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Unearthing
The Stalin Era
Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932
by Hiroaki Kuromiya
(Cambridge University Press, 1990)
The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization
by Lynne Viola
(Oxford University Press, 1987)
By B.W.
In the last few years, the rulers of the former Soviet Union have
openly repudiated the entire period of socialism in the USSR and
have adopted nakedly capitalist political and economic forms for
their rule in the various republics. An important part of this evolution
has been rewriting history to justify and promote these changes,
to convince the oppressed there and around the world that socialism
was a failure, and that they have no alternative to capitalism.
The period of Tsarism is now portrayed as a golden age whose great
potential was thrown away by the “aberration” of the Bolshevik Revolution
which led to what is now called the “dark days” of Stalin’s rule.
These developments underscore the importance of a new
trend of Western historians known in academic circles as “revisionists”,
not because they “revise” Marxism-Leninism but because they revise
the “totalitarian” histories of the USSR which have long dominated
in the West.1 Whereas the totalitarian historians depict
the USSR under Lenin and especially Stalin as being subjected to
the iron will of a single despot, with the masses simply silent
victims, the “revisionists” point out the role of different class
forces in the USSR in the socialist period, including a number of
accomplishments of the Soviet revolutionaries. One of these authors,
H Kuromiya, describes this trend: “The revolution appears in these
[revisionist] works not merely as a revolution from above but also
as one that was to some extent politically pressed and supported
‘from below’. So uncritically have Western historians assumed that
Stalin intimidated and terrorised the whole society that the question
of popular support has largely escaped them.” These historians do
not claim to be revolutionary, and they are not. As is implied in
Kuromiya’s statement, they view the state not as dictatorship of
one class or another, but as an arena where different classes have
varying amounts of influence. Nor is their goal to analyse how capitalist
society can be superseded; rather, they are trying to be faithful
to a static view of society as an ensemble of differing and often
conflicting social interests - a model that they consider to be
more truthful than the dominant totalitarian school of history.
Yet despite their fundamentally erroneous view, this historical
school has taken a fresh look at many of the crucial events in the
building of socialism in the USSR. This review will deal with two
of these recent texts.
The Best Sons of the Fatherland by
L. Viola is the history of a campaign called by the Bolshevik Party
in 1929 to send 25 000 workers to the countryside as a proletarian
shock-force in the fight to collectivise agriculture. Viola gives
a brief overview of the economic situation prevailing in the USSR
at that time and shows that for those taking part in the campaign
collectivisation was felt to be indispensable for continuing the
Bolshevik revolution. This was especially true of those politically
active workers from the historic strongholds of the October Revolution.
The “25 000ers”, as they came to be called, consciously saw themselves
as bringing advanced proletarian consciousness to the peasant masses
in the backward countryside, to unite with the revolutionary peasants
and help lead their struggle to build socialism and create a whole
new world.
The 25 000ers campaign was launched following
a great crisis which confronted the USSR in 1927-28 when, despite
a good harvest, the amount of grain sent to the cities declined
dramatically. At the same time, the urban population was growing
rapidly. Moreover instead of revolution elsewhere in Europe coming
to their aid, as most Bolsheviks had anticipated, there was a renewed
menace of war. While some leaders of the CPSU gave up revolution
and sought ways to make their peace with the old order, the dominant
section, led by Stalin, resolved to push ahead and build socialism,
to increase Soviet economic and military strength and to ensure
the supply of grain for the Red Army in case of war.
The campaign of the 25 000ers itself grew out of the
frustration of the Party centre in its initial efforts to carry
the revolution to the countryside by relying on the rural officials
already in place.
Though the 25 000ers had the support of the Party centre,
the local situation was often difficult. In 1926 there was approximately
one Bolshevik for every 400 rural inhabitants; most were new members
who joined during the NEP period, and, besides the politically untested,
many were often wealthier peasants whose real motive for joining
the Party was to keep their privileged position in the village.
Calling on the advanced workers to send 25 000 from
their ranks to the countryside, for what was initially expected
to be a campaign of a year or two, was part of an effort to go over
the heads of this conservative rural officialdom and mobilise the
party’s proletarian social base. The workers were chosen as the
culmination of a mass campaign in the factories, with many times
more volunteers than the number needed - factories sponsored the
workers and tried to aid them with material and moral support. Of
the factory directors, who were all members of the Communist Party,
a few supported the campaign, but many resisted. They too were facing
the need to industrialise rapidly, as part of the First Five Year
Plan, and, according to Viola, wanted neither to lose some of their
best workers and activists nor to have a major political campaign
going on and “distracting” from work. Many argued openly that the
quotas of workers demanded were too high; others adopted different
tactics and tried to send raw, inexperienced youth with no particular
political dedication to carry out this complicated and dangerous
task. Articles appeared in the press stating that the workers could
expect a hostile reception - hardly meant to encourage participation.
Led by Stalin, Bolshevik party forces mobilised from
below to overcome this resistance, to implement the campaign and
then persevere in supporting the workers once they were in the countryside.
The workers who went were not motivated by personal interest: the
conditions of life in the countryside were far worse than in the
cities - the 25 000ers could expect an immediate, dramatic decline
in their income and general conditions of life, including food,
cultural activity, and so forth. They went for other reasons: most
of the volunteers were veterans of the civil war against the bourgeoisie
and the imperialist interventionist armies, and political activists
in the years since - they were dedicated to the ideals of Marxism-Leninism
and the Communist Party. Viola gives the example of a worker from
Rostov, F.Z. Drozd, who declared to his fellow factory workers that
it was his duty to fight for collectivisation just as he had served
in the civil war: “I am an old partisan. Earlier, not even stopping
to think, I cast aside my family and went to defend the party and
Soviet power. Now when the slogan is ‘transform the North Caucasus
to 100 percent collectivisation in one and one half years’, I, with
satisfaction, go to the countryside in order again to fulfil my
duty before the party and Soviet power.”
Viola notes the frustration found among many workers
with the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) - the temporary
retreat in the early and mid-1920s which was called by Lenin in
the face of the ravages of the imperialist intervention against
the new-born revolutionary power. NEP had allowed a certain revival
of capitalism in the cities and especially the countryside, where
the Bolsheviks were still too weak to effectively revolutionise
the society and economy. With collectivisation, the workers saw
themselves as renewing the offensive and reinvigorating the revolution
by taking it to the peasantry, especially the poor peasants. Veteran
workers of 60 and over volunteered, recalling how they fought in
the civil war at the front, and inspiring the younger workers to
take their own positions on the front lines. Workers who knew the
countryside spoke out too; one declared, “I am from the peasantry
myself. For a long time, I not only had to observe the life of the
peasant but myself tasted all of the superstitions by which all
of our old pre-revolutionary peasantry was nourished. I saw that
the only way for the peasantry to break out of its indigent condition
was to enter the collective farm.”
The 25 000ers saw themselves as a necessary aid to
the weak Party forces in the rural areas, indispensable for ensuring
that collectivisation was carried out and that the cities, and the
revolution itself, were not cut off and strangled by rural bourgeois
forces in the countryside. But they saw themselves as far more than
simply brawn added to ensure the enforcement of party policy. They
also saw themselves as standard-bearers of proletarian culture and
consciousness, fighting against illiteracy, drunkenness, lack of
discipline, and in general taking an awareness of the Soviet revolution
to hitherto unreached areas. Though many of them eventually returned
to the cities, many others settled down to their new life among
the peasantry.
The workers went in spite of material deprivation,
hostility and danger from the kulak enemy - many were murdered,
hundreds were beaten, arrested and purged from the party by rural
party committees run by the rural elite and their cronies. Many
went hungry and virtually all of them lived in conditions far more
difficult than those they left behind in the cities. Yet the majority
of the 25 000ers persevered and carried on collectivisation, rallying
allies in the villages, generally the poorer peasants, schoolteachers
and youth.
In part due to the efforts of self-sacrificing proletarian
revolutionaries like these, for the first time in the history of
mankind the toilers themselves wrenched the land out of the hands
of private owners who had controlled it for countless generations.
This was a truly earth-shaking victory that inspired millions of
workers and peasants around the world with hope and shamefully exposed
the capitulation of those leaders of the Soviet party like Trotsky
and Bukharin who proclaimed such a victory impossible. It is true
that, as Mao analysed later, there were serious mistakes in this
campaign, and when the revisionists seized power in the 1950s, they
turned the collective and state farms into factories of oppression
and degradation. Mao analysed that though collectivisation in the
USSR was a great victory, it had excessively squeezed the peasants,
and was part of a policy that overemphasised heavy industry to the
detriment of agriculture and light industry. Nonetheless, such errors
on the part of Stalin and the Soviet revolutionaries do not take
away from the fact that this was a first path-breaking step, and
part of the basis on which Mao and the Chinese comrades learned
to advance better and higher.
Stalin’s Industrial Revolution, by Hiroaki Kuromiya,
is a work of economic history, not easily accessible, which focuses
on the First Five Year Plan in the USSR, from 1928 to 1932, and
especially on the role of the workers in carrying out industrialisation.
Kuromiya briefly goes over the objective conditions at the time
of the decision to end NEP and launch the drives for industrialisation
and collectivisation. International tension was mounting and the
Soviet leaders were growing concerned at the possibility of renewed
imperialist intervention. The grain crisis that erupted in 1926-27,
mentioned above, posed an acute challenge to the line of Stalin
and those determined to go ahead and build socialism in the USSR.
These factors gave rise to a crisis of confidence in the revolutionary
regime.
Kuromiya is not concerned with attempting an overall
summary of the period of the First Five Year plan, but limits the
book to describing the role of the workers in carrying out industrialisation.
In doing so, his account of this period brings welcome relief from
the mountains of garbage churned out by the “totalitarian” school
of history which interests itself almost exclusively in the suppression
of reactionary intellectuals and kulaks. Kuromiya shows vividly
not only that Stalin’s policies had significant popular support
but that they answered deeply felt frustrations of broad strata
in Soviet society, particularly the young proletarians, with the
NEP period. Mao, looking at this period from the point of view of
the acute class struggle in Soviet society, summed up that this
campaign was urgent and necessary.
Yet who was the party to count on in carrying out the
drive? Revolutionaries had never faced such a problem before and
the revolution’s very success now posed new dilemmas: veteran workers
often had moved up in the factory into the better-paying, skilled
jobs and enjoyed a certain status as acknowledged leaders of the
workers. Almost all the factory administrators were themselves higher-ranking
members of the Communist Party. Would they lead the mass movements
that would be required to build
socialism?
Huge industrial projects were launched which drew in
hundreds of thousands of unemployed youth from the cities and young
migrants from the countryside. In the vanguard of these giant projects
for socialist construction were the shock movements, often spearheaded
by the youth. At the time, this was not so evident a policy as it
might seem to revolutionaries today: the shock movements meant constantly
increasing production norms, and this often met reluctance from
sections of the workers themselves, especially the older, more highly
skilled workers and including many of the veterans of the revolution
and civil war.
Some in the CPSU leadership had to be in the forefront
of this movement, but most youth in the factories were fresh from
the countryside and unschooled in class struggle and industrial
life, and were looked on with suspicion by workers on whom the party
relied. One party leader, for example, argued that, “For them [younger
workers from the countryside], the factory is neither the property
of the working class that was taken by the working class from the
capitalists, nor the creation of the proletariat that has been erected
by Soviet power, but rather a place in which they can earn a little
extra to strengthen their own farms.”
Yet the party leadership put great confidence in these
youth, especially from the working class itself. Stalin called on
the Komsomol youth “to put themselves in the front ranks” of the
movement to industrialise. And they did. An American engineer in
the USSR, who was not sympathetic to the Soviet regime, nonetheless
recorded in his diary at the time that, “a present-day observer
can easily overlook... the genuine upsurge of messianic hopes and
revolutionary self-sacrifice... and the welcome release from the
psychological doldrums of NEP, with its undramatic goals and its
petit-bourgeois comfort.... The force of this emotion was great
among a part of the first post-revolutionary generation, especially
among many sons and daughters of the previously underprivileged
peasants and factory workers.” For them, the purpose of the new
challenge “was not merely to advance their own careers, but to create
a new society, never known before, in which injustice and inherited
social inequities would dissolve in a brotherhood of the proletariat
and eventually all people”.
The shock movements and workers’ planning sessions
saw party cadres on the shop floors mobilise the workers to surpass
the plan norms set in the centre. The factory managers, though nearly
always members of the party, not infrequently resisted, for movements
of the masses inevitably posed new challenges to them: when workers
insisted on doubling output, where were they to obtain the new raw
materials, and how would they pay for them? What was the role of
the trade unions, who were supposed to defend the conditions of
the workers? Many managers vehemently complained about the time
lost to the constant meetings held by the workers: an average of
half an hour every day.
According to Kuromiya, the renewed upsurge of revolutionary
elan in the USSR brought along with it a growth in egalitarian trends.
Mutual aid teams and other collective work forms were set up by
the workers, including, for a certain period, a “brigade system”,
where large groups with varying skill categories joined together
and pooled their efforts and wages, which they then split up equally.
For a while, differentials in wages were reduced throughout Soviet
society, and in many factories skilled workers came to be paid no
more than unskilled ones. Kuromiya notes that this development “was
incomprehensible from a market point of view”, for it was taking
place amidst dramatic shortages of skilled labour. The “wage-levelling
trends”, he notes, “had a heroic tone of fighting against the spontaneity
of the market”. One source of support for these wage-levelling policies
was, according to Kuromiya, Stalin’s view that such egalitarianism
would insulate the core of the working class from the dangers of
labour aristocratic viewpoints.
Nonetheless, the egalitarian trends gave rise to new
problems. Many of the skilled workers simply moved on to factories
where the revolutionary movement among the workers was less powerful
and thus egalitarianism weaker, so that they could command better
wages and working conditions. This seriously disrupted production.
Ultimately, the party leadership concluded that it was impossible
to sustain the “brigade system”.
In summing up socialist construction in the USSR, Mao
Tsetung pointed out that as time went on Stalin tended to rely less
and less on the masses. Kuromiya is not a Marxist. His analysis
is certainly not informed by the experience of the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution when the Chinese revolutionaries were able to
rectify many of the Soviet revolutionaries’ errors. Yet the details
he provides about what the Soviet leaders and masses actually did
do and why support Mao’s analysis. One case of this is Kuromiya’s
account of the Soviet policy of one-man management.
It is doubtless that in unleashing the drives for industrialisation
and collectivisation, Stalin knew of and was prepared to do battle
with powerful bureaucratic interests in Soviet society. An example
of this can be seen in his fierce rebuke of the managers and others
who resisted the planning initiatives of the workers and the shock
movement, particularly the method of socialist competition: “Socialist
competition is a manifestation of a practical revolutionary self-criticism
by the masses, springing from the creative initiative of
millions of workers.... The bureaucratic danger manifests itself
concretely above all in that it shackles the energy, initiative
and independent activity of workers, keeps concealed the colossal
reserves latent in the depths of our system, deep down in the working
class and peasantry, and prevents these resources from being utilised
in the struggle against our class enemies. It is the task of socialist
competition to smash these bureaucratic shackles, to afford broad
scope for the unfolding of the energy and creative initiative of
workers, to bring to light the colossal reserves latent in the depths
of our system and to throw them into the scale in the struggle against
our class enemies both inside and outside our country.”
Yet even as Stalin led the Soviet people into uncharted
waters, in transforming the economy of the country in a way unprecedented
in history, he increasingly came to rely on methods that were in
contradiction with the cause for which he fought. Not the least
of these was the policy of one-man management. It seems that Stalin
saw this policy as an inherent part of increased centralisation,
which in turn he considered essential to industrialise and collectivise
rapidly in order to put the Soviet Union on a war footing. Centralisation
was supposed to counteract the chaos that would inevitably arise
in this process.
But the method of one-man management, which walled
workers off from the management of the factories, was not the only
possible solution to such a problem. It is true that the CPSU tried
to counterbalance one-man management with a system of “workers’
control”, which was effective enough to provoke frequent howls of
protest from administrators - often because the workers upset routine
with “storming sessions” in which they raised plans for production
and the like. Kuromiya gathers evidence that there was immediate,
widespread protest among the workers themselves at adopting one-man
management. Mao Tsetung considered this policy an error, and argued
that “there should be a basic distinction between the principles
governing socialist and capitalist enterprises”. In fact, the Chinese
went on in the Cultural Revolution to develop revolutionary committees,
which were combinations that included representatives chosen “from
below”. Sometimes they were made up of representatives of the party,
military and masses; sometimes old, middle-aged and young; and especially
“red and expert”, with red being the determining factor. Such combinations
made use of various experiences to guide factories, schools, and
other institutions; they also helped break down the division of
labour inherited from class society and mobilised the enthusiasm
of the masses.
Stalin’s support for one-man management formed part
of a tendency that grew within the ranks of the Soviet leadership
to become less fully reliant on the masses - a tendency which later
had serious adverse results. And even within the great moments of
the First Year Plan and the drive to collectivise, these tendencies
expressed themselves - Kuromiya records not only the adoption of
one-man management, despite resistance from many workers, but also
the growing use of piece rates, material incentives and other such
policies.
Moreover, the upsurge of the workers in the First Five
Year Plan, though genuinely revolutionary in both its spirit and
achievements, was constrained even from the beginning by a too narrow
focus on production. Truly millions of workers, for example, were
brought into the ranks of the management and scientific and technical
personnel of the new society. This astonished many observers at
the time, yet the way it was carried out did not strike as deeply
as possible at the roots of the established division of labour in
society. So while it could be said that for this generation, there
was truth in the statement that the workers were stepping onto the
stage in nearly every sphere of society, they were doing so in large
part by moving out of the working class; in other words,
by moving higher up in the social division of labour. The notion
that the division of labour could be overcome by more and more workers
becoming administrators, scientists and the like went hand in hand
with Stalin’s ever more pronounced view that building socialism
meant developing the productive forces. The more awesome challenge
of gradually digging up the very roots of the social division of
labour characteristic of class society by mobilising the masses
to seize and transform the superstructure had to await Mao Tsetung
and the Cultural Revolution. There, for example, the educated youth
were called on to go to the countryside where they not only took
their book knowledge to the peasants, but more importantly, learned
from the peasants such things as what knowledge was needed and for
whom and to do what.
Parting ways with the dominant “totalitarian” school
of historians, Kuromiya considers that important struggles continued
in the top ranks of the CPSU well into the 1930s and that the success
of what he calls “the Stalin group” was far from certain. He points
to the strength of opponents of Stalin who gathered first around
Trotsky and later Bukharin in the mid- and late-1920s, including
within the trade unions and other important institutions, and takes
seriously the possibility that they were prepared even in the early
1930s to seize on any major setback to “the Stalin group” in order
to grab power. K.B. Radek, for example, who was a member of the
Politburo, stated in regards to the industrialisation drive that,
“If this general offensive were not slowed down it would, as we
defined it by a catch-phrase, ‘end like the march on Warsaw’” (referring
to a campaign involving Stalin during the revolutionary civil war
in which the Red Army suffered a serious defeat). Others thought
that the failure of Stalin’s policy and the rise of the Right were
virtually “a foregone conclusion”. Kuromiya shows that there was
support for these rightist lines broadly throughout the party hierarchy.
For example, a meeting of “shock workers on the financial front”
in 1932 saw significant open support for a proposal that the profit
motive should be restored to a determining position in the financial
affairs of the Soviet state - and these were supposedly the politically
advanced finance workers!
Kuromiya sums up the period of the First Year Plan
by observing that, by seriously underestimating the actual role
of ideology and politics in CPSU policy, Western historians tend
to overstate the monolithic character of Soviet society: “Stalin,
far from rallying the entire nation, even split it. Unlike Witte
[a reformer in the pre-World War 1 period], who had merely dreamed
of a strong autocracy that would not have had to rely on any particular
class, but stand above all classes, Stalin deliberately sought the
support of particular political constituencies, the Communists,
Komsomols and industrial workers, by pitting them against the alleged
class enemy.”
A later generation of revolutionaries led by Mao Tsetung
have, while upholding Stalin’s contributions, made serious criticisms
of the line guiding both these great campaigns2. They
were nonetheless tremendous achievements by the Soviet people in
building socialism. The very many observers such as Anna Louise
Strong, Maurice Hindus, the Durants, Dr. Norman Bethune and others
who travelled the length and breadth of the USSR in this period
took back countless stories of the miracles worked by the previously
downtrodden workers and peasants of backward Russia - in books that
today are, of course, all out of print. Indeed, while the advanced
imperialist powers of Germany, Great Britain, France and the US
floundered in the Great Depression, with millions living in the
streets and begging for food in these richest countries on earth,
in the formerly backward area of the USSR the most rapid economic
development witnessed in the 20th century was taking place and the
old way of life was being overturned. The Chinese masses led by
Mao advanced further along the path to communism than Stalin and
the Soviet people were able, in no small part by correcting their
errors - indeed, their progress was only possible by standing on
the shoulders of those generations of Soviet people who truly set
out to build the earth on new foundations.
Endnotes
1In Chapter 6 of Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Then
That? (Chicago: Banner Press, 1986), Bob Avakian, Chairman of
the RCP,USA, analyses the theory of the “totalitarian state” and
the way in which Western, and especially social-democratic, theorists
have used it as “one of the main weapons in the ideological arsenal
of Western imperialism in its conflict with the Soviet bloc” following
World War 2. In fact, no such thing as the “totalitarian state”
has ever existed. Avakian dissects the main tenets of this theory:
that the “totalitarian state” rests on all-pervasive terror, that
its goal is world domination, that it seeks to control every sphere
of life, etc., and shows in what ways this theory served imperialism.
This thesis especially hides the division of society into classes
and the role the state plays as the organ of rule of a class.
2In particular, Mao criticised Stalin’s one-sided emphasis
on industrialisation and modernisation. He discusses this at length
in A Critique of Soviet Economics (Monthly Review Press,
1977). The Maoist position is summarised briefly in the Declaration
of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.
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