripping" --
consequently in the first place catching up with -- Europe and America. She has, that is, to solve those problems of technique
and productivity which were long ago solved by capitalism in the advanced countries.
Could it indeed be otherwise? The overthrow of the old ruling classes did not achieve, but only completely revealed, the task: to
rise from barbarism to culture. At the same time, by concentrating the means of production in the hands of the state, the
revolution made it possible to apply new and incomparably more effective industrial methods. Only thanks to a planned directive
was it possible in so brief a span to restore what had been destroyed by the imperialist and civil wars, to create gigantic new
enterprises, to introduce new kinds of production and establish new branches of industry.
The extraordinary tardiness in the development of the international revolution, upon whose prompt aid the leaders of the
Bolshevik party had counted, created immense difficulties for the Soviet Union, but also revealed its inner powers and
resources. However, a correct appraisal of the results achieved -- their grandeur as well as their inadequacy -- is possible only
with the help of an international scale of measurement. This book will be a historic and sociological interpretation of the process,
not a piling up of statistical illustrations. Nevertheless, in the interests of the further discussion, it is necessary to take as a point
of departure certain important mathematical data.
The vast scope of industrialization in the Soviet Union, as against a background of stagnation and decline in almost the whole
capitalist world, appears unanswerably in the following gross indices. Industrial production in Germany, thanks solely to feverish
war preparations, is now returning to the level of 1929. Production in Great Britain, holding to the apron strings of
protectionism, has raised itself 3 or 4 per cent during these six years. Industrial production in the United States has declined
approximately 25 per cent; in France, more than 30 per cent. First place among capitalist countries is occupied by Japan, who
is furiously arming herself and robbing her neighbors. Her production has risen almost 40 per cent! But even this exceptional
index fades before the dynamic of development in the Soviet Union. Her industrial production has increased during this same
period approximately 3 1/2 times, or 250 per cent. The heavy industries have have increased their production during the last
decade (1925 to 1935) more than 10 times. In the first year of the five-year plan (1928 to 1929), capital investments amounted
to 5.4 billion rubles; for 1936, 32 billion are indicated.
If in view of the instability of the ruble as a unit of measurement, we lay aside money estimates, we arrive at another unit which is
absolutely unquestionable. In December 1913, the Don basin produced 2,275,000 tons of coal; in December 1935, 7,125,000
tons. During the last three years the production of iron has doubled. The production of steel and of the rolling mills has increased
almost 2 1/2 times. The output of oil, coal and iron has increased from 3 to 3 1/2 times the pre-war figure. In 1920, when the
first plan of electrification was drawn up, there were 10 district power stations in the country with a total power production of
253,000 kilowatts. In 1935, there were already 95 of these stations with a total power of 4,345,000 kilowatts. In 1925, the
Soviet Union stood 11th in the production of electro-energy; in 1935, it was second only to Germany and the United States. In
the production of coal, the Soviet Union has moved forward from 10th to 4th place. In steel, from 6th to 3rd place. In the
production of tractors, to the 1st place in the world. This also is true of the production of sugar.
Gigantic achievement in industry, enormously promising beginnings in agriculture, an extraordinary growth of the old industrial
cities and a building of new ones, a rapid increase of the numbers of workers, a rise in cultural level and cultural demands --
such are the indubitable results of the October revolution, in which the prophets of the old world tried to see the grave of human
civilization. With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to
victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth's surface -- not in the
language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal
difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of leadership, were to collapse -- which we firmly hope will not happen -- there
would remain an earnest of the future this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a backward country
has achieved in less than 10 years successes unexampled in history.
This also ends the quarrel with the reformists in the workers' movement. Can we compare for one moment their mouselike
fussing with the titanic work accomplished by this people aroused to a new life by revolution? If in 1918 the Social-Democrats
of Germany had employed the power imposed upon them by the workers for a socialist revolution, and not for the rescue of
capitalism, it is easy to see on the basis of the Russian experience what unconquerable economic power would be possessed
today by a socialist bloc of Central and Eastern Europe and a considerable part of Asia. The peoples of the world will pay for
the historic crime of reformism with new wars and revolutions.
2.
Comparative Estimate Of These Achievements
The dynamic coefficients of Soviet industry are unexampled. But they are still far from decisive. The Soviet Union is uplifting
itself from a terrible low level, while the capitalist countries are slipping down from a very high one. The correlation of forces at
the present moment is determined not by the rate of growth, but by contrasting the entire power of the two camps as expressed
in material accumulations, technique, culture and, above all, the productivity of human labor. When we approach the matter
from this statistical point of view, the situation changes at once, and to the extreme disadvantage of the Soviet Union.
The question formulated by Lenin -- Who shall prevail? -- is a question of the correlation of forces between the Soviet Union
and the world revolutionary proletariat on the one hand, and on the other international capital and the hostile forces within the
Union. The economic successes of the Soviet Union make it possible for her to fortify herself, advance, arm herself, and, when
necessary, retreat and wait -- in a word, hold out. But in its essence the question, Who shall prevail -- not only as a military, but
still more as an economic question -- confronts the Soviet Union on a world scale. Military intervention is a danger. The
intervention of cheap goods in the baggage trains of a capitalist army would be an incomparably greater one. The victory of the
proletariat in one of the Western countries would, of course, immediately and radically alter the correlation of forces. But so
long as the Soviet Union remains isolated, and, worse than that, so long as the European proletariat suffers reverses and
continues to fall back, the strength of the Soviet structure is measured in the last analysis by the productivity of labor. And that,
under a market economy, expresses itself in production costs and prices. The difference between domestic prices and prices in
the world market is one of the chief means of measuring this correlation of forces. The Soviet statisticians, however, are
forbidden even to approach that question. The reason is that, notwithstanding its condition of stagnation and rot, capitalism is
still far ahead in the matter of technique, organization and labor skill.
The traditional backwardness of agriculture in the Soviet Union is well enough known. In no branch of it has progress been
made that can in the remotest degree bear comparison with the progress in industry.
"We are still way behind the capitalist countries in the beet crop," complains Molotov, for example, at the end of 1935.
"In 1934 we reaped from one hectare [approximately 2 1/2 acres] 82 hundredweight; in 1935, in the Ukraine with an
extraordinary harvest 131 hundredweight. In Czechoslovakia and Germany, they reap about 250 hundredweight, in
France, over 300 per hectare."
Molotov's complaint could be extended to every branch of agriculture -- textile as well as grain growing, and especially to
stockbreeding. The proper rotation of crops, selection of seeds, fertilization, the tractors, combines, blooded stock farms -- all
these are preparing a truly gigantic revolution in socialized agriculture. But it is just in this most conservative realm that the
revolution demands time. Meanwhile, notwithstanding collectivization, the problem still is to approach the higher models of the
capitalist West, handicapped though it is with the small-farm system.
The struggle to raise the productivity of labor in industry runs in two channels: adoption of an advanced technique and better use
of labor power. What made it possible to establish gigantic factories of the most modern type in the space of a few years was,
on the one hand, the existence in the West of a high capitalist technique, on the other, the domestic regime of planned economy.
In this sphere foreign achievements are in process assimilation. The fact that Soviet industry, as also the equipping of the Red
Army, has developed at a forced tempo, contains enormous potential advantages. The industries had not been compelled to
drag along an antiquated implementation as in England and France. The army has not been condemned to carry an
old-fashioned equipment. But this same feverish growth has also had its negative side. There is no correspondence between the
different elements of industry; men lag behind technique; the leadership is not equal to its tasks. Altogether this expresses itself in
extremely high production costs and poor quality of product.
"Our works," writes the head of the oil industry, "possess the same equipment as the American. But the organization of
the drilling lags; the men are not sufficiently skilled." The numerous breakdown, he explains are a result of "carelessness,
lack of skill and lack of technical supervision".
Molotov complains:
"We are extremely backward in organization of the building industry.... It is carried on for the most part in old ways with
an abominable use of tools and mechanisms."
Such confessions are scattered throughout the Soviet press. The new technique is still far from giving the results produced in its
capitalist fatherlands.
The wholesale success of the heavy industries is a gigantic conquest. On that foundation alone it is possible to build. However,
the test of modern industry is the production of delicate mechanisms which demand both technical and general culture. In this
sphere the backwardness of the Soviet Union is still great.
Undoubtedly the most important successes, both quantitative and qualitative , have been achieved in the war industries. The
army and fleet are the most influential clients, and the most fastidious customers. Nevertheless in a series of their public speeches
the heads of the War Department, among them Voroshilov, complain unceasingly: "We are not always fully satisfied with the
quality of the products which you give us for the Red Army." It is not hard to sense the anxiety which these cautious words
conceal.
The products of machine manufacture, says the head of the heavy industries in an official report, "must be good quality and
unfortunately are not". And again: "machines with us are expensive." As always the speaker refrains from giving accurate
comparative data in relation to world production.
The tractor is the pride of Soviet industry. But the coefficient of effective use of the tractors is very low. During the last industrial
year, it was necessary to subject 18 per cent of the tractors to capital repairs. A considerable number of them, moreover, got
out of order again at the very height of the tilling season. According to certain calculations, the machine and tractor stations will
cover expenses only with a harvest of 20 to 22 hundredweight of grain per hectare. At present, when the average harvest is less
than half of that, the state is compelled to disburse billions to meet the deficit.
Things are still worse in the sphere of auto transport. In America a truck travels 60- to 80-, or even 100,000 kilometer a year;
in the Soviet Union only 20,000 -- that is, a third or a fourth as much. Out of every 100 machines, only 55 are working; the rest
are undergoing repairs or awaiting them. The cost of repairs is double the cost of all the new machines put out. It is no wonder
that the state accounting office reports: "Auto transport is nothing but a heavy burden on the cost of production."
The increase of carrying power of the railroads is accompanied, according to the president of the Council of People's
Commissars, "by innumerable wrecks and breakdowns". The fundamental cause is the same: low skill of labor inherited from the
past. The struggle to keep the switches in neat condition is becoming in its way a heroic exploit, about which prize switchgirls
make reports in the Kremlin to the highest circles of power. Water transport, notwithstanding the progress of recent years, is far
behind that of the railroads. Periodically the newspapers are speckled with communications about "the abominable operation of
marine transport", "extremely low quality of ship repairs", etc.
In the light industries, conditions are even less favorable than in the heavy. A unique law of Soviet industry may be formulated
thus: commodities are as a general rule worse the nearer they stand to the mass consumer. In the textile industry, according to
Pravda, "there is a shamefully large percentage of defective goods, poverty of selection, predominance of low grades".
Complaints of the bad quality of articles of wide consumption appear periodically in the press: "clumsy ironware"; "ugly furniture,
badly put together and carelessly finished"; "you can't find decent buttons"; "the system of social food supply works absolutely
unsatisfactorily". And so on endlessly.
To characterize industrial progress by quantitative indices alone, without considering quality, is almost like describing a man's
physique by his height and disregarding his chest measurements. Moreover, to judge correctly the dynamic of Soviet industry, it
is necessary, along with qualitative corrections, to have always in mind the fact that swift progress in some branches is
accompanied by backwardness in others. The creation of gigantic automobile factories is paid for in the scarcity and bad
maintenance of the highways. "The dilapidation of our roads is extraordinary. On our most important highway -- Moscow to
Yaroslavl -- automobiles can make only 10 kilometers [6 miles] an hour." (Izvestia) The president of the State Planning
Commission asserts that the country still maintains "the tradition of pristine roadlessness".
Municipal economy is in a similar condition. New industrial towns arise in a brief span; at the same time dozens of old towns are
running to seed. The capitals and industrial centers are growing and adorning themselves; expensive theatres and clubs are
springing up in various parts of the country; but the dearth of living quarters is unbearable. Dwelling houses remains as a rule
uncared for. "We build badly and at great expense. Our houses are being used up and not restored. We repair little and badly."
(Izvestia)
The entire Soviet economy consists of such disproportions. Within certain limits they are inevitable, since it had been and
remains necessary to begin the advance with the most important branches. Nevertheless the backwardness of certain branches
greatly decreases the useful operation operation of others. From the standpoint of an ideal planning directive, which would
guarantee not the maximum tempo in separate branches, but the optimum result in economy as a whole, the statistical coefficient
of growth would be lower in the first period, but economy as a whole, and particularly the consumer, would be the gainer. In the
long run the general industrial dynamic would also gain.
In the official statistics, the production and repair of automobiles is added in with the total of industrial production. From the
standpoint of economic efficiency, it would be proper to subtract, not add. This observation applies to many other branches of
industry. For that reason, all total estimates in rubles have only a relative value. It is not certain what a ruble is. It is not always
certain what hides behind it -- the construction of a machine, or its premature breakdown. If, according to an estimate in
"stable" rubles, the total production of the big industries has increased by comparison with the pre-war level 6 times, the actual
output of oil, coal and iron measured in tons will have increased 3 to 3 1/2 times. The fundamental cause of this divergence of
indices lies in the fact that Soviet industry has created a series of new branches unknown to tzarist Russia, but a supplementary
cause is to be found in the tendentious manipulation of statistics. It is well known that every bureaucracy has an organic need to
doll-up the facts.
3.
Production Per Capita of the Population
The average individual productivity of labor in the Soviet Union is still very low. In the best metal foundry, according to the
acknowledgment of its director, the output of iron and steel per individual worker is a third as much as the average output of
American foundries. A comparison of average figures in both countries would probably give a ratio of 1 to 5, or worse. In these
circumstances the announcement that blast furnaces are used "better" in the Soviet Union than in capitalist countries remains
meaningless. The function of technique is to economize human labor and nothing else. In the timber and building industries things
are even less favorable than in the metal industry. To each worker in the quarries in the United States falls 5,000 tons a year, in
the Soviet Union 500 tons -- that is, 1/10 as much. Such crying differences are explained not only by a lack of skilled workers,
but still more by bad organization of the work. The bureaucracy spurs on the workers with all its might, but is unable to make a
proper use of labor power. In agriculture things are still less favorable, of course, than in industry. To the low productivity of
labor corresponds a low national income, and consequently a low standard of life for the masses of the people.
When they assert that in volume of industrial production the Soviet Union in 1936 will occupy the 1st place in Europe -- of itself
this progress is gigantic! -- they leave out of consideration not only the quality and production cost of the goods, but also the
size of the population. The general level of development of a country, however, and especially the living standard of the masses
can be defined, at least in rough figures, only by dividing the products by the number of consumers. Let us try to carry out this
simple arithmetical operation.
The importance of railroad transport for economy culture and military ends needs no demonstration. The Soviet Union has
83,000 kilometres of railroads, as against 58,000 in Germany, 63,000 in France, 417,000 in the United States. This means that
for every 10,000 people in Germany there are 8.9 kilometres of railroad, in France 15.2, in the United States 33.1, and in the
Soviet Union 5.0. Thus, according to railroad indices, the Soviet Union continues to occupy one of the lowest places in the
civilized world. The merchant fleet, which has tripled in the last five years, stands now approximately on a par with that of
Denmark and Spain. To these facts we must add the still extremely low figure for paved highways. In the Soviet Union 0.6
automobiles were put out for every 1,000 inhabitants. In Great Britain, about 8 (in 1934), in France about 4.5, in the United
States 23 (as against 36.5 in 1928). At the same time in the relative number of horses (about 1 horse to each 10 or 11 citizens)
the Soviet Union, despite the extreme backwardness of its railroad, water and auto transport, does not surpass either France or
the United States, while remaining far behind them in the quality of the stock.
In the sphere of heavy industry, which has attained the most outstanding successes, the comparative indices still remain
unfavorable. The coal output in the Soviet Union for 1935 was about 0.7 tons per person; in Great Britain, almost 5 tons; in the
United States, almost 3 tons (as against 5.4 tons in 1913); in Germany, about 2 tons. Steel: in the Soviet Union, about 67
kilograms [kg = 2 1/5 lbs. ap.] per person, in the United States about 250 kilograms, etc. About the same proportions in pig
and rolled iron. In the Soviet Union, 153 kilowatt hours of electric power was produced per person in 1935, in Great Britain
(1934) 443, in France 363, in Germany 472.
In the light industries, the per capita indices are as a general rule still lower. Of woolen fabric in 1935, less than 1/2 metre per
person, or 8 to 10 times less than in the United States or Great Britain. Woolen cloth is accessible only to privileged Soviet
citizens. For the masses cotton print, of which about 16 metres per person was manufactured, still has to do for winter clothes.
The production of shoes in the Soviet Union now amounts to about one-half pair per person, in Germany more than a pair, in
France a pair and a half, in the United States about three pairs. And this leaves aside the quality index, which would still further
lower the comparison. We may take it for granted that in bourgeois countries the percentage of people who have several pairs
of shoes is considerably higher than in the Soviet Union. But unfortunately the Soviet Union also still stands among the first in
percentage of barefoot people.
Approximately the same correlation, in part still less favorable, prevails in the production of foodstuffs. Notwithstanding Russia's
indubitable progress in recent years, conserves, sausages, cheese, to say nothing of pastry and confections, are still completely
inaccessible to the fundamental mass of the population. Even in the matter of dairy products things are not favorable. In France
and the United States, there is approximately one cow for every five people, in Germany one for every six, in the Soviet Union
one for every eight. But when it comes to giving milk, two Soviet cows must be counted approximately as one. Only in the
production of grainbearing grasses, especially rye, and also in potatoes, does the Soviet Union, computing by population,
considerably surpass the majority of European countries and the United States. But rye bread and potatoes as the predominant
food of the population -- that is the classic symbol of poverty.
The consumption of paper is one of the chief indices of culture. In 1935, the Soviet Union produced less than 4 kg. per person,
the United States over 34 (as against 48 in 1928), and Germany 47 kg. Whereas the United States consumes 12 pencils a year
per inhabitant, the Soviet Union consumers only 4, and those 4 are of such poor quality that their useful work does not exceed
that of one good pencil, or at the outside two. The newspapers frequently complain that the lack of primers, paper, and pencils
paralyzes the work of the schools. It is o wonder that the liquidation of illiteracy, indicated for the 10th anniversary of the
October revolution, is still far from accomplished.
The problem can be similarly illumined by starting from more general considerations. The national income per person in the
Soviet Union is considerably less than in the West. And since capital investment consumes about 25 to 30 per cent --
incomparably more than anywhere else -- the total amount consumed by the popular mass cannot but be considerably lower
than in the advanced capitalist countries.
To be sure, in the Soviet Union there are no possessing classes, whose extravagance is balanced by an under-consumption of
the popular mass. However, the weight of this corrective is not so great as might appear at first glance. The fundamental evil of
the capitalist system is not the extravagance of the possessing classes, however disgusting that may be in itself, but the fact that
in order to guarantee its right to extravagance the bourgeoisie maintains its private ownership of the means of production, thus
condemning the economic system to anarchy and decay. In the matter of luxuries, the bourgeoisie, of course, has a monopoly of
consumption. But in things of prime necessity, the toiling masses constitute the overwhelming majority of consumers. We shall
see later, moreover, that although the Soviet Union has no possessing class in the proper sense of the word, still she has very
privileged commanding strata of the population, who appropriate the lion's share in the sphere of consumption. And so if there is
a lower per capita production of things of prime necessity in the Soviet Union than in the advanced capitalist countries, that does
mean that the standard of living of the Soviet masses still falls below the capitalist level.
The historic responsibility for this situation lies, of course, upon Russia's black and heavy past, her heritage of darkness and
poverty. There was no other way out upon the road of progress except through the overthrow of capitalism. To convince
yourself of this, it is only necessary to cast a glance at the Baltic countries and Poland, once the most advanced parts of the
tzar's empire, and now hardly emerging from the morass. The undying service of the Soviet regime lies in its intense and
successful struggle with Russia's thousand-year-old backwardness. But a correct estimate of what has been attained is the first
condition for further progress.
The Soviet regime is passing through a preparatory stage, importing, borrowing and appropriating the technical and cultural
conquests of the West. The comparative coefficients of production and consumption testify that this preparatory stage is far
from finished. Even under the improbably condition of a continuing complete capitalist standstill, it must still occupy a whole
historic period. That is a first extremely important conclusion which we shall have need of in our further investigation.
Chapter 2
ECONOMIC GROWTH
AND THE ZIGZAGS OF THE LEADERSHIP
1."Military Communism", the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) and the Course Toward the Kulak
2.A sharp turn: "The Five Year Plan in four years" and "Complete collectivization"
1.
"Military Communism", the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) and the Course Toward the Kulak
The line of development of the Soviet economy is far from an uninterrupted and evenly rising curve. In the first 18 years of the
new regime you can clearly distinguish several stages marked by sharp crises. A short outline of the economic history of the
Soviet Union in connection with the policy of the government is absolutely necessary both for diagnosis and prognosis.
The first three years after the revolution were a period of overt and cruel civil war. Economic life was wholly subjected to the
needs of the front. Cultural life lurked in corners and was characterized by a bold range of creative thought, above all the
personal thought of Lenin, with an extraordinary scarcity of material means. That was the period of so-called "military
communism" (1918-21), which forms a heroic parallel to the "military socialism" of the capitalist countries. The economic
problems of the Soviet government in those years came down chiefly to supporting the war industries, and using the scanty
resources left from the past for military purposes and to keep the city population alive. Military communism was, in essence, the
systematic regimentation of consumption in a besieged fortress.
It is necessary to acknowledge, however, that in its original conception it pursued broader aims. The Soviet government hoped
and strove to develop these methods of regimentation directly into a system of planned economy in distribution as well as
production. In other words, from "military communism" it hoped gradually, but without destroying the system, to arrive at
genuine communism. The program of the Bolshevik party adopted in March 1919 said:
"In the sphere of distribution the present task of the Soviet Government is unwaveringly to continue on a planned,
organized and state-wide scale to replace trade by the distribution of products."
Reality, however, came into increasing conflict with the program of "military communism". Production continually declined, and
not only because of the quenching of the stimulus of personal interest among the producers. The city demanded grain and raw
materials from the rural districts, giving nothing in exchange except varicolored pieces of paper, named, according to ancient
memory, money. And the muzhik buried his stores in the ground. The government sent out armed workers' detachments for
grain. The muzhik cut down his sowings. Industrial production of steel fell from 4.2 million tons to 183,000 tons -- that is, to
1/23 of what it had been. The total harvest of grain decreased from 801 million hundredweight to 503 million in 1922. That was
a year of terrible hunger. Foreign trade at the same time plunged from 2.9 billion rubles to 30 million. The collapse of the
productive forces surpassed anything of the kind that history had ever seen. The country, and the government with it, were at
the very edge of the abyss.
The utopian hopes of the epoch of military communism came in later for a cruel, and in many respects just, criticism. The
theoretical mistake of the ruling party remains inexplicable, however, only if you leave out of account the fact that all calculations
at that time were based on the hope of an early victory of the revolution in the West. It was considered self-evident that the
victorious German proletariat would supply Soviet Russia, on credit against future food and raw materials, not only with
machines and articles of manufacture, but also with tens of thousands of highly skilled workers, engineers and organizers. And
there is no doubt that if the proletarian revolution had triumphed in Germany -- a thing that was prevented solely and exclusively
by the Social Democrats -- the economic development of the Soviet Union as well as of Germany would have advanced with
such gigantic strides that the fate of Europe and the world would today have been incomparably more auspicious. It can be said
with certainty, however, that even in that happy event it would still have been necessary to renounce the direct state distribution
of products in favor of the methods of commerce.
Lenin explained the necessity of restoring the market by the existence in the country of millions of isolated peasant enterprises,
unaccustomed to define their economic relations with the outside world except through trade. Trade circulation would establish
a "connection", as it was called, between the peasant and the nationalized industries. The theoretical formula for this
"connection" is very simple: industry should supply the rural districts with necessary goods at such prices as would enable the
state to forego forcible collection of the products of peasant labor.
To mend economic relations with the rural districts was undoubtedly the most critical and urgent task of the NEP. A brief
experiment showed, however, that industry itself, in spite of its socialized character, had need of the methods of money payment
worked out by capitalism. A planned economy cannot rest merely on intellectual data. The play of supply and demand remains
for a long period a necessary material basis and indispensable corrective.
The market, legalized by the NEP, began, with the help of an organized currency, to do its work. As early as 1923, thanks to
an initial stimulus from the rural districts, industry began to revive. And moreover it immediately hit a high tempo. It is sufficient
to say that production doubled in 1922 and 1923, and by 1926 had already reached the pre-war level -- that is, had grown
more than five times its size in 1921. At the same time, although at a much more modest tempo, the harvests were increasing.
Beginning with the critical year 1923, the disagreements observed earlier in the ruling party on the relation between industry and
agriculture began to grow sharp. In a country which had completely exhausted its stores and reserves, industry could not
develop except by borrowing grain and raw material from the peasants. Too heavy "forced loans" of products, however, would
destroy the stimulus to labor. Not believing in the future prosperity, the peasant would answer the grain expeditions from the city
by a sowing strike. Too light collections, on the other hand, threatened a standstill. Not receiving industrial products, the
peasants would turn to industrial labor to satisfy their own needs, and revive the old home crafts. The disagreements in the party
began about the question how much to take from the villages for industry, in order to hasten the period of dynamic equilibrium
between them. The dispute was immediately complicated by the question of the social structure of the village itself.
In the spring of 1923, at a congress of the party, a representative of the "Left Opposition" -- not yet, however, known by that
name -- demonstrated the divergence of industrial and agricultural prices in the form of an ominous diagram. This phenomenon
was then first called "the scissors", a term which has since become almost international. If the further lagging of industry -- said
the speaker -- continues to open these scissors, then a break between city and country is inevitable.
The peasants made a sharp distinction between the democratic and agrarian revolution which the Bolshevik party had carried
through, and its policy directed toward laying the foundations of socialism. The expropriation of the landlords and the state lands
brought the peasants upwards of half a billion gold rubles a year. In prices of state products, however, the peasants were paying
out a much larger sum. So long as the net result of the two revolutions, democratic and socialistic, bound together by the firm
know of October, reduced itself for the peasantry to a loss of hundreds of millions, a union of the two classes remained dubious.
The scattered character of the peasant economy, inherited from the past, was aggravated by the results of the October
revolution. The number of independent farms rose during the subsequent decade from 16 to 25 million, which naturally
strengthened the purely consummatory character of the majority of peasant enterprises. That was one of the causes of the lack
of agricultural products.
A small commodity economy inevitably produces exploiters. In proportion as the villages recovered, the differentiation within
the peasant mass began to grow. This development fell into the old well-trodden ruts. The growth of the kulak [well-off peasant,
employing labor] far outstripped the general growth of agriculture. The policy of the government under the slogan "face to the
country" was actually a turning of its face to the kulak. Agricultural taxes fell upon the poor far more heavily than upon the well
to do, who moreover skimmed the cream of the state credits. The surplus grain, chiefly in possession of the upper strata of the
village, was used to enslave the poor and for speculative selling to the bourgeois elements of the cities. Bukharin, the theoretician
of the ruling faction at that time, tossed t the peasantry his famous slogan, "Get rich!" In the language of theory that was
supposed to mean a gradual growing of the kulaks into socialism. In practice it meant the enrichment of the minority at the
expense of the overwhelming majority.
Captive to its own policy, the government was compelled to retreat step by step before the demands of a rural petty
bourgeoisie. In 1925 the hiring of labor power and the renting of land were legalized for agriculture. The peasantry was
becoming polarized between the small capitalist on one side and the hired hand on the other. At the same time, lacking industrial
commodities, the state was crowded out of the rural market. Between the kulak and the petty home craftsman there appeared,
as though from under the earth, the middleman. The state enterprises themselves, in search of raw material, were more and
more compelled to deal with the private trader. The rising tide of capitalism was visible everywhere. Thinking people saw plainly
that a revolution in the forms of property does not solve the problem of socialism, but only raises it.
In 1925, when the course toward the kulak was in full swing, Stalin began to prepare for the denationalization of the land. To a
question asked at his suggestion by a Soviet journalist: "Would it not be expedient in the interest of agriculture to deed over to
each peasant for 10 years the parcel of land tilled by him?", Stalin answered: "Yes, and ever for 40 years." The People's
Commissar of Agriculture of Georgia, upon Stalin's own initiative, introduced the draft of a law denationalizing the land. The aim
was to give the farmer confidence in his own future. While this was going on, in the spring of 1926, almost 60 per cent of the
grain destined for sale was in the hands of 6 per cent of the peasant proprietors! The state lacked grain not only for foreign
trade, but even for domestic needs. The insignificance of exports made it necessary to forego bringing in articles of manufacture,
and cut down to the limit the import of machinery and raw materials.
Retarding industrialization and striking a blow at the general mass of the peasants, this policy of banking on the well-to-do
farmer revealed unequivocally inside of two years, 1924-26, its political consequences. It brought about an extraordinary
increase of self-consciousness in the petty bourgeoisie of both city and village, a capture by them of many of the lower Soviets,
an increase of the power and self-confidence of the bureaucracy, a growing pressure upon the workers, and the complete
suppression of party and Soviet democracy. The growth of the kulaks alarmed two eminent members of the ruling group,
Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were, significantly, presidents of the Soviets of the two chief proletarian centers, Leningrad and
Moscow. But the provinces, and still more the bureaucracy, stood firm for Stalin. The course toward the well-to-do farmer won
out. In 1926, Zinoviev and Kamenev with their adherents joined the Opposition of 1923 (the "Trotskyists").
Of course "in principle" the ruling group did not even then renounce the collectivization of agriculture. They merely put it off a
few decades in their perspective. The future People's Commissar of Agriculture, Yakovlev, wrote in 1927 that,
although the socialist reconstruction of the village can be accomplished only through collectivization, still "this obviously
cannot be done in one, two or three years, and maybe not in one decade". "The collective farms and communes," he
continued, "... are now, and will for a long time undoubtedly remain, only small islands in a sea of individual peasant
holdings."
And in truth at that period only 8 per cent of the peasant families belonged to the collectives.
The struggle in the party about the so-called "general line", which had come to the surface in 1923, became especially intense
and passionate in 1926. In its extended platform, which took up all the problems of industry and economy, the Left Opposition
wrote:
"The party ought to resist and crush all tendencies directed to the annulment or undermining of the nationalization of land,
one of the pillars of the proletarian dictatorship."
On that question, the Opposition gained the day; direct attempts against nationalization were abandoned. but the problem, of
course, involved more than forms of property in land.
"To the growth of individual farming [fermerstvo] in the country we must oppose a swifter growth of the collective farms.
It is necessary systematically year by year to set aside a considerable sum to aid the poor peasants organized in
collectives. The whole work of the co-operatives ought to be imbued with the purpose of converting small production
into a vast collectivized production."
But this broad program of collectivization was stubbornly regarded as utopian for the coming years. During the preparations for
the 15th Party Congress, whose task was to expel the Left Opposition, Molotov, the future president of the Soviet of People's
Commissars, said repeatedly:
"We not slip down (!) into poor peasants illusions about the collectivization of the broad peasant masses. In the present
circumstances it is no longer possible."
It was then, according to the calendar, the end of 1927. So far was the ruling group at that time from its own future policy
toward the peasants!
Those same years (1923-28) were passed in a struggle of the ruling coalition, Stalin, Molotov, Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin
(Zinoviev and Kamenev went over to the Opposition in the beginning of 1926), against the advocates of "super-industrialization"
and planned leadership. The future historian will re-establish with no small surprise the moods of spiteful disbelief in bold
economic initiative with which the government of the socialist state was wholly imbued. An acceleration of the tempo of
industrialization took place empirically, under impulses from without, with a crude smashing of all calculations and an
extraordinary increase of overhead expenses. The demand for a five-year plan, when advanced by the Opposition in 1923, was
met with mockery in the spirit of the petty bourgeois who fears "a leap into the unknown". As late as April 1927, Stalin asserted
at a plenary meeting of the Central Committee that to attempt to build the Dnieperstroy hydro-electric station would be the
same thing for us as for a muzhik to buy a gramophone instead of a cow. This winged aphorism summed up the whole program.
It is worth nothing that during those years the bourgeois press of the whole world, and the social-democratic press after it,
repeated with sympathy the official attribution to the "Left Opposition" of industrial romanticism.
Amid the noise of party discussions the peasants were replying to the lack of industrial goods with a more and more stubborn
strike. They would not take their grain to market, nor increase their sowings, The right wing (Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin), who
were setting the tone at that period, demanded a broader scope for capitalist tendencies in the village through a raising of the
price of grain, even at the cost of a lowered tempo in industry. The sole possible way out under such a policy would have been
to import articles of manufacture in exchange for exported agricultural raw materials. But this would have meant to form a
"connection" not between peasant economy and the socialist industries, but between the kulak and world capitalism. It was not
worth while to make the October revolution for that.
"To accelerate industrialization," answered the representatives of the Opposition at the party conference of 1926, "in
particular by way of increased taxation on the kulak, will produce a large mass of goods and lower market prices, and
this will be to the advantage both of the worker and of the majority of the peasants... Face to the village does not mean
turn your back to industry; it means industry to the village. For the 'face' of the state, if it does not include industry, is of
no use to the village."
In answer Stalin thundered against the "fantastic plans" of the Opposition. Industry must not "rush ahead, breaking away from
agriculture and abandoning the tempo of accumulation in our country." The party decisions continued to repeat these maxims of
passive accommodation to the well-off upper circles of the peasantry. The 15th Party Congress, meeting in December 1927 for
the final smashing of the "super-industrializers", gave warning of the "danger of a too great involvement of state capital in big
construction". The ruling faction at that time still refused to see any other dangers.
In the economic year 1927-28, the so-called restoration period in which industry worked chiefly with pre-revolutionary
machinery, and agriculture with the old tools, was coming to an end. For any further advance independent industrial construction
on a large scale was necessary. It was impossible to lead any further gropingly and without plan.
The hypothetic possibilities of socialist industrialization had been analyzed by the Opposition as early as 1923-25. their general
conclusion was that, after exhausting the equipment inherited from the bourgeoisie, the Soviet industries might, on the basis of
socialist accumulation, achieve a rhythm of growth wholly impossible under capitalism. The leaders of the ruling faction openly
ridiculed our cautious coefficients in the vicinity of 15 to 18 per cent as the fantastic music of an unknown future. This
constituted at that time the essence of the struggle against "Trotskyism".
The first official draft of the five-year-plan, prepared at last in 1927, was completely saturated with the spirit of stingy tinkering.
The growth of industrial production was projected with a tempo declining yearly from 9 to 4 per cent. Consumption per person
was to increase during the whole five years 12 per cent! The incredible timidity of thought in this first plan comes out clearly in
the fact that the state budget at the end of the five years was to constitute in all 16 per cent of the national income, whereas the
budget of tzarist Russia, which had no intention of creating a socialist society, swallowed 18 per cent! It is perhaps worth adding
that the engineers and economists who drew up this plan were some years later severely judged and punished by law as
conscious sabotagers acting under the direction of foreign powers. The accused might have answered, had they dared, that their
planning work corresponded perfectly to the "general line" of the Politburo at that time and was carried out under its orders.
The struggle of the tendencies was now translated into arithmetical language. "To prevent on the 10th anniversary of the
October revolution such a piddling and completely pessimistic plan," said the platform of the Opposition, "means in reality to
work against socialism." A year later, the Politburo adopted a new five-year plan with an average yearly increase of production
amounting to 9 per cent. The actual course of the development, however, revealed a stubborn tendency to approach the
coefficients of the "super-industrializers". After another year, when the governmental policy had radically changed, the State
Planning Commission drew up a third five-year- plan, whose rate of growth came far nearer than could have been expected to
the hypothetical prognosis made by the Opposition in 1923.
The real history of the economic policy of the Soviet Union, as we thus see, is very different from the official legend.
Unfortunately, such pious investigators as the Webbs pay not the slightest attention to this.
2.
A Sharp Turn: "Five-year Plan in Four Years" and "Complete Collectivization"
Irresoluteness before the individual peasant enterprises, distrust of large plans, defense of a minimum tempo, neglect of
international problems -- all this taken together formed the essence of the theory of "socialism in one country", first put forward
by Stalin in the autumn of 1924 after the defeat of the proletariat in Germany. Not to hurry with industrialization, not to quarrel
with the muzhik, not to count on world revolution, and above all to protect the power of the party bureaucracy from criticism!
The differentiation of the peasantry was denounced as an intervention of the Opposition. The above-mentioned Yakovlev
dismissed the Central Statistical Bureau whose records gave the kulak a greater place than was satisfactory to the authorities,
while the leaders tranquilly asserted that the goods famine was out-living itself, that "a peaceful tempo in economic development
was at hand", that the grain collections would in the future be carried on more "evenly", etc. The strengthened kulak carried with
him the middle peasant and subjected the cities to a grain blockade. In January 1928 the working class stood face-to-face with
the shadow of an advancing famine. History knows how to play spiteful jokes. In that very month, when the kulaks were taking
the revolution by the throat, the representatives of the Left Opposition were thrown into prison or banished to different parts of
Siberia in punishment for their "panic" before the specter of the kulak.
The government tried to pretend that the grain strike was caused by the naked hostility of the kulak (where did he come from?)
to the socialist state -- that is, by ordinary political motives. But the kulak is little inclined to that kind of "idealism". If he hid his
grain, it was because the bargain offered him was unprofitable. For the very same reason he managed to bring under his
influence wide sections of the peasantry. Mere repressions against kulak sabotage were obviously inadequate. It was necessary
to change the policy. Even yet, however, no little time was spent in vacillation.
Rykov, then still head of the government, announced in July 1928:
"To develop individual farms is... the chief task of the party."
And Stalin seconded him:
"There are people who think that individual farms have exhausted their usefulness, that we should not support them....
These people have nothing in common with the line of our party."
Less than a year later, the line of the party had nothing in common with these words. The dawn of "complete collectivization"
was on the horizon.
The new orientation was arrived at just as empirically as the preceding, and by way of a hidden struggle within the governmental
bloc.
"The groups of the right and center are united by a general hostility to the Opposition" -- thus the platform of the Left
gave warning a year before -- "and the cutting off of the latter will inevitably accelerate the coming struggle between these
two."
And so it happened. The leaders of the disintegrating bloc would not for anything, of course, admit that this prognosis of the left
wing, like many others, had come true. As late as the 19th of October, 1918, Stalin announced publicly:
"It is time to stop gossiping about the existence of a Right deviation and a conciliatory attitude towards it in the Politburo
of our Central Committee."
Both groups at that time were feeling out the party machine. The repressed party was living on dark rumors and guesses. But
just in a few months the official press, with its usual freedom from embarrassment, announced that the head of the government,
Rykov, "had speculated on the economic difficulties of the Soviet power"; that the head of the Communist International,
Bukharin, was "a conducting wire of bourgeois-liberal influences"; that Tomsky, president of the all-Russian Central Council of
Trade Unions, was nothing but a miserable trade-unionist. All three, Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky, were member of the
Politburo. Whereas the whole preceding struggle against the Left Opposition had taken its weapons from the right groups,
Bukharin was now able, without sinning against the truth, to accuse Stalin of using in his struggle with the Right a part of the
condemned Left Opposition platform.
In one way or another the change was made. The slogan "Get rich!", together with the theory of the kulak's growing painlessly
into socialism, was belatedly, but all the more decisively, condemned. Industrialization was put upon the order of the day.
Self-satisfied quietism was replaced by a panic of haste. The half-forgotten slogan of Lenin, "catch up with and outstrip", was
filled out with the words, "in the shortest possible time". The minimalist five-year plan, already confirmed in principle by a
congress of the party, gave place to a new plan, the fundamental elements of which were borrowed in toto from the platform of
the shattered Left Opposition. Dnieperstroy, only yesterday likened to a gramophone, today occupied the center of attention.
After the first new successes the slogan was advanced: "Achieve the five-year plan in four years." The startled empires now
decided that everything was possible. Opportunism, as has often happened in history, turned into its opposite, adventurism.
Whereas from 1923 to 1928 the Politburo had been ready to accept Bukharin's philosophy of a "tortoise tempo", it now lightly
jumped from a 20 to a 30 per cent yearly growth, trying to convert every partial and temporary achievement into a norm, and
losing sight of the conditioning interrelation of the different branches of industry. The financial holes in the plan were stopped up
with printed paper. During the years of the first plan the number of bank notes in circulation rose from 1.7 billion to 5.5, and by
the beginning of the second five-year plan had reached 8.4 billion rubles. The bureaucracy not only freed itself from the political
control of the masses, upon whom this forced industrialization was laying an unbearable burden, but also from the automatic
control exercised by the chervonetz [theoretical par = $5]. The currency system, put on a solid basis at the beginning of the
NEP, was now again shaken to its roots.
The chief danger, however, and that not only for the fulfillment of th plan but for the regime itself, appeared from the side of the
peasants.
On the 15th of February, 1928, the population of the country learned with surprise from an editorial in Pravda that the villages
looked not at all the way they had been portrayed up to that moment by the authorities, but on the contrary very much as the
expelled Left Opposition had presented them. The press which only yesterday had been denying the existence of the kulaks,
today, on a signal from above, discovered them not only in the villages, but in the party itself. It was revealed that the communist
nuclei were frequently dominated by rich peasants possessing complicated machinery, employing hired labor, concealing from
the government hundreds and thousands of poods of grain, and implacably denouncing the "Trotskyist" policy. The newspapers
vied with each other in printing sensational exposures of how kulaks in the position of local were denying admission to the party
to poor peasants and hired hands. All the old criteria were turned upside down; minuses and pluses changed places.
In order to feed the cities, it was necessary immediately to take from the kulak the daily bread. This could be achieved only by
force. The expropriation of the grain reserve reserve, and that not only of the kulak but of the middle peasant, was called, in the
official language, "extraordinary measures". This phrase is supposed to mean that tomorrow everything will fall back into the old
rut. But the peasants did not believe fine words, and they were right. The violent seizures of grain deprived the well-off peasants
of their motive to increased sowings. The hired hands and the poor peasant found themselves without work. Agriculture again
arrived in a blind alley, and with it the state. It was necessary at any cost to reform the "general line".
Stalin and Molotov, still giving individual farming the chief place, began to emphasize the necessity of a swifter development of
the soviet and collective farms. But since the bitter need of food did not permit a cessation of military expenditures into the
country, the program of promoting individual farms was left hanging in the air. It was necessary to "slip down" to collectivization.
The temporary "extraordinary measures" for the collection of grain developed unexpectedly into a program of "liquidation of the
kulaks as a class". From the shower of contradictory commands, more copious than food rations, it became evident that on the
peasant question the government had not only no five-year plan, but not even a five months' program.
According to the new plan, drawn up under the spur of a food crisis, collective farms were at the end of five years to comprise
about 20 per cent of the peasant holdings. This program -- whose immensity will be clear when you consider that during the
preceding 10 years collectivization had affected less than 1 per cent of the country -- was nevertheless by the middle of the five
years left far behind. In November 1929, Stalin, abandoning his own vacillations, announced the end of individual farming. The
peasants, he said, are entering the collective farms "in whole villages, counties and even provinces". Yakovlev, who two years
before had insisted that the collectives would for many years remain only "islands in a sea of peasant holdings", now received an
order as People's Commissar of Agriculture to "liquidate the kulaks as a class", and establish complete collectivization at the
"earliest possible date". In the year 1929, the proportion of collective farms rose from 1.7 per cent to 3.9 per cent. In 1930 it
rose to 23.6, in 1931 to 52.7, in 1932 to 61.5 per cent.
At the present time hardly anybody would be foolish enough to repeat the twaddle of liberals to the effect that collectivization as
a whole was accomplished by naked force. In former historic epochs the peasants in their struggle for land have at one time
raised an insurrection against the landlords, at another sent a stream of colonizers into untilled regions, at still another rushed into
all kinds of sects which promised to reward the muzhik with heaven's vacancies for his narrow quarters on earth. Now, after the
expropriation of the great estates and the extreme parcellation of land, the union of these small parcels into big tracts had
become a question of life and death for the peasants, for agriculture, and for society as a whole.
The problem, however, is far from settled by these general historic considerations. The real possibilities of collectivization are
determined, not by the depth of the impasse in the villages and not by the administrative energy of the government, but primarily
by the existing productive resources -- that is, the ability of the industries to furnish large-scale agriculture with the requisite
machinery. These material conditions were lacking. The collective farms were set up with an equipment suitable in the main only
for small-scale farming. In these conditions an exaggeratedly swift collectivization took the character of an economic adventure.
Caught unawares by the radicalism of its own shift of policy, the government did not and could not make even an elementary
political preparation for the new course. Not only the peasant masses, but even the local organs of power, were ignorant of
what was being demanded of them. The peasants were heated white hot by rumors that their cattle and property were to be
seized by the state. This rumor, too, was not so far from the truth. Actually realizing their own former caricature of the Left
Opposition, the bureaucracy "robbed the villages". Collectivization appeared to the peasant primarily in the form of an
expropriation of all his belongings. They collectivized not only horses, cows, sheep, pigs, but even new-born chickens. They
"dekulakized", as one foreign observer wrote, "down to the felt shoes, which they dragged from the feet of little children." As a
result there was an epidemic selling of cattle for a song by the peasants, or a slaughter of cattle for meat and hides.
In January 1930, at a Moscow congress, a member of the Central Committee, Andreyev, drew a two-sided picture of
collectivization:
On the one side he asserted that a collective movement powerfully developing throughout the whole country "will now
destroy upon its road each and every obstacle"; on the other, a predatory sale by the peasants of their own implements,
stock and even seeds before entering the collectives "is assuming positively menacing proportions".
However contradictory those two generalizations may be, they show correctly from opposite sides the epidemic character of
collectivization as a measure of despair. "Complete collectivization", wrote the same foreign critic, "plunged the national
economy into a condition of ruin almost without precedent, as though a three years' war had passed over."
Twenty-five million isolated peasant egoisms, which yesterday had been the sole motive force of agriculture -- weak like an old
farmer's nag, but nevertheless forces -- the bureaucracy tried to replace at one gesture by the commands of 2,000 collective
farm administrative offices, lacking technical equipment, agronomic knowledge and the support of the peasants themselves. The
dire consequences of this adventurism soon followed, and they lasted for a number of years. The total harvest of grain, which
had risen in 1930 to 835 million hundredweight, fell in the next two years below 700 million. The difference does not seem
catastrophic in itself, but it meant a loss of just that quantity of grain needed to keep the towns even at their customary hunger
norm. In technical culture, the results were still worse. On the eve of collectivization the production of sugar had reached almost
100 million poods [1 pood = ap. 36 lbs.], and at the height of complete collectivization it had fallen, owing to a lack of beets, to
48 million poods -- that is, to half what it had been. But the most devastating hurricane hit the animal kingdom. The number of
horses fell 55 per cent -- from 34.6 million in 1929 to 15.6 million in 1934. The number of horned cattle fell from 30.7 million to
19.5 million -- that is, 40 per cent. The number of pigs, 55 per cent; sheep, 66 per cent. The destruction of people -- by
hunger, cold, epidemics and measures of repression -- is unfortunately less accurately tabulated than the slaughter of stock, but
it also mounts up to millions. The blame for these sacrifices lies not upon collectivization, but upon the blind, violent, gambling
methods with which it was carried through. The bureaucracy foresaw nothing. Even the constitutions of the collectives, which
made an attempt to bind up the personal interests of the peasants with the welfare of the farm, were not published until after the
unhappy villages had been thus cruelly laid waste.
The forced character of this new course arose from the necessity of finding some salvation from the consequences of the policy
of 1923-28. But even so, collectivization could and should have assumed a more reasonable tempo and more deliberated
forms. having in its hands both the power and the industries, the bureaucracy could have regulated the process without carrying
the nation to the edge of disaster. They could have, and should have, adopted tempos better corresponding to the material and
moral resources of the country.
"Under favorable circumstances, external and external," wrote the emigre organ of the "Left Opposition" in 1930, "the
material- technical conditions of agriculture can in the course of some 10 of 15 years be transformed to the bottom, and
provide the productive basis for collectivization. However, during the intervening years there would be time to overthrow
the Soviet power more than once."
This warning was not exaggerated. Never before had the breath of destruction hung so directly above the territory of the
October revolution, as in the years of complete collectivization. Discontent, distrust, bitterness, were corroding the country. The
disturbance of the currency, the mounting up of stable, "conventional", and free market prices, the transition from a similacrum of
trade between the state and the peasants to a grain, meat and milk levy, the life-and-death struggle with mass plunderings of the
collective property and mass concealment of these plunderings, the purely military mobilization of the party for the struggle
against kulak sabotage (after the "liquidation" of the kulaks as a class) together with this a return to food cards and hunger
rations, and finally a restoration of the passport system -- all these measures revived throughout the country the atmosphere of
the seemingly so long ended civil war.
The supply to the factories of food and raw materials grew worse from season to season. Unbearable working conditions
caused a migration of labor power, malingering, careless work, breakdown of machines, a high percentage of trashy products
and general low quality. The average productivity of labor declined 11.7 per cent in 1931. According to an incidental
acknowledgement of Molotov, printed in the whole Soviet press, industrial production in 1932 rose only 8.5 per cent, instead of
the 36 per cent indicated by the year's plan. To be sure, the world was informed soon after this that the five-year plan had been
fulfilled in four years and three months. But that means only that the cynicism of the bureaucracy in its manipulations of statistics
and public opinion is without limit. That, however, is not the chief thing. Not the fate of the five-year plan, but the fate of the
regime was at stake.
The regime survived.
But that is the merit of the regime itself, which had put down deep roots in the popular soil. It is in no less degree due to
favorable external circumstances. In those years of economic chaos and civil was in the villages, the Soviet Union was
essentially paralyzed in the face of a foreign enemy. The discontent of the peasantry swept through the army. Mistrust and
vacillation demoralized the bureaucratic machine, and the commanding cadres. A blow either from the East or West at that
period might have had fatal consequences.
Fortunately, the first years of a crisis in trade and industry had created throughout the capitalist world moods of bewildered
watchful waiting. Nobody was ready for war; nobody dared attempt it. Moreover, in no one of the hostile countries was there
an adequate realization of the acuteness of these social convulsions which where shaking the land of soviets under the roar of the
official music in honor of the "general line".
* * *
In spite of its brevity, our historic outline shows, we hope, how far removed the actual development of the workers' state has
been from an idyllic picture of the gradual and steady piling up of successes. From the crises of the past we shall later on derive
important indications for the future. But, besides that, a historic glance at the economic policy of the Soviet government and its
zigzags has seemed to us necessary in order to destroy that artificially inculcated individualistic fetishism which finds the sources
of success, both real and pretended, in the extraordinary quality of the leadership, and not in the conditions of socialized
property created by the revolution.
The objective superiority of the new social regime reveals itself, too, of course, in the methods of the leaders. But these methods
reflect equally the economic and cultural backwardness of the country, and the petty-bourgeois provincial conditions in which
the ruling cadres were formed.
It would be the crudest mistake to infer from this that the policy of the Soviet leaders is of third-rate importance. There is no
other government in the world in whose hands the fate of the whole country is concentrated to such a degree. The successes
and failures of an individual capitalist depend, not wholly of course, but to a very considerable and sometimes decisive degree,
upon his personal qualities. Mutatis mutandis, the Soviet government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the
position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise. The centralized character of the national economy converts
the state power into a factor of enormous significance. But for that very reason the policy of the government must be judged, not by summarized results, not by naked statistical data, but by the specific role which conscious foresight and planned leadership have played in achieving these results.
The zigzags of the governmental course have reflected not only the objective contradictions of the situation, but also the
inadequate ability of the leaders to understand these contradictions in season and react prophylactically against them. It is not
easy to express mistakes of the leadership in bookkeeper's magnitudes, but our schematic exposition of the history of these
zigzags permits the conclusion that they have imposed upon the Soviet economy an immense burden of overhead expenses.
It remains of course incomprehensible -- at least with a rational approach to history -- how and why a faction the least rich of all
in ideas, and the most burdened with mistakes, should have gained the upper hand over all other groups, and concentrated an
unlimited power in its hands. Our further analysis will give us a key to this problem too. We shall see, at the same time, how the
bureaucratic methods of autocratic leadership are coming into sharper and sharper conflict with the demands of economy and
culture, and with what inevitable necessity new crises and disturbances arise in the development of the Soviet Union.
However, before taking up the dual role of the "socialist" bureaucracy, we must answer the question: What is the net result of
the preceding successes? Is socialism really achieved in the Soviet Union? Or, more cautiously: Do the present economic and
cultural achievements constitute a guarantee against the danger of capitalist restoration -- just as bourgeois society at a certain
stage of its development became insured by its own successes against a restoration of serfdom and feudalism?
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