Soviet Russia: Anatomy of a Social History

Part VI: The Termination of Reconstruction

Chapter XX: The Soviet Power and the Peasants

I: The Recovery of Agriculture

The good harvest of 1933 inaugurated a period of unbroken agricultural recovery. Although quantitative results were uneven and not very impressive, the fundamental success of the agrarian reorganisation decided all questions of power for many years to come in favour of the Soviet government, and the peasants settled down to work under the new conditions. They discovered soon that they did not fare any worse, and often very much better, than in earlier years as individual farmers.

With one exception, the years of the Second Five-Year Plan (1933-37) were distinguished by comparatively favourable weather conditions, and the contrast in grain harvests against the previous five years is very remarkable indeed. 1937, the last year of the Second Plan, was distinguished by a bumper crop, and that year’s harvest has since not been reached again. [1]

Grain exports were practically discontinued, and these harvests guaranteed the satisfaction of all grain requirements of the Russian people. Yet even during these years the extremely low yields of grain cultivation improved only a little. In spite of capital investments running into many billions of roubles, in spite of the almost complete mechanisation of grain production, yields per hectare increased only from 8.5 quintals in 1913 to 8.9 quintals in 1933, and to 9.6 quintals during 1936-38.

Further appreciable progress was made in the production of technical crops. In some cases production was doubled or trebled (cotton and sugar beet), although at high costs, but in other directions results were distinctly disappointing: [2]

In comparison with prewar conditions, the production of raw cotton had been more than trebled, and the output of the other technical crops was approximately doubled. In spite of growing home requirements, the raw material problem of the textile and food industries was generally solved.

Finally, important improvements in cattle breeding were at last realised. Even so the losses of the First Five-Year Plan were not quite replaced at the end of the Second: [3]

At the end of the reorganisation period, the number of pigs was 9 per cent higher than before the revolution, but the number of oxen and cows had declined by 6 per cent, sheep and goats by 33 per cent, and horses 53 per cent. Even now the Soviet Union is still suffering from the effects of the collectivisation crisis in the lack of animal foodstuffs, hides and leather, etc.

Russian agriculture has lost during the reorganisation period not less than 17.7 million HP. The government, on the other hand, disposed at the end of the Second Five-Year Plan of 454 500 tractors with 8 385 000 HP (1938—483 500 machines with 9 256 200 HP), [4] which are certainly more evenly distributed and better used than the horses of the individual peasants were fifteen years ago. Nevertheless a net loss of 8 million HP remains, and the government is seriously perturbed about the economic and, even more, the military dangers of this fact; the comparatively large part played by sabotage of horse breeding in the third Moscow Trial may be regarded as a distorted expression of this anxiety. The failure of the oil industry to expand according to plan, and according to the rising demands of mechanised agriculture and of the mechanised army, may have extremely serious repercussions on the state of agriculture should war demands on oil materialise. The usefulness of the tractors would be greatly impaired in such a case, and Russian agriculture would feel the full effects of the reduction in the number of horses.

The first thing necessary for making a fair appraisal of Soviet agriculture at the end of the Second Five-Year Plan is a proper starting-point. In view of the growth of population, comparison with prewar conditions leads to very unfavourable results, perhaps with the exception of technical crops. The picture is even worse if the demands of the Plan are used for purposes of comparison. The Plan demanded a doubling of agricultural output, but in 1937, a year of unusually favourable conditions, production reached only a value of 20 100 million roubles [5] as compared with 13 071 million roubles in 1932, that is, the Plan was ‘fulfilled’ only by one half.

Successes appear very impressive, on the other hand, when compared with the state of things at the end of 1932; but it may be questioned whether there is really much reason for pride and self-congratulations because part of the mischief done during 1929-33 was repaired at enormous cost during 1933-37. The quick recovery of agricultural production had in any case salutary consequences for the food industry and for the living conditions of the workers, although Soviet statistics are apt to exaggerate this effect by obscuring the fact that the number of consumers of manufactured foodstuffs greatly increased during this time. In spite of the non-fulfilment of the agrarian Plan, food industry was the only branch of Group B industries to develop fully in accordance with the Plan. The nutrition of the Russian people became once more normal and ceased to be one of the most difficult problems of economic policy. Above all, however, the relations of power between the Soviet state and the peasants had been completely changed since the end of the NEP and the government was in control of agricultural production and distribution.

The fate of collectivisation was decided during 1933. The famine of the spring months convinced the peasants that the state power was adamant in its demands, the good harvest prevented the physical breakdown of the whole system. During the following five years collectivisation was extended to practically the whole peasantry, but the qualitative results remained not very impressive.

At the beginning of the Second Five-Year Plan there were still 8 200 000 individual peasants in existence who tilled 15 200 000 hectares of grain land. [6] This large minority of peasants were by no means ‘kulaks ’, but, on the contrary, peasants with a sown area of only two-fifths of the average area sown per collective farm household. For this reason it was comparatively easy for the government to bring most of these peasants into the collective farms. At the end of 1938 only 1 300 000 individual peasants remained compared to 18 800 000 collectivised households; their sown area was a bare 600 000 hectares, [7] and their influence on grain production negligible, but they were very well paid as seasonal workers in collective farms, and therefore an obstacle to the introduction of new methods of labour organisation and discipline into collective farm work. This fact, and not a fantastic and non-existing kulak danger, was mainly responsible for their final ‘liquidation’ which is probably completed by now.

During these years mechanisation and technical reorganisation of agriculture were vigorously pushed ahead. The number of tractors increased strongly, but it should be noted that, while it was doubled between 1933 and 1936, the increase during 1937 and 1938 was only 14.4 per cent. [8] The Plan was completely fulfilled, but it is probable that the need for further tractors is still considerable. Other remarkable results were achieved in the production of harvester combines, the number of which increased from 25 400 in 1932 to 128 800 (in 1938 even 153 500), which garnered more than one-half of the total grain harvest [9] and greatly reduced harvest losses which in earlier times amounted to as much as 10 pood per hectare, or approximately 20 per cent of the gross harvest. [10] Similar, though less spectacular advances were made in the building of lorries, etc, and Stalin was probably on firm ground when he asserted in March 1939 ‘that the reconstruction of our agriculture on the bases of a new, modern technique is on principle already completed’. [11]

This agriculture is distinguished from the original intentions of the government by the relative neglect of state farms and by the concentration of all efforts on the support of collective farming. The number of tractors in the state farms remained practically stationary, whereas the number of tractors in the MTS, which are serving the collective farms, was trebled during the Second Five-Year Plan. It is, therefore, surprising to learn that in 1938 only three-fourths of the sown area were cultivated by MTS, [12] although the Plan had expected to cultivate the whole grain area with the help of a smaller number of MTS than were then actually in existence.

The enthusiasm for huge grain factories under public management, completely independent of the peasants, characteristic of the First Five-Year Plan, had vanished ten years later. Between 1928 and 1932 the grain acreage of state farms increased from 1.5 to 10.8 million hectares, [13] at the end of 1937 it had again fallen by one million hectares. [14] The reasons for this reversal of Communist policy must be sought in the failure of the state farms to fulfil the expectations of their advocates. They seem to have been (and to be) particularly inefficient, and the unsuccessful campaign against their bureaucratic defects, inaugurated by Stalin himself on the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party, only showed the difficulties of effecting a change for the better. Five years later it was Molotov’s turn to confess that it was still a task for the future to make the state farms profit-earning.

II: The Government and the Collective Farmers

The promises made by the government during the spring of 1932, although they came too late to prevent crisis and famine, were the starting-point for a new agrarian policy which seems to continue up to the present day. Instead of force, material inducements are used to an increasing degree in order to mobilise the energies of the Russian peasant in the service of the collective farms.

The most primitive and least original method of influencing production by means of the state power is taxation policy. The ‘quota’, which the peasant has to deliver against only nominal payment, was reduced in 1934 and was to remain stable in case of higher yields, thus inducing him to work better because he knew that he would be allowed to retain the full margin of his higher efforts. Seed loans, granted during the dark years of collectivisation, were made repayable after some years in order to give the peasants at once higher incomes. The agricultural tax was not to be increased if the sown area was in excess of the size prescribed by the Plan. Finally, a large part of the debts of the collective farms, not less than 437 500 000 roubles, [15] was wiped out completely by Decree of 23 December 1934. Quite recently taxation has been used, on the contrary, to penalise violations of the collective farm constitution and to prevent reduction of sown areas below the level of the Plan.

All these concessions were made to the collective farmers only, while the burdens carried by the individual peasants were constantly being increased, and in the spring of 1938 a new drive for the destruction of the individual peasants was organised, and further intensified at the beginning of September 1939 by a change in the agricultural tax which very probably will suffice to ‘liquidate’ completely the remnants of individual peasantry still existing in the country.

The position of the collective farmers was further improved by social and economic measures. From a psychological point of view it may have been important that the collective farm land was given in perpetuity to the collective farms (Second Collective Farm Congress, 1935). In order to reduce the burden of administration, which in a bureaucratic state is always liable to be excessive, administrative expenses were limited to 8 per cent of the total number of labour days. A similar, and even more important, limitation was imposed on the amounts used for communal investments, reserves and expenses, which were greatly resented by the peasants, and which were, indeed, partly local taxes in disguise. After some preliminary orders it was finally decreed on 19 April 1938 that at least 60 to 70 per cent of the cash income should be distributed amongst the collective farmers, and that the upper limit of communal investments was to be 10 per cent.

The method of calculating the share of every collective farm worker was repeatedly changed. The system of labour days in its original form proved too clumsy for the purposes of the government and was considerably modified. Already in 1935 special premiums were granted to good ‘brigades’ for work of higher quality than the average in order to counterbalance the consequences of piecework which normally leads to the sacrifice of quality to quantity. Normal members of these special brigades were to get a premium of 10 per cent, udarniki of 15 per cent, and group leaders of 20 per cent over and above the total of their labour days.

At the same time the government underlined the importance given to special branches of agriculture by different scales of remuneration for the collective farmers engaged in them. Thus cotton growing or cattle breeding could be favoured in comparison with the routine jobs of collective farm work. The number of actually worked labour days was multiplied by coefficients ranging from one-half to two or even to three. Thus in some cases only one-half of the actually worked labour days was paid for, while other people got three times higher payment than was justified by their efforts and skill—a new departure which was clearly incompatible with the ‘Socialist principle’ (from each according to his ability, to each according to his work). The combined result of all these measures was, of course, progressing differentiation of peasant incomes within the collective farms, though there still remained some rough proportion between efforts and income.

These inducements to higher efforts were supplemented by new, and highly questionable, regulations concerning the private economy of the collective farmers. In 1935 the private plots of collective farmers were regulated and in many cases increased. Udarniki and other favoured persons were privileged by the granting of larger plots, up to two and a half acres, and the differentiation of the collective farmers received a new and dangerous stimulus; the danger consisted in the strengthening of private interests outside, or even in opposition to, those of the collective farms. Apart from that here again a glaring violation of the ‘Socialist principle’ was committed. It was a new case of according privileges to people in a certain category owing to their membership in this category, and the government deserved the difficulties which only a few years later arose in this vexed question.

Though these measures can only partly be defended by the official explanation that they were necessary for the increase of agricultural output within the framework of the new organisation, this aim was more or less attained. The starting-point for this policy was certainly sound; it was the undeniable fact that even after the fundamental success of collectivisation the peasants remained peasants, and the official policy was a workable, and probably a very good, compromise between the interests of national economy as a whole and those of the peasants. Thus their approval of collectivisation was being won at last, and it may be said for certain that individual small-scale farming is a thing of the past in the Soviet Union. After the solution of the fundamental difficulties in the relations between the government and the peasants, everything depended on the ability of industry to regulate the commodity, exchange between town and country in the interests of both parties, that is, to increase the supply of industrial goods for the peasants.

III: The New Market

The use of force for the extraction of agrarian produce was necessary for some time, but clearly impossible as a long-term policy, because it was bound to bring about a violent agrarian crisis. During the Second Five-Year Plan a compromise between the interests of the peasants as consumers and the state had to be found, and at the end of the year 1937 this had probably been done.

Supplies of foodstuffs were much better than during the preceding five years, above all owing to the discontinuation of grain exports. The Soviet Union exported in 1930 grain to the value of 882.4 million roubles; 1933 the value of grain exports had fallen to 176.9 million roubles, and in 1936 it was not more than 35.9 million roubles, [16] although it should be noted that 1936 was an exceptionally bad year. In any case the stopping of grain exports released many additional millions of tons for the home consumption of the peasants and the supply of the towns. The latter were growing not so quickly as before, and the town population was again able to satisfy its requirements of bread, the standard food of the Russian people.

The elemental pressure on the supply system of the government was thereby greatly reduced, and this enabled the Soviet power to organise at leisure its system of agrarian collections on the lines laid down previously. In the spring of 1933 the agricultural ‘quota’ was simplified and transformed into taxes which could be considerably reduced during the following years. For the remainder of its requirements the government principally relied on the market, that is, on the voluntary sales of agricultural produce by the peasants in exchange for industrial goods; the most important exception to this rule is cotton.

In order to stimulate voluntary sales of agrarian produce, a new price policy was introduced which is clearly similar on principle to the new wage policy of this period. The delivery of surplus quantities of agricultural produce over the statutory or planned amounts is rewarded by premiums. This method was used for the first time, on Stalin’s personal initiative, for the cotton harvest 1935 and produced a quick rise in harvest yields and in gross production: [17]

Since 1936 the same method is being successfully applied to grain collections. It is important to note that the size of the premiums rises with the size of the surplus deliveries. In 1936 the premium for collective farm deliveries amounted to 10 per cent if the surplus was less than five tons, but it rose to 100 per cent for deliveries of over one hundred tons in excess of the planned quota. [18] Similar premiums were given for technical crops.

A further large contribution to state collections of agricultural products is made by the MTS. It is based on a kind of barter between the government, which leases to the collective farms agricultural machinery and the services of skilled mechanics, and the collective farms, which pay for it by a share in the harvest. (The accounting work is normally done by the State Bank.) The rates of pay for MTS services are on a sliding scale, changing with the yield of the harvest. For harvesting with combines 9 per cent of the harvest is charged, and the rates for ploughing and sowing never reached 10 per cent. The complete utilisation of the MTS machinery and mechanics is guaranteed to the government by the rule that their services must be accepted by the collective farms wherever they are available, and the state thereby acquires a further 10 to 12 per cent of the grain harvest without interference by the market.

In 1935, when mechanisation was still far from being complete, the grain balance of the country was roughly as follows. From a gross harvest of about 90 million tons the peasants retained approximately 59 million tons, while 31 million tons were handed over to the state. Of this total, the production of state farms (which may have been as much as 9 or 10 million tons) and the compulsory ‘quota’ of the peasants amounted to 18.6 million tons, payments in kind for MTS services reached 5.7 million, and milling tax 700 000 tons, while peasant sales on the free market amounted to a further 5.9 million tons. [19] The government got about 30 per cent of the gross harvest without any trouble with the free market, and the problem of feeding the towns was solved. The peasants retained somewhat less grain than before the war, but many of them bought bread and flour from the cooperative stores instead of using their grain at home. In the beginning ‘centralised’ collections were much more important than ‘decentralised’ collections, but this relation underwent some change during the Second Five-Year Plan, at least in secondary foodstuffs and raw materials.

As far as the basic exchange between village and town was concerned, the Soviet government succeeded in replacing the market by public buying organisations; it did not want, on the other hand, to prevent the renaissance of direct retail trading relations between the peasants and the urban consumers without interference by private middlemen. This so-called collective farm trade was a necessary supplement to and a correction of the badly working public trade system, and in the course of time its size grew considerably: [20]

Up to 1935, these figures undervalue the increase in volume of this free trade, because prices were quickly falling; on the other hand, it is practically certain that the increase for 1937 and 1938 exaggerates the rise in volume, because prices would seem to have gone up again. This market is comparatively free; its prices were determined during the earlier years by the disproportion between the formal purchasing power of the people and the supply of foodstuffs and other consumption goods, since 1935 they can be greatly influenced by the government owing to the abolition of rationing and the competition by public trade.

The supply of agricultural produce is therefore regulated today in a manner thoroughly acceptable to the state, which receives a large share in the agricultural output and may claim that this is only a just consequence of the investment of many billions of roubles in agricultural production. But the peasants wanted and want not only modern means of production, but also manufactured consumption goods. Immediately after the reorganisation crisis, up to 1934, the government was clearly unable to accede to this demand. For this reason a very rigid rationing system was established in the village which was even more arbitrary than that of the towns. Village retail trade was, and is, formally in the hands of the cooperative societies which are, of course, simply executive organs of the state. The purchasing power of the peasants was artificially reduced by raising industrial prices in the village high above the level of urban prices, but even so demand was always far in excess of supplies. ‘Deficit’ goods were, therefore, distributed only among udarniki , normal collective farmers received the slender rest, and ‘loafers’, or individual peasants, had to go without. [21]

These emergency measures were not always satisfactory, but they helped the Soviet power to weather a stormy transitional period. As late as 10 January 1936, Molotov told the Central Executive Committee that trade in industrial goods was lagging behind seriously. But after 1935 village trade increased particularly quickly, probably much better than urban trade. The government wanted to stabilise collectivisation by satisfying the peasants as far as possible by selling them as many industrial goods as it could. According to the nature of things and the wishes of the Soviet power statistical data are particularly unsafe in this field, but it has been stressed by all expert observers of the Soviet Union that during the last few years—up to 1937—the supply of industrial goods in the village has greatly increased. It may for this reason be assumed that at the end of the Second Five-Year Plan the last difficulty in the relations between the farmers and the Soviet power was overcome, at least on principle.

In spite of many mistakes and terrible brutalities, the Communists have at last succeeded in reorganising agriculture on a new social and technical basis. The collective farm constitution is a healthy compromise between the deep-rooted individualism of the peasants and the requirements of large-scale agriculture. The collection of agricultural produce partly by the state and partly by the ‘free’ collective farm market is a healthy compromise in the sphere of distribution. On the other hand, peasant demand for modern means of production is almost completely satisfied, and supplies of manufactured consumption goods for the village were on the upgrade at least up to the end of the Second Five-Year Plan.

Chapter XXI: Industry During the Second Five-Year Plan

I: The Fruits of the First Plan

Contrary to all official promises, the first years of reconstruction were accompanied by a serious fall in the standard of living of the workers, but the sacrifices made by the Russian people during these years were not in vain. Although actual production figures, with one important exception, lagged far behind the Plan, valuable preparatory work had been done which resulted in a quick increase in production during the next few years.

The failure of industrial production to expand in accordance with the Plan during the first Piatiletka is in grim contrast with the amount of capital investments, which was far higher than assumed beforehand. This was, on the one hand, the result of over-optimistic calculations and, on the other, a consequence of the incredible waste of materials and manpower. Apart from that it was caused by serious mistakes of official policy and official propaganda in the evaluation of the tempo of new constructions. If the time required for building mines, factories and railways had been wrongly assumed to be three or five years instead of five or seven years (generally owing to wrong estimates of the productivity of labour), these new constructions were still in need of huge investments when they were already scheduled by the Plan to produce or to move millions of tons of coal, iron ore, steel or cement. But in spite of these serious temporary consequences, non-fulfilment of the Plan did not mean that nothing at all had been achieved during this time. New constructions were generally opened much later than originally planned, but after some time the output of these plants increased suddenly and considerably, and continued on this level which was, however, generally still lower than that prescribed by the Plan. During the First Five-Year Plan 25 000 million roubles—at 1933 prices, whatever this may mean—were invested in industry, but the value of enterprises newly put into operation was only 15 700 million roubles. According to the Second Plan, on the other hand, industrial investments were to reach 69 500 million roubles while industrial enterprises to the value of 69 100 million roubles were to be put into operation. [22] Many plants scheduled already for the First Plan started work only during the first years of the Second Five-Year Plan.

Thus it could be hoped that the seed of the First Five-Year Plan, fertilised by sweat and blood, would bear fruit during the following period. This was true, of course, only under the condition that it had not been thrown away on waste land; wasted energies, constituting a deplorably high proportion of the whole, remained without results, but wherever new constructions really were under way it could be expected that after some time they would be finished and would turn out valuable goods. This time was extremely long in many cases, and the following instance, taken from the Third Moscow Trial, where it was naturally attributed to wrecking, is as good as any:

The second case was the Kuvasai State District Power Station… The range for the delivery of coal was planned for a capacity of 75 000 kw, whereas the power house was built for 48 000 kw, and the planned capacity of the station is 70 000… The elements of wrecking were present in the very planning of the station… and lastly what was caused in Moscow was the systematic failure to supply machines, and that is why the station, work on which was started practically in 1929-30, has been under construction for seven years and is not completed yet. [23]

Most of the unfinished plants of the First Plan which were completed during the Second Five-Year Plan belonged to heavy industry. From a total investment of 25 000 million roubles not less than 85.2 per cent were invested in ‘Group A’ industries, and the slow expansion of heavy industry up to 1932 may therefore be regarded as merely a temporary phenomenon. The chances of consumption goods industries were rather slender even during the Second Five-Year Plan because very little only had been done for their reconstruction during the preceding years.

The first sketch of the Second Five-Year Plan for the development of Soviet economy is contained in the so-called ‘directives’ of the Seventeenth Conference of the CPSU (January-February 1932), which suffer very badly indeed from the bureaucratic megalomania of these years. Coal production in 1932 was actually 64.3 million tons; the ‘directives’ ordered an output of 250 million tons for 1937; the production of oil was to increase by 150-200 per cent, machine construction by 200-250 per cent. Pig iron was to be produced in 1937 to the tune of 22 million tons (1932—6.2 million tons), electricity was to rise from 13 900 million kwh to not less than 100 000 million kwh. [24] The First Five-Year Plan of railway construction contained provisions for 17 000 km of new railways [25] but the actual result was only an addition of 6 000 km to the railway net of the country. In spite, or because, of this glaring failure the ‘directives’ ordered the construction of not less than 25 000 to 30 000 km during the following five years.

The Second Five-Year Plan, as finally adopted in 1934, completely disregarded these ‘directives’, and had much less ambitious aims. Nevertheless it contained, again, numerous impossible predictions and tasks. Total industrial production was to increase by 114.1 per cent. In view of the general discontent with living conditions it was decided that the pace of increase in Group B was to quicken considerably. According to official claims of doubtful legitimacy, the output of consumption goods industries had increased by 53 per cent between 1928 and 1932; [26] during the Second Five-Year Plan it was to rise by not less than 133.6 per cent. [27] Production goods industries were to increase their production by ‘only’ 97.2 per cent as compared to 116.2 per cent during the first Plan period.

These aims were free from the ridiculous exaggerations of the ‘directives’, but their realisation as a whole was far from probable. The doubling of output in the production goods industries was a very ambitious but not necessarily an imaginary task. At the same time the material conditions for raising the output of Group B industries by 133.6 per cent were conspicuous by their absence. In the immediate past these industries, and particularly their most important branches in the food and light industry, suffered from two grave handicaps—lack of raw materials and lack of larger and more efficient plants. The lack of raw materials was, above all, a consequence of the agrarian crisis. In view of its successful termination the government could hope for a considerable increase in food supplies and agricultural raw materials available for industry. This improvement was bound to affect the condition of the food industry almost at once because raw materials are more important in this field than anything else. Things were, however, different in light industry as a whole, and particularly in the textile industry, where capital investments during the First Five-Year Plan, though far from insignificant, were too small to bring about the radical change without which conditions could not improve to anything like the planned extent.

At the end of the NEP, the basic capital of Group B industries was assessed at about 4350 million roubles, that of Group A at 5450 millions. Taking the years 1928-37 together, Group A industries were to increase their output by 350 per cent with the help of investments amounting to 75 000 million roubles (prices 1933), or fifteen times their initial basic capital; Group B industries, on the other hand, were to increase their output by 340 per cent with the help of investments of 19 600 million roubles, or less than five times their initial capital, although their reserves of technical capacity at the end of the NEP had been nil. The Second Five-Year Plan for the consumption goods industries again contained a large element of wishful thinking, and was not more possible of realisation than its predecessor; the Soviet power was, however, unable to demand less because in this field the Second Five-Year Plan was not much more than a repetition of the First Five-Year Plan.

II: Plan and Reality

The great efforts of the reconstruction period could be seen at the end of the Second Plan, particularly in heavy industry and machine construction: [28]

There is no doubt that at last a powerful heavy industry had been created, and that the shortage of most of the important industrial raw materials was being overcome. Only the development of oil output during these years was a serious disappointment. The quick expansion of oil production during the first years of reconstruction led the Communists to the pleasant assumption that this process could be continued with the same ease. As a matter of fact the plan for the output of oil and gas was based on a gross production of not less than 46.8 million tons, and there is good reason to assume that this figure really corresponded to the demand of the newly mechanised army and collectivised agriculture. Production of tractors, motor cars—and we may assume, of ‘planes and tanks—was completely or almost completely up to the planned figures, and the lagging behind of oil production and, even more, of oil refining was and is a serious problem. The oil shortage prevailing at present in the Soviet Union is probably the most important single economic and military weakness of Soviet Russia as a whole, and there is reason to assume that, in spite of the very large resources of the country, this problem will not be solved either easily or rapidly.

The percentage of plan fulfilment in heavy industry during the Second Five-Year Plan was much better than during the preceding years. A large share of these important successes belongs to Soviet armament production. Figures concerning this vital point are naturally absent, but it may be estimated, according to K Voroshilov’s speech on the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU, that during 1933-37 Russia’s military power increased by 200-300 per cent, and the huge quantities of war material needed for this purpose were furnished practically completely by Russian industry. The gigantic growth of Russia’s armament effort during these years is well illustrated by the budget expenditure for military purposes; these figures, significant though they are, must not, however, be taken at their face value because they do not make any allowance for the progressing depreciation of the rouble: [29]

The few and rather meagre statistical data concerning the fulfilment of the Second Five-Year Plan in heavy industry and machine construction suggest that it was in armament industry that the greatest progress has been achieved during these years. In 1937 the gross production of Group A industries amounted to 55 200 million roubles against a planned total of only 45 500 million roubles. The plan for these industries was therefore ‘over-fulfilled’ by the huge sum of 9700 million roubles. This amount was made up as to 8000 million roubles from machine construction and as to 400 million roubles from chemical industry, the armament industries par excellence . The Plan was completely fulfilled only in one other important branch of this group (black metallurgy), while the other trades did not reach the provisions of the Plan, often by a very wide margin.

As far as machine construction itself is concerned, it is practically impossible to check the known results and to discover the exact spot where the great successes were achieved, but it is very probable that it was no other than the armaments industry. For 1937 it must be assumed that roughly one-half of the whole value of machine construction represented armaments. Figures published by the leaders of the government in the special circumstances of a Party Congress are at least not worse than those which remain for the time being unpublished. From Molotov’s report before the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU it would then appear that the Plan was completely fulfilled only in the production of motor cars—and here, again, the military importance of the result is obvious. But in the production of locomotives, freight cars (and probably tractors) it was not fulfilled by a wide margin, while even the output of lathes remained 10 per cent below its provisions. If the totals, though suspicious and contradictory, are accepted for the sake of argument, the conclusion is unavoidable that armament production must be responsible for the gigantic difference.

It is therefore necessary to stress the fact that other parts of heavy industry whose military necessity is not quite so obvious did not fare so well. This is particularly true for the production of railway material and for building materials. The output of locomotives in 1937 was only 56.4 per cent, that of freight cars only 49.7 per cent of the planned figure. Cement production reached only 5.5 million tons (= 73.3 per cent of the Plan), hauling of merchant timber only 111.3 million cubic metres (= 65.5 per cent of Plan), and the output of sawmill products only 28.8 million cubic metres (= 67 per cent of Plan). [30] The effects of this serious failure on Russia’s building trade were pernicious. Defence and industrial constructions receiving particular consideration in the supply of raw materials, the failure fell with full pressure on the building of workers’ homes. The amount of dwelling accommodation finished during the Second Five-Year Plan was only a little more than one-third of the insufficient figures of the Plan, and it is no secret that housing conditions for the masses are certainly not improving and very probably deteriorating.

In light industry, and in many branches of food industry, the Second Five-Year Plan was simply a repetition of the unfulfilled estimates of its predecessor: [31]

Even so the Plan was not attained by a very wide margin. According to the official totals the failure was only about 15 per cent, but some results in the most important branches of Group B industries suggest quite different figures:

Not in a single one of these industries was the 1937 Plan fulfilled, not even where it was actually lower than the 1932-33 Plan. Some important industries (textile industry as a whole, sugar refining) did not even at the end of the Second Five-Year Plan reach the figures of the first Piatiletka . There were certainly far better results in some branches of consumption goods industries in what must be called under Soviet conditions luxury goods, for example, wireless sets, watches, bicycles, etc. But in those branches which were catering for the needs of the masses production remained completely insufficient even at the end of the Second Plan period.

The reasons for this deplorable development are, again, manifold. One of the most important among them was the exhaustion of technical capacities which had not yet been completely overcome owing to the insufficiency of capital investments in these branches of industry. This was particularly true for the textile industry where even a radical improvement in raw material supplies was not enough to effect a change. The output of woollen goods reached its lowest point in 1934, that of cotton goods as late as 1935!

This development cannot simply be explained by the fact that Soviet Russia, too, chose ‘guns instead of butter’. Higher armament expenses certainly cause a reduction in the standard of living unless they can be paid for out of accumulated reserves. But while this effect is felt simultaneously with the deflection of productive energies to armament production, in the Soviet Union the partial recovery of consumption goods industries falls exactly in the years of rising armament expenditure. The delay in the increase of output of consumption goods and the insufficiency of this increase are exclusively caused by Soviet economic policy; it must be accepted, as far as this policy is accepted as necessary, it must be criticised, as far as this policy was and is tainted by bureaucratic clumsiness and contempt for the needs of the Russian people.

III: The Perfection of Planned Economy

The successes achieved in the sphere of production enabled the Soviet power to complete the reorganisation of centralised accounting and economic control. During the First Five-Year Plan these tasks were neglected owing to the preoccupation of the government with the increase of production at any price, and the ‘control by the rouble’ was introduced as an economic slogan only when this lack of control had already caused serious economic setbacks.

The Credit Reform of 1930, although it did not fulfil the immediate expectations of the Communists, was the starting-point for a planned control of the economic system, the organisation of which contains elements of permanent value for future attempts at large-scale planning under more favourable conditions.

The final order established in this field is quite simple. The control of current financial transactions between the different units of the economic system was centralised in the State Bank; the other banks (Industrial Bank, Communal Bank, etc) became responsible for the control of capital expenditure. The State Bank kept the most important accounts of the larger economic institutions, made payments (by means of crediting the account of one of its many thousand customers and debiting the account of his partner), and granted working credits (by means of overdrafts), but it also controlled the amount of the expenses incurred by its customers in their work by means of the detailed financial plans of every enterprise which were at the same time, from the Bank’s point of view, credit plans. (Apart from this continuous control, economic enterprises were subject to control by their central organisations which were particularly interested in the amount of wage payments. The danger of excessive wage payments by the management diminished, however, with the growing financial interest of the managers in the fulfilment of the financial plans.) This transformation of the credit system of the NEP resulted in the creation of an organisation which was completely deprived of the capitalist character of a modern banking system, and which became an important part of the mechanism of planning.

This change of structure was recognised by the law of 9 March 1934. Since that time the planned requirements of national economy for capital investments are satisfied by investment grants through the investment banks (Prombank, etc) which receive the necessary funds either from the budget or from the profits of industry, and are simply used for the distribution and control of the accumulated part of the national income. For this reason the debit and credit accounts of all enterprises of public character with these investment banks were wiped out at the same time. The reorganisation of the State Bank in May 1935 served similar purposes of economic control. The central administration of the Bank was divided into departments which took over the planning and control of the various branches of national economy, and which are subdivided so that they may effectively control the financial transactions of every single enterprise belonging to their branch. This important step was made possible by the extension of the Gosbank mechanism throughout the Union, and more particularly by the centralisation of the rural credit cooperative societies and their transformation into branches of Gosbank in 1930. By this merger the number of Gosbank branches rose suddenly from 648 at the beginning of 1930 to 2570 on 1 October of the same year and remained since then approximately on the same level. [32] By this development Gosbank finally received the status originally possessed by the Supreme Economic Council, and the financial control exercised by the bank is undoubtedly much more efficient than the merely administrative or bureaucratic control of the former ever had been.

On the other hand, the frequent attempts to overcome the fungus of bureaucracy by reorganisations, periodical dismissals of superfluous officials, and general ‘campaigns’ remained completely unsuccessful. Once the root of the evil was found in excessive centralisation, then, on the contrary, in the lack of proper centralisation. Since November 1937 an economic dictatorship within the dictatorship has been established by the appointment of an Economic Council within the government with wide powers to overrule all subordinate regional organisations and to overcome the friction of the gigantic bureaucratic machine.

At the end of the Second Five-Year Plan, industrial production and economic organisation were by no means ideal, but they were considerably better and more stable than ever before. The quantitative development of industry was certainly out of all proportion with the immense investments of the reconstruction years, but at least in the essential armaments industry and in some of the most important branches of heavy industry output made good progress. Soviet economy of today is clearly distinguished from the capitalist system by its structure and its method of direction; in spite of extraordinarily unfavourable circumstances the system works, and the difference is on the whole to the advantage of the Soviet system, although its advantages are obscured and its weaknesses exaggerated by the bureaucratic character of the Russian regime. The practical planning work and even the mistakes of the last decade have not been in vain. Industrialisation is not yet completed by a long way, and it is certainly threatened by the dangers of the international situation and by the short-sightedness of the bureaucratic rulers of the country; from an economic point of view, however, planned economy has been justified under conditions which did not even give it a fair chance of proving its superiority over free competition or private monopoly.

Chapter XXII: The Differentiation of the Working Class

I: Raising the Productivity of Labour

At the end of the year 1932 the catastrophic failure of the productivity of human labour to rise according to plan was one of the most important problems of Soviet economy. This low productivity of labour deprived the new plants which had been constructed at so high a price of a large part of their economic value, the time of deprivations for the whole people was lengthened and the relations between the Soviet power and the workers and peasants were severely tested. After 1931 the impetus given to the productivity of labour slackened in spite of the introduction of modern machinery and constant administrative pressure from above: [33]

Through two or three years the new social policy seems to have done nothing to improve the situation. The work of the better-paid and better-fed groups of workers may have improved, but the masses could not work more and better because their living conditions did not permit it; hence the very slow increase which in 1932 probably remained completely on paper.

This development was the direct result of the lowered standard of living of the Russian workers which was, in turn, caused by Communist agrarian policy more than by anything else. The chronic malnutrition of the workers gradually ceased with the success of collectivisation and the improvement in the market supplies of foodstuffs, and this improvement was almost at once translated into higher efforts. The better physical conditions of the Russian workmen together with the results of technical reconstruction were responsible for a reversal of the pernicious tendency of the years 1930-33, and the rate of increase in the productivity of labour grew up to the year 1936.

It is uncertain whether the government understood these very simple but nevertheless fundamental facts; in any case they did not have the slightest influence on its social policy. On the contrary, the new social policy, which had been worked out after 1930-31, was applied with ever-increasing consistency and ruthlessness during the Second Plan period. Disciplinary measures were tightened up in a manner which, far from being Socialist, was inhuman from the standpoint of progressive capitalism; yet it was a ‘despotism tempered by inefficiency’, and the practical application of these measures was frequently far from complete. At the same time a technical working-class aristocracy was fostered by all means and was rewarded for its better work in a manner out of all proportion to the ‘Socialist principle’.

In the autumn of 1933, a commission of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry reported an insufficient utilisation of the seven-hour day. Labour discipline had been weakened, and the report demanded the dismissal of superfluous and inefficient workers. Actually, a purge of real or alleged loafers in industry had already been effected at the end of 1932 in connection with the introduction of the internal passport.

In March 1934 the government repealed a section of the Labour Code which guaranteed to pieceworkers a minimum wage of two-thirds the standard wage, whatever their real work. ‘Systematic’ non-fulfilment of the norm was to be punished by transfer to lower-paid categories or, in extreme cases, by dismissal.

In November 1934 a conference of trade union officials representing the factory committees asked for a more resolute struggle against wage-levelling tendencies, and advocated a policy of more influence for foremen and masters in the fixing of wages—a resolution which clearly foreshadowed the wage system of ‘Makeyevka’, which was itself the direct predecessor of Stakhanovism.

In the beginning of 1935 the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry ordered compulsory tests of skill for all skilled workers who had not passed technical examinations with good success. At the same time the government and the unions organised a campaign for the ‘revision’, that is, the raising of production norms (standard piecework rates), because the existing norms had become insufficient owing to the equipment of Russian industry with better machinery.

These measures, together with many more of only limited importance, form an unbroken chain of preparatory actions linking up the original new social policy with its ultimate outcome, the ‘spontaneous’ Stakhanov movement. Other features of this widely advertised ‘movement’ were foreshadowed and anticipated by the simultaneous differentiation of working-class living conditions. ‘Loafers’ and inefficient workers were punished by wage reductions, but more efficient or otherwise favourably treated workers were given material rewards of growing size. The struggle against wage-levelling tendencies was intensified from year to year, if not from month to month, and the difference in wages between labourers and semi-skilled workmen, on the one hand, and skilled workers, udarniki , foremen and masters, on the other, was deliberately widened. The basis of wage calculations was the wage scale, which, according to a typical example at the beginning of Stakhanovism (October 1935), showed the following differences: [34]

This differentiation was probably completely covered by the ‘Socialist principle’, but it was considerably extended by the new system of giving departmental heads, masters, foremen and charge-hands premiums for the work of their subordinates which raised their total income far above the level corresponding to their category of skill.

These growing differences are, of course, completely disguised by the average figures which are for this reason not very illuminating. The growth of the average earnings of the wage-earners in Soviet economy naturally continued during the Second Five-Year Plan: [35]

But different groups of workers profited to quite a different extent from this rise. A rough idea of the distribution of wage-earners according to the amount of their income may be won from the following figures relating to a Leningrad shoe factory (September 1935), where the average monthly wage (190 roubles) was by chance the same as that of Russian economy as a whole for the period in question: [36]

The course of nominal wages was, however, not the most important fact determining the real income of the working class. These years were marked by a complicated combination of an intricate rationing system with a ‘free’ market where prices changed very quickly during short periods. An analysis of these technical problems is essential for an understanding of the Stakhanov period with its strong influence on Russia’s social development during the immediate past.

II: Prices and Real Wages During 1933-35

The Communists did not adopt rationing from theoretical reasons, but simply owing to external pressure. It was a very expensive system of distribution, the administrative costs of every ration book amounting to eight roubles a year. The government desired to abolish this rigid and clumsy system as soon as possible, and to replace it by a normal distributive system. The gradual change in the relations with the peasants permitted the slow transition to a better and cheaper trade system.

During the worst years of reconstruction prices in the ‘commercial’ shops were on an average at least ten times higher than prices in ‘closed’ shops. The improvement in the state of agriculture very soon brought down the excessive prices on the free market by a substantial increase in supplies. The government had hardly more to do in this direction than to wait for the expected results of its new agrarian policy; but the creation of a uniform price level could also be accelerated by reducing the surplus purchasing power of the people. This ‘deflationary’ policy could not, for political reasons, adopt the simple device of reducing nominal wages, but there were other and better methods for getting the surplus money in the hands of the workers. One of them was the system of internal loans. The other and more important method consisted in reducing the rations and increasing the prices of rationed goods. If fewer goods had to be reserved for the rationing system, supplies in the ‘commercial’ shops could be increased and ‘free’ prices could be reduced; if the workers had to pay more for their rations their nominal purchasing power on the free market would decline, and the pressure of surplus purchasing power would fall. From above and from below the gap in prices between ‘commercial’ and ‘closed’ trade would be narrowed and finally closed.

This policy seems to have been completely successful. There are no price-indices for Soviet Russia since 1930 in existence, but the trend can be gauged from some instances. After being quickly increased in 1931 and, again, in the early months of 1932 ration prices continued to rise during the following years. The price of black bread, the mainstay of the worker’s diet, in ‘closed’ shops increased from 0.10 roubles in July 1932 [37] to 0.50 roubles [38] in 1934; at the same time the ‘free’ price of black bread fell from 2.50 roubles in 1933 [39] to 1.00 rouble in 1934. [40] White bread rose simultaneously in ‘closed’ shops from 0.30 to 1.00 rouble, and fell in ‘commercial’ shops from 4.00 roubles [41] to 3.40 roubles. Similarly the ration price of beef increased from between 1.00 and 2.00 roubles to between 3.28 and 5.00 roubles, that of butter from between 2.40 and 4.10 roubles to not less than 7.75 roubles per kilogram, although these goods still remained very expensive in ‘commercial’ shops.

The difference in the price-level between ‘closed’ and ‘commercial’ shops was reduced much more by increasing ration prices than by lowering ‘commercial’ prices. Soviet official sources proudly told an admiring world that ‘prices’ were reduced during every successive year by 30, 20 or 15 per cent. They did not care to add that these price reductions in ‘free’ trade had their corollary in price increases in ‘closed’ trade and in reductions in the size of the rations. The smaller the difference in prices between ‘commercial’ and ‘free’ trade, the smaller grew the importance of rationing. But the final success of this policy was still a matter of conjecture, and the government was therefore very careful in the abolition of rationing. It started with bread, flour, etc, only which after the beginning of 1935 were sold at uniform prices and (very soon) without quantitative limits. The new free price of black bread was fixed at 0.85 rouble, as compared to one rouble in ‘commercial’ shops and 0.50 rouble in ‘closed’ trade. In October 1935 rationing was abolished for meat, fish, sugar, etc, and the price was fixed somewhere halfway between the two price-levels of earlier times; this was, again, a price reduction in comparison with free trade, but it constituted a price increase of between 50 and 100 per cent over ration prices. [42] As from the beginning of 1936 rationing was completely abolished, even Torgsin closed down a few weeks later and Russian trade was again a unified system. Town trade was in the hands of state trading organisations, village trade was organised by the cooperative societies.

These price movements had important consequences for the living conditions of the working class. The relative advantage which the poorest workers enjoyed during the first time of rationing was later on greatly reduced by the repeated increase in ration prices, and finally disappeared with the abolition of rationing. This development certainly raised the importance of nominal wages and of the possession of money. On the other hand, the rationing system itself had been used during the later period of its existence as a means of privileging different groups of consumers at the expense of others. Thus the abolition of rationing, while favourable for the attempts to press the lowest paid groups of workers to higher efforts, was at the same time an injury to certain privileges enjoyed by the working-class aristocracy in earlier years.

The Soviet power did not want this result, which was contrary to its new social policy, and the potential victims of this development who constituted a strong and very influential factor in Soviet society were by no means willing to accept it as the necessary outcome of the new market policy. The ruling bureaucracy, which had enormously increased in numbers through the growth of the armed forces and the economic reconstruction of the country, and the working-class aristocracy wanted to maintain their economic privileges under the new conditions of distribution. Even now some space remained for rewards in kind not obtainable for the normal citizen: flats in the new workers’ apartment blocks were so few that only privileged persons received them, wireless sets, bicycles, or even motor cars in recognition of special services, stay in one of the fashionable resorts in the Crimea, and similar distinctions of a considerable material value were constantly being given to an élite of workers either for special services on the Labour Front or for the possession of valuable connections. These extremely welcome supplements to their normal earnings were, however, not enough to indemnify the working-class aristocracy for the threatened loss of their daily privileges; this could be done only by raising their cash income to such an extent that they would not be worse off, absolutely and relatively, after the abolition of rationing than they had been before. If the general situation of the working masses improved, their situation was to improve at least at the same pace, and in practice even more quickly.

After the abolition of rationing the price-level was considerably higher than it had been before for rationed goods. But these higher prices had to be paid by everybody, whether labourer, skilled workman or state official. If the monetary income of the privileged groups could not be substantially increased, their standard of living was in actual danger of reduction or, at least, the difference between their standard of living and that of the masses would have fallen. In order to prevent discontent, the lowest-paid workers were even granted a 10 per cent increase in wages at the time of abolishing bread rationing—an involuntary admission of the enormous importance still held by black bread in the diet of the average worker; this would even appear to have increased the ‘loss’ suffered by the better-paid groups through the abolition of rationing. The differences in pay according to the category of skill were far too small to enable the working-class aristocracy to maintain their higher standard of living, and the consequence was an elemental pressure of these privileged groups who wanted to retain, or even to extend, their privileged position. This pressure had to be satisfied because the working-class aristocracy was the most important support of the ruling bureaucracy, and it was not less the driving force behind the new social policy than its product. These groups called for a very large increase in their rouble incomes, whatever the reason found for it. And it is this fact which must be regarded as the second root of the Stakhanov ‘movement’.

III: Stakhanovism

The Stakhanov movement remains a mystery unless it is regarded as the result of two different, though by no means opposed, forces: the necessity to raise the productivity of labour which, in the bureaucratic Soviet regime, assumed the form of raising a working-class aristocracy, and the desire of all privileged groups, particularly the ‘economic officers and NCOs’, to retain and extend their privileges under the new conditions of distribution by rapid increases in their cash incomes.

The Stakhanov ‘movement’ was, of course, no movement of the masses of the working class. Prepared through several years by the new social policy of the government, it was a creation of official propaganda and official pressure. The original ‘spontaneous’ record of Stakhanov himself was established in the presence not only of the Communist cell secretary but also in that of the editor of the local newspaper whose normal working place was certainly not in the pits. Only the official propaganda machine was able to concoct the totally misleading, and yet not exactly false, numerical claims made for Stakhanov and his many followers. Although the average worker after some time definitely opposed the Stakhanov movement, it had certainly a good measure of technical justification, and it was particularly welcomed by the young working-class aristocracy.

The official claims made for Stakhanov and the Stakhanovists were so incredible for the layman that the simplest explanation of many well-meaning observers was to call them just a piece of bluff. Skilled workmen obviously could not increase their output tenfold and more, unless they had been idling before—this was the explanation found by so sympathetic an observer as A Gide. The presentation of the actual results of Stakhanovism was simply based on a comparison of figures and results which cannot be compared without breaking the most elementary statistical rules, because, on the one hand, the work of individual workers was taken, while, on the other, that of whole groups under the leadership of Stakhanovists was credited to the Stakhanovists personally.

The technical principle of Stakhanovism was very simple and completely sound. The few skilled workers of Russian industry were to be freed from all unskilled work which they were doing before. Thus Stakhanov had used half his worktime for timbering instead of for hewing coal; now this work was delegated to helpers, and he used his automatic hammer for six hours instead of three. [43] It seems to be strange that this simple and sound principle should have given rise to the many difficulties and quarrels surrounding the Stakhanov system which were not confined to the low-paid members of the working class, but were expressed by many trusted Communists as well. The reason for this development is not to be found in the incontestable principle but in its very questionable application.

The records of the Stakhanovists, established by picked workers with the support of picked helpers and under the instruction of Communist officials, were used as pretext for further increases in the ‘norm’ of piecework:

What is to be done if the standards of output no longer correspond to reality and our working men and women have already managed to exceed them five or ten times? … Is it that we have not the courage to smash the old traditions and allow free scope to the new forces of the working class? [44]

It is only natural that Communist officials all over the country tried to respond to Stalin’s appeal, and that many workers bitterly opposed this new form of speeding-up. But their opposition was directed particularly against the social consequences of Stakhanovism which were visible ere long.

The most pernicious and most permanent social result of Stakhanovism was a particular form of group or gang work (derived from the quondam ‘brigade’). Group work was, of course, not invented by Stakhanovism, but this system was from the very beginning connected with very dangerous new wage regulations. Official propaganda told the world that one man mined 102 tons of coal in a six-hour shift as compared to 16 tons which was the average result of udarnik work—without mentioning the fact that he had been supported by a number of helpers. But this propaganda bluff was the actual basis of the new wage regulations which assumed that the existing norms were not surpassed by the whole group, but by the Stakhanovist who was its skilled leader or foreman. The members of the group were paid according to their skill and the official wage scales, and the group leader received, apart from his wages according to the wage scale, the premium paid for the achievement of the whole group. According to the wage scale, a skilled worker received two and a half or, at the utmost, three times as much as a common labourer; actually the members of the new working-class aristocracy received ten times as much or more. Superior workers were paid for the work of their subordinates, and this was bound to create conflicts of interests and crude exploitation within the working class. The contrast between the Red Director, who received a cash premium for the financial results of ‘his’ enterprise, and the workers as a whole, was reproduced in every workshop. The group leader or foreman had not only a different position but divergent material interests from those of the members of his group, and for moral as well as for economic reasons the workers, who at first applauded the records of the Stakhanovists, now resisted this innovation.

Thus the Stakhanov movement made the rift between the mass of the workers and the working-class aristocracy, which had been the result of the new social policy, permanent and irremediable by introducing an element of direct exploitation. The social consequences of this new departure for the Stakhanovists themselves are not less worthy of consideration. Wages of 800, 1000, 1200 and more roubles a month are not unusual for Stakhanovists of repute, and the ‘heroes of labour’ tell in interviews in the Soviet press about motorcycles and cars, wireless sets and gramophones, private lessons in dancing or in foreign languages, and many other good things which they are now able to enjoy.

The connection between the existence of a working-class aristocracy and the Stakhanov movement was unwittingly emphasised by Stalin himself when he said:

The basis of the Stakhanov movement was first and foremost the radical improvement in the material welfare of the workers. Life has improved, comrades, life has become more joyous. And when life is joyous, work goes well. Hence the higher rates of output… if people in our country lived badly, drably, joylessly, we would have had no Stakhanov movement. [45]

In the year 1935 the masses of the Russian working class still lived ‘badly, drably, joylessly’, but the Stakhanov movement was welcomed by that group amongst the workers whose living conditions were better than those of the rest, and who wanted to retain and even to increase their margin of wellbeing.

Thus it is only natural that the success of the Stakhanov movement as a movement of the privileged groups of the Soviet working class aiming at the maintenance and extension of their privileges under the new conditions of commodity distribution was complete. Many leading Stakhanovists developed useful improvements of individual processes of production and labour, but they made a very good and, indeed, an unjustifiably good bargain out of their achievements. Their wages were doubled, trebled and even further increased by special rewards in cash and kind, many of them were distinguished by the highest honours, and were accepted as members of the leading strata of the ruling bureaucracy, often in safe distance from the factories and mines where their successes had been scored. Only a little more than a year after the beginning of the Stakhanov movement, on the Eighth Soviet Congress in December 1936, no less than 371 Stakhanovists were encountered among the 2016 delegates. [46]

It is, on the other hand, very difficult to make a sound estimate of the technical success of the Stakhanov system as a method of raising the productivity of labour. On principle the results ought to be good, and during 1936 productivity increased in a spectacular manner by more than 20 per cent. [47] In view of the fact that the increase during the whole of the Second Five-Year Plan amounted to 82 per cent, [48] it would appear that the increase in the productivity of labour during 1937 must have been less than 8 per cent, that is, lower than at any time except the year of starvation, 1932. It may be assumed that the Communists had to pay by a severe setback during 1937 for their initial propaganda success.

Chapter XXIII: From the ‘Realisation of Socialism’ to the Moscow Trials

I: The Realisation of Socialism

The first, modest, aim of Communist policy was the realisation of Socialism as the lower stage of the Communist–Socialist order of society. According to Marx–Lenin, this state of things was reached after the abolition of inequalities based on the possession of capital, while inequalities based on differences in gifts and skill were still finding expression in differences in income. The slogan of the period was, therefore, ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work’, and the Communists asserted that this was an adequate description of their own social and wages policy. It is a fact of great practical and considerable theoretical interest that these claims of the Communists were completely refuted by the course of developments during the Second Five-Year Plan.

Apart from the general introduction of piecework, the Socialist principle covers the use of different wage scales for workers of different skill. The wage scales were supposed to be simple mathematical expressions of these differences in skill and experience, and it may successfully be argued that the labour of the higher categories was of a more complicated character and compressed larger quantities of ‘simple’ labour into equal spaces of time. It is probable that the considerable inequalities in the supply of necessities, which was very much better for the working-class aristocracy than for common workers, were much greater than the differences in performance, but there is no real proof for this plausible assumption available. Convincing evidence of this fact can be given only for later years during which wages in kind can be neglected as insignificant in comparison with money wages.

The general course of events may be explained by an instance taken from a different sphere. The Red Army officers always belonged to the most highly privileged parts of the ruling bureaucracy, and they participated very liberally in the general improvement in living conditions during the Second Five-Year Plan. But it is a very interesting fact that different categories of army officers did not benefit to the same extent by this development. The figures indicate that life did not become more joyous for all officers to the same degree, that is, by a flat rate of increase in salaries: [49]

Since 1934 the allowances of different groups of officers increased in a very disproportionate manner, not only in absolute value but also in relation to one another. With one unimportant exception the scale of increase was rising with the military, and therefore the social, rank of the recipient. The factor determining the amount of wage increases was here not the amount and the quality of the work done, but simply the social position of the recipient as such. In the economic sphere it is, of course, impossible to give illustrations of similar simplicity, but here, too, the language of the figures is clear.

Wages certainly did not rise without connection with the quantity and quality of work done, but they did no longer rise strictly in proportion to the amount of work done, that is, in accordance with the piecework principle. In the first years of the new social policy the system of promising extraordinary premiums was used, above all, for stimulating work in the many branches of Soviet economy where ‘narrow spots’ had to be overcome at any price. In July 1933 the wage system on the railways was revised in this sense because the permanent failure of the transport plan was a serious danger for the progress of national economy as a whole. Work in excess of normal standards was, therefore, to be rewarded by a 50 per cent premium, and, in case of excess work amounting to more than 10 per cent, even by a 100 per cent premium.

In later years this principle was, however, much more generally applied. In the generation of electrical power the following premiums were granted for work in excess of the ‘norm’: [50]

Similar inducements were given in other industries. These regulations belong already to the time of the Stakhanov movement, and they explain how comparatively small differences in work could lead to enormous differences in earnings.

This wage system obviously contradicts the principle of Socialism as expressed by the slogan ‘to each according to his work’. It may be said that the higher utility of this work justified the extra payment made by the state. But this strange principle of reversed marginal utility not only resembles suspiciously many justifications of interest and profit, it has in any case nothing in common with the Socialist principle of payment according to the amount of actual work done. In view of the fact that piecework on the basis of a differentiated wage scale already takes into account differences in quantity and quality of labour, the premium paid to the group leader is paid without any equivalent—unless the social utility of his work consists in speeding-up the work of his subordinates and lowering the piece rates paid to the average worker. To claim the achievement of Socialism as perfected under the pretext of general piecework under extremely onerous conditions is nothing but adding insult to Socialism to the injury done to the working class.

These regulations are as yet only transitional forms between achievement wages and wages determined by the social position of the recipient. The ‘chain’ system of labour organisation, as the system resulting from Stakhanovism is frequently called in the Soviet Union, is, however, of a different character, and it has been widely introduced in industry and, more recently, also in agriculture. Small groups, gangs or brigades, work under a responsible leader, frequently a Stakhanovist, who receives most or all the premium won by his group for surpassing the norm; this is already a clear case of ‘position earnings’ instead of ‘achievement wages’. And it is the wide use made of this system which, in connection with the rising scale of the premiums, completely explains the material advantages of the Stakhanovists and their unpopularity amongst the workers.

In a country without capitalists, the material effects of disproportionate rewards for one group of workers on the conditions of the rest are very clear. In the Soviet Union the complicated legal forms and traditional pretexts of capitalism are absent. Whether or not Marxist economics are the best method of describing the surface developments of capitalist economy, partly owing to their fundamental correctness as an analysis of modern industrialism, partly owing to the Communists’ Marxist approach to economic problems, they offer a simple method of description of Soviet economy. The connection between the useful work of the members of society and the size of the available fund of consumption goods is comparatively simple. Wages are vouchers for a certain quantity of consumption goods which must correspond to the amount of work actually done by every worker, though their value will be necessarily smaller than the value of his labour. If, however, a minority of skilled workers makes a contribution to the common fund of goods which is 10 or 20 or even 100 per cent greater than would follow from their number, while every member of this minority receives consumption goods to the tune of 300, 500, or even 1000 per cent more than a common workman, the remaining quantity of consumption goods does not suffice to reward the majority of workers ‘according to the work done’ by them. How far this reduction in the generally available fund of consumption goods will be practically felt must depend on the numerical strength of the minority and the amount of its privileges. The number of Stakhanovists is not definitely known. Semi-official sources put it as high as 35 to 40 per cent of the number of (industrial?) workers; according to a well-informed writer it was at the end of 1937 about one million, [51] and has certainly increased since. In any case it is important enough, and the privileges of the Stakhanovites are large enough, to influence the purchasing and consuming power of the rest of the community, which is at the same time further reduced by the growth of the economic privileges of the ruling bureaucracy.

This is proved by the existence of a sediment of inhumanly underpaid workers. During November 1937 the government decided to introduce a minimum wage of 110 roubles per month for pieceworkers in national economy. Average wages in heavy industry were then as high as 280 roubles, and even in timber industry almost 200 roubles. [52] This concession was to increase the wage fund for 1938 by 600 million roubles, that is, 50 million roubles per month. If the average wages of these low-paid workers during 1937 are assumed to have amounted to 100 roubles —which then corresponded, according to the calculations of a very sympathetic observer, to £1 sterling—their number would have been not less than five millions, or about 20 per cent of the whole number of wage-earners. In case of an even lower average, say 90 roubles, a figure which seems already incredibly low, the numerical strength of this group would still be as much as 10 per cent of the total number of wage-earners. It is impossible to find a suitable money equivalent for these wages in Anglo-Saxon currencies, but it must be concluded that in 1937 between 10 and 20 per cent of the Russian wage-earners had to spend almost the sixth part of their wages in order to buy as much black bread as was consumed on an average by the Russian population during 1928.

At the other end of the scale, the growth of the working-class aristocracy and of the privileged bureaucracy created a quickly expanding demand for luxury goods (in the Russian sense), which was satisfied by the production of better-class consumption goods. These more expensive goods were and are freely bought by the members of the bureaucracy, including the officers of the Red Army—down from marshals and generals—by the best paid workers and a considerable number of collective farmers, but they are completely out of the reach of the average workers and peasants.

It is obvious that the realisation of Socialism has political and social conditions of fundamental importance, and cannot be measured by economic standards alone. These foundations for a really Socialist society have not been created by the Soviet power, the rulers of which arbitrarily restricted the meaning of Socialism to the narrow limits of a wage policy determined by the slogan ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work’. But even in this limited and insufficient sense, Socialism has not been realised in the Soviet Union. At the present time the structure of wages and incomes of the population, and of the industrial working class in particular, does not show the extreme disparities typical of capitalist countries, but it is by no means determined by the ‘Socialist principle’. The unskilled strata of the working class receive certainly somewhat less, and the upper strata of Stakhanovists and industrial managers—not to mention the members of the ruling bureaucracy—receive appreciably more than warranted by their work.

The fundamental reason for this devious social development is the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state, which had been largely responsible for the horrors of the collectivisation period with their severe reaction on Soviet life in general. The degeneration of the bureaucracy into a social organism intent on maintaining its social and economic privileges was the decisive reason for the pernicious transformation of the new social policy into an instrument of political manoeuvre. In retrospect the parallel between the degeneration of Communist rule during War Communism and the not less fateful development of the Soviet bureaucracy during the reconstruction period is very interesting. In either case material necessities were stronger than Communist principles and revolutionary ideals. Yet there is a fundamental difference between the behaviour of the Soviet power on these two occasions. War Communism was a result of uncontrollable elemental forces which had to be accepted as such if the Soviet regime was to survive. The political face of the Soviet power and of the Communist Party was scarred for all future by the impressions of these years, but these features, though far from attractive, were powerful and justly proud. The second ‘revolutionary’ crisis, the events of 1928-33, did not show this elemental character. It has been suggested by Sidney and Beatrice Webb that the culminating terror of this period, the famine of 1932-33, was not the result of elemental forces but the outcome of the tension between the state and the peasants. The same is very largely true for this whole period. The difficulties which had to be surmounted were certainly enormous and could not be conjured away by any trick—but the policy of the government was apt to increase them before it was compelled to tackle them. And there is strong evidence to suggest that this wrong policy was directly caused by the degeneration of the revolutionary dictatorship into a short-sighted and selfish bureaucracy.

This bureaucracy finally underwent a process of petrification and became an organisation in possession of all ‘commanding heights’ of Soviet life intent on maintaining its political position and on improving its material conditions. The working class was split by the establishment of a highly-privileged aristocracy within its own ranks which forms the broad social basis of the bureaucracy.

II: The ‘Abolition of the Classes’ and the ‘Intensification in the Class Struggle’

At the beginning of the year of crisis, 1932, when the Communists discussed the outlines of the Second Five-Year Plan, the Seventeenth Conference of the CPSU adopted a remarkable resolution:

… the vast natural wealth of the country, the Bolshevik rate of Socialist construction, the growing activity of the masses of the workers and collective farmers, and the correct line of the Party fully guarantee such development of the productive forces of the Socialist economy in the Second Five-Year Plan as will serve as the basis for the complete extermination of the capitalist elements in the USSR…, the chief political task of the Second Five-Year Plan is a final liquidation of the capitalist elements and of classes in general. [53]

From this statement the following conclusion was drawn which may be called without exaggeration prophetical:

… an intensification of the class struggle will still be inevitable in future at certain periods and particularly in certain districts and certain sections of Socialist construction, which at the same time emphasises the fact that bourgeois influences upon individual strata or groups of workers will inevitably remain and in some cases even grow stronger, that for a long time to come class influences alien to the proletariat will inevitably penetrate the working class and even the Party. In view of this the Party faces the task of strengthening the proletarian dictatorship and of increasing its struggle against opportunism, especially the right deviation which is the main danger at the given stage. [54]

The Soviet power seems to have expected a desperate resistance by the capitalist elements, if any, against their complete destruction, and their alleged supporters within the Communist Party, the Right Wing led by Rykov, Bukharin, Tomsky, etc, were clearly warned that opposition against the resolute, revolutionary policy of the government would be ruthlessly suppressed.

Even two years later Stalin used the same explanation for the existence of certain oppositional voices within the party which otherwise was developing in an irreproachable manner:

It is clear that these remnants [of capitalism] are bound to form a favourable soil in order to resuscitate the ideologies of the vanquished anti-Leninist groups among certain members of our party. [55]

Yet an important change in comparison with 1932 had taken place. The Seventeenth Conference of the CPSU took place before the determined attempt of the government to find a compromise with the peasants; for this reason the danger was alleged to threaten from the Right, that is, from the advocates of such a compromise. In 1934 the success of collectivisation on the basis of such a compromise was clear, and opposition came from those Communists who were unable to reconcile its terms with their Communist conscience—in Stalin’s view owing to petit-bourgeois influences. A sign of the general uneasiness within the party was particularly the mistaken idea that the realisation of Socialism ought to be accompanied by the withering away of the state.

Thus in 1934 the leaders of the Communist Party still believed that capitalist or petit-bourgeois influences were the real enemies which had to be overcome. But in this and the following year great progress was obviously made in this struggle, and 1936 was marked by a complete reversal of official policy. Already, at the beginning of that year the President of Gosplan believed that the most important difficulties of Socialist construction were a thing of the past, and that national economy in its entirety was ‘assured of harmonious and rapid progress’. [56] This conviction was shared by the government, and the struggle against the remnants of capitalism was obviously at an end. In the summer of the same year the dismissal of employees owing to their social origin was forbidden, and other restrictions on people deprived of citizens’ rights—mainly owing to their connections with the exploiting classes of the past—were cancelled. This development finally produced the Stalinist Constitution which was claimed by the official propaganda machine all over the world as the most democratic constitution in existence. The differences in the electoral rights of workers and peasants disappeared, the Soviet system was replaced by parliamentary institutions on the Western, or perhaps on the Nazi, model, and social origin ceased to be a reason for the loss of electoral rights. The liquidation of the classes was clearly completed; the bourgeoisie and the kulaks were things of the past, and at last a harmonious structure of society was accomplished.

It should be assumed that the existence of classes was a necessary condition for the existence of class struggles. It is noteworthy that the Communists, for once, claimed even too little for their policy when they pretended still to discover capitalist elements in the Soviet Union of 1932. Neither economically nor socially capitalism existed in Russia at that time, although there were still many people who previously belonged to the bourgeoisie or to the rural upper class. Some of them were in the service of the Soviet government as specialists, and these were often justly—and even more frequently unjustly—accused of sabotage, or at least of indifference towards their duties. Show trials and the summary shooting of whole groups of consulting engineers, technicians, agronomists, etc, symbolised the dangerous part played by these old specialists within Soviet economy as well as the use to which they could be put occasionally as scapegoats for bureaucratic mistakes. Later on, when the general situation improved after the better harvest of 1933, the mood of the people was not so tense, the general pressure—the combined result of empty stomachs, excessive strain and political compulsion—fell, and the work of industry improved; sabotage trials became rarer, the position of the ‘intelligentsia’ became better, and the growth of a new Soviet intelligentsia made it possible to dispense with the services of many lukewarm and unreliable men in key positions.

There is no shred of evidence to support the official theory that the ‘resistance’ of capitalist elements against the revolutionary policy of the government increased during the Second Plan period—actually it was already broken effectively and permanently during the preceding years. As far as the ‘intensification in the class struggles’ was to be the result of capitalist resistance, it was a mere chimera. Nevertheless there was plenty of political and class warfare within Russian society, and probably even within the Communist Party.

Already during the first few years of this period, the differentiation of the working class became intense enough to cause political discontent. The first official traces of this tendency may already be found in Stalin’s refutation of the heresies within the Communist Party in the beginning of 1934. The growing tension within the working class probably influenced many old Bolsheviks in subordinate positions and therefore in close contact with the people, and the same must have been true to an even higher degree of the members of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth organisation. The assassination of Kirov at the end of 1934 has up to now not been completely cleared up, but it may well have been partly the outcome of these tendencies. (On the other hand, it was clearly connected with frictions within the ruling bureaucracy, between the regional organisation of the Communist Party and the Leningrad GPU, therefore foreshadowing one of the problems decided later on by the Moscow Trials.) Neither in this spectacular case nor in many other social and political conflicts of these years had the remnants of the bourgeoisie and the kulaks the slightest influence.

Finally, the abolition of classes in general and the adoption of the most democratic constitution in the world were accompanied by a fierce political struggle within the ruling layers of the regime, if it is permitted to call the ‘liquidation’ of tens of thousands without the slightest resistance by the victims a ‘struggle’. These events were prepared by the intensification of the new social policy, by the campaign for increasing the productivity of labour at any price which reached its culminating point in the invention and spreading of the Stakhanov movement throughout the country. The widespread wave of social discontent following its general application and the increasing tension and internal friction of Soviet society became the starting-point for a general overhaul of the bureaucratic system of Soviet economy and administration.

These facts explain the coincidence of the ‘abolition of classes in general’ and the ‘intensification in class struggles’, the simultaneous abolition of restrictions imposed in consequence of social origin, and the tightening up of police supervision of the whole people, the introduction of parliamentary democracy and the physical destruction of all potential opponents within the Communist Party.

III: The Moscow Trials

The psychological enigmas of the Moscow Trials cannot be discussed, and can even less be solved, in this place. In a general way it may be remarked that the most frequently used alternative concerning their rights and wrongs was logically and practically unjustified. It is not necessary that either Stalin or his victims had ceased to be Socialist revolutionaries and had become either Asiatic despots or despicable spies. As far as the personal development or the personal degeneration of the actors in this tragic drama is of any importance at all, it is much more probable that Stalin and his henchmen as well as the oppositionists of different shades who became his victims were more or less equally remote from the psychological attitude and the political ideas for which they stood twenty or thirty years ago.

The bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet regime as a whole changed not only Stalin but also his previous rivals and later victims. All of them got used to work and life under these completely new conditions, and adapted themselves to their new surroundings, although some of them may have found this process more difficult than others. But it is hardly permissible (as many opponents of the Stalinist dictatorship did at the time of the Trials) to glorify as symbols of immaculate revolutionary idealism men with a great revolutionary past who nevertheless had participated in every volte-face of the dictatorship as long as they were permitted to do so. This is not quite true of those revolutionaries who had spent most of the last ten years of their life in Siberia as exiles; but even men of the type of Rakovsky or Muralov, whose strength of intellect or character was far above the high average of old Bolsheviks, were completely broken as political characters long before they disappeared into the night of an inglorious grave or GPU prison.

An obvious explanation of the trials, which within certain limits is as true as obvious explanations of complicated events usually are, is furnished by the assumption that Stalin and his associates wanted once for all to get rid of the leaders of oppositional tendencies within the CPSU. The ‘old Bolsheviks’ were naturally divided into the two groups of supporters and of open or secret opponents of the ruling tendency, and the destruction of the latter was therefore a foregone conclusion. There are important exceptions among the personnel of the trials. Yagoda, Grinko, etc, and particularly Tukhachevsky and most of the other generals were not intimately connected with the factional struggle within the Communist Party, but this explanation is certainly correct for the main figures of the three Moscow Trials (Zinoviev and Kamenev, Sokolnikov, Radek and Piatakov, Rakovsky, Krestinsky, Bukharin and Rykov). Even if this explanation is accepted as plausible it still remains to be seen why the solution of this question was felt to be ripe and urgent during these years towards the end of the Second Five-Year Plan, as these persons, again with the exception of Tukhachevsky and the other generals, were completely deprived of political power.

A further very plausible explanation of the Trials is furnished by the international situation. Trotsky’s suggestion is, in view of recent developments, of particular importance:

Many symptoms indicate that Stalin has to fight a certain part of the bureaucracy which will assure its position at any price, even at the price of an alliance of friendship with Hitler. Stalin is, I suppose, not inclined now to go along in this way, but will expose this tendency by the spectre of Trotskyism: ‘It is Trotsky’s policy; we will execute everybody who is of the same opinion.’ This is not an opinion on my part, only a supposition. [57]

It is now hardly fantastic to assume that Molotov was and is one of the exponents of this tendency—a hypothesis which is perhaps strengthened by Trotsky’s proof that Molotov’s star was distinctly in eclipse at the time of the first Trial.

The international threat to the military and territorial safety of the Soviet Union was—and is—an extremely dangerous development. It is probable that the rulers of the Soviet Union believed in 1936 war to be even more imminent than it really was, and they had no illusions about the danger to their rule which would be caused by a large-scale military conflict. This may have been sufficient reason for them to eliminate everybody who opposed the official policy in such a vital question, and to prevent the creation or to effect the destruction of an existing centre of opposition to the present rulers which might have had serious chances of becoming an alternative government in the course of a crisis of the regime.

After all the experience of the activities of the Fifth Column in Spain and during the present war, it would be very rash indeed to regard the existence of similar dangers in the Soviet Union as pure fancy. Nevertheless, the only condition for success of a rival leadership is even in case of war the existence of antagonistic social interests within the framework of society. If the official assertions of the Soviet government were more than mere phrases, if the last remnants of antagonistic social groups were really destroyed, this fear was a ghastly error. Under these conditions the danger of war and actual war would have only served to strengthen the bonds of unity against the common danger which threatened all social and professional groups within the Soviet Union alike.

For this reason the official version of the Moscow Trials constantly asserts that the accused had no coherent social and political programme, and this was certainly true. On the other hand, it was simply a piece of grotesque and cruel irony to make the accused confess to the stimulus of inordinate ambition as the main motive for their criminal actions. After the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin it is hardly necessary to discuss the ethics of the accusation that the doomed old Bolsheviks had been simply agents for Nazi Germany and for the Japanese militarists. Even if the idea must be rejected that the victims of the Moscow Trials and of the great purge of 1936-38 were still the pure and great revolutionaries of 1916-18, the official propaganda version of the Trials and the accompanying purge does not make sense. Although it would appear today that Stalin and Molotov have been foolish or short-sighted enough to believe in Hitler’s promises, there is no plausible reason to assume that the ‘ambitious’ old Bolsheviks were guilty of a similar error of judgment. For once the impotent victims of Stalin were in a better position to judge with a cool head and a wide vision than the men on the top of a violent but short-sighted bureaucracy whose judgement was fatally compromised by the extent of the danger by which they were—and are—threatened.

A satisfactory answer to the problems of the Moscow Trials can be given only from a very different angle, by regarding them as the bureaucratic, and therefore distorted, expression of real developments and real conflicts within Soviet society.

The Soviet Union underwent an important change during the years of the reconstruction period, a change which exposed it to new internal conflicts. Up to the end of the NEP the bureaucracy claimed to represent the workers, but it never even claimed to represent the peasants who were regarded as an external force. By subordinating the country to collectivisation, a vast new agricultural bureaucracy was created, comprising hundreds of thousands of presidents and secretaries of collective farms, state farm directors, MTS directors, and political representation of all these organisations by Communist officials. The influence of the Soviet power over the village was tremendously increased, but the peasants won a certain, and probably a very strong, hold on the bureaucracy. Peasant interests were now represented within the bureaucracy by the representatives of the state towards the peasants who were also the spokesmen of the peasants towards the state.

At the same time the weight of the economic bureaucracy was further increased by the reconstruction of industry which demanded an army of managing officials directly or indirectly belonging to the bureaucratic apparatus of the Soviet state. The use of Communists for economic key positions certainly extended the power of the Communist Party throughout the economic system, but it also gave the leaders of the economic system direct access to and influence with the rulers of the country.

The regional and central party officials whose voice was heard within the Communist Party were commanded to the fulfilment of economic tasks not as manual workers but as managing directors. Owing to the simultaneous effects of the new social policy which created or widened a rift between the interests of the mass of the workers and the managing and executive personnel (including the top layer of skilled workers), it was the viewpoint of the management and of the privileged groups in general which was almost exclusively heard within the counsels of the central authorities. At the same time, a considerable number of Communist rank-and-file members who worked among the mass of the workers may have succumbed to their discontent and voiced within the Communist Party the grievances of the common worker instead of subordinating everything to the application of the ‘General Line’.

The disadvantages of this development for the workers were furthermore increased by the fate of the trade unions, which were finally deprived of the remnants of independent influence they may have had before. The external symptom of this decline of trade union importance was the removal from office of Tomsky, who was a member of the ‘right opposition’, because he rejected the rising demands of the First Five-Year Plan. (Later on he was made President of the State Publishing House, and preferred suicide to the necessity of appearing as one of the accused in the first Moscow Trial.) The complete estrangement between the unions and the workers was certainly unwelcome to the government, but it was the inevitable result of its policy, and could not be prevented by palliatives of any kind. The abolition of the Ministry of Labour in 1933 and the transfer of its functions to the unions may be regarded as well, and with better reasons, as the abolition of the unions and the transfer of their personnel to the Ministry of Labour, which from now on was to be maintained at the expense of the workers. The trade unions have important administrative duties to fulfil (administration of social insurance, factory inspection, supervision of economic plans in the field of industrial labour, that is, fulfilment of the plans for the increase in the productivity of labour), but these tasks do not include the protection of the workers. On the contrary, the real function of the unions is strictest control of the working class; this is particularly true in the case of social insurance which, under the new social policy, is used for the suppression of so-called ‘loafers’, and therefore causes sharp conflicts between the workers and ‘their’ representatives.

It is interesting to note that industry was in recent years freed from some of the ‘social burdens’ which it had been carrying before. Social insurance contributions were reduced, the maintenance of the factory committees was completely thrown on the shoulders of the workers, who were also compelled to make a contribution to their stay in rest-homes, etc. In view of all these developments it was, of course, completely illusionary once again to ‘democratise’ the union movement, as the central authorities repeatedly demanded. The government certainly wanted the workers to take more interest in their unions and to reduce the costs of the union bureaucracy, which had grown to a total of not less than 76 500 people, by doing union work, that is, the functions of the Ministry of Labour, in their spare time. But as trade union democracy was to be confined to uncontroversial topics, these attempts were completely unsuccessful.

The development of Soviet bureaucracy was very similar to that of Soviet society as a whole. Within the ruling bureaucracy the representatives of independent material interests—the collective farmers—or of privileged groups—the executive power, economic leaders, and the working-class aristocracy—shared in the power, while the working masses were practically unrepresented. The whole structure of the Soviet bureaucracy was radically changed, and this transformation was bound to react on the personnel of the dictatorship. For the time being the old Communists remained within the ruling bureaucracy, very frequently still in the decisive positions, but they were joined by a growing number of administrators pure and simple who were brought to the top by the requirements of economic reconstruction and by the various economic interests to which it gave rise and access to the ruling bureaucracy. The old Bolsheviks within the dictatorship were partly conscious advocates of this change, as Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, etc, for the rest, however, they seem to have suffered grievously from the irreconcilable contrast between their past and their present; to use a striking phrase coined by Bukharin in his last plea in the third Moscow Trial (March 1938), they suffered from a ‘dual mind’. The new generation of more or less successful industrial managers, collective farm presidents, and other political and economic administrators, on the other hand, was completely and firmly rooted in the new state of things, approved and influenced the new tendencies of the Soviet power, and was filled with deep mistrust of their old colleagues who were regarded as an incongruous remnant of a barbaric and inefficient past.

This strong and growing force of new bureaucrats without revolutionary past not only distrusted the old Bolsheviks, however sadly these themselves may have changed in the course of the years, but they positively wanted to get rid of these amateurs of social and economic administration. This obvious fact does not, however, explain the violent character of the extermination of the old leaders and cadres . The ultimate reason for the violent character of this revirement , for the removal of the wrecks of the revolution by the beneficiaries of the post-revolutionary period, was the emergence of new social conflicts between the mass of the workers and the bureaucratic regime. These conflicts were a consequence of the reappearance of economic privileges and economic exploitation. As long as the peasants offered a united front of resistance against the towns, the workers not less than the government, the Soviet power was at least partly justified in claiming to represent the workers. After the success of collectivisation the peasants managed to obtain comparatively far-reaching material concessions and probably a modicum of direct political influence. The working class, on the other hand, was split by the new social policy into a privileged minority and into a ‘negatively privileged’ majority whose interests were by no means adequately protected by the bureaucratic regime. The old social balance was greatly disturbed, but no new stability could be attained. Under the economic conditions of a centralised and largely industrialised system, the transformation of the bureaucratic rulers into a materially privileged group was a source of new disturbances and created a general feeling of discontent among a large part of the masses and a feeling of insecurity among the leaders. This feeling was further enhanced by the threatening international situation which seemed to compel the Soviet regime to undergo the terrible and decisive test of a totalitarian war.

This real background of the Moscow Trials brings out one grotesque and terrible fact. If the Communist leaders really wanted to get rid of potential rivals, or the potential leaders, either of a second revolution, or of a Fifth Column in the service of Fascism; if they suffered from fear of an impending social upheaval—a fear which was greatly increased by their now bad conscience—they made a curious mistake in the choice of their victims. By striking at their past opponents, they only struck their own past. The accused of the Moscow Trials, the former leaders of the oppositional tendencies within the Communist Party, who lost their life owing to the Trials or to the purge, were already political corpses when they appeared before what were called their judges. In spite of the gruesome reality of their confessions and their indictments, their judgements and their executions, the Moscow Trials were not even political actions but a fight of the bureaucracy with its faded revolutionary shadow.

The purge was certainly successful as far as it eliminated those elements tainted by a revolutionary past who had not atoned for this crime by constant adherence to the successive bureaucratic degenerations of the regime without complaint. The purge destroyed the contradiction between appearance and reality, between traditions and tasks of the dictatorship, and adapted its personnel to its functions. It demonstrated to the world that the once Communist and revolutionary dictatorship of the Soviet Union has become a bureaucratic dictatorship pure and simple which acts according to no principle whatever, and is inspired by one aim only—the maintenance of its own position, the preservation of its own existence.

The influence of the Moscow Trials and of the accompanying purge in the Communist Party and in the Soviet state on the rapidly continuing process of social differentiation, on the reappearance of economic privileges and economic exploitation, was exactly nil. Although the struggle in the political jungle was a distorted expression and a symptom of the fateful development of the social forces, it had no bearing whatever on their further destiny.

Notes

1. Stalin, ‘Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU’, Pravda , 11 March 1939.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Molotov, ‘Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU’, Pravda , 15 March 1939.

5. Stalin, cited in USSR: Bilan 1934 , pp 50ff.

6. Stalin, ‘Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU’, Pravda , 11 March 1939.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Speech of Andreyev, member of the Polbureau, Pravda , 14 March 1939.

10. J Stalin, ‘Speech at the Conference of Harvester-Combines Operators’, 1 December 1935, in A Fineberg (ed), Soviet Union , 1936 (Moscow, 1936), p 32.

11. Stalin, ‘Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU’, Pravda , 11 March 1939.

12. Speech of Andreyev, member of the Polbureau, Pravda , 14 March 1939.

13. Stalin, cited in USSR: Bilan 1934 , pp 50ff.

14. Calculated from Stalin’s figures in Pravda , 11 March 1939.

15. G Grinko, ‘The Financial Programme of the SU for 1936’, in Soviet Union, 1936 , p 480.

16. D Mishustin, ‘Foreign Trade’, in The Soviet Union Comes of Age (London, 1938), p 99.

17. Molotov, ‘Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU’, Pravda , 15 March 1939.

18. LE Hubbard, Soviet Money and Finance (London, 1936), p 173.

19. LE Hubbard, Soviet Trade and Distribution (London, 1938), p 174.

20. Stalin, ‘Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU’, Pravda , 11 March 1939.

21. W Nodel, Supply and Trade in the USSR (London, 1934), p 100.

22. State Planning Commission of the USSR, The Second Five-Year Plan of the USSR (1933-1937) (Moscow, 1936), pp 15ff.

23. People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ , 2-13 March 1938 (Moscow, 1938), p 234.

24. Forward to the Second Five-Year Plan of Socialist Construction: Resolutions of the Seventeenth Conference of the CPSU (Moscow, 1932), p 34.

25. The Soviet Union Looks Ahead: The Five Year Plan of Economic Reconstruction (London, 1930), p 99.

26. Stalin, cited in USSR: Bilan 1934 , p 37.

27. Forward to the Second Five-Year Plan , p 6.

28. Ibid, pp 577ff.

29. Max Werner, The Military Strength of the Powers (London, 1939), p 41.

30. Molotov, ‘Report to the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU’, Pravda , 15 March 1939.

31. L Segal, The Soviet Union in Reconstruction (London, 1931), p 42; The Soviet Union Looks Ahead , p 252; The Second Five-Year Plan , pp 584ff.

32. AZ Arnold, Banks, Credit, and Money in Soviet Russia (New York, 1937), p 389.

33. BL Marcus, ‘The Stakhanov Movement and the Increased Productivity of Labour in USSR’, International Labour Review, July 1936, p 7ff.

34. Sir W Citrine, I Search for Truth in Russia (London, 1938), p 93.

35. Hubbard, Soviet Trade , p 269.

36. Citrine, I Search for Truth in Russia , p 39.

37. GR Mitchison, ‘The Russian Workers’, in MD Cole (ed), Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia (London, 1933), pp 94ff.

38. A Pasquier, Le Stakhanovisme (Paris, 1938), p 60.

39. Hubbard, Soviet Trade , p 273.

40. Pasquier, Le Stakhanovisme , p 60.

41. Ibid.

42. Hubbard, Soviet Money , p 120.

43. Pasquier, Le Stakhanovisme , pp 28ff.

44. J Stalin, ‘Speech at the First Conference of Stakhanovists’, 17 November 1935, in Soviet Union, 1936 , pp 14ff.

45. Ibid, p 11.

46. Yvon, L’URSS telle quelle est (Preface by A Gide) (Paris, 1938), p 272.

47. The National Economic Plan of the USSR for 1937 (Moscow, 1937), p 4, and Mezhlauk in Soviet Union, 1936 , p 335.

48. By approximate calculation from other figures officially published the increase in the productivity of labour would seem to have been 7.3 per cent.

49. Voroshilov, ‘Speech on the Eighteenth Congress of the CPSU’, Pravda, 15 March 1939.

50. Pasquier, Le Stakhanovisme , p 54.

51. Ibid, p 87.

52. Pravda , 21 December 1937.

53. Forward to the Second Five-Year Plan… , pp 31ff.

54. Ibid, p 38.

55. Stalin, cited in USSR: Bilan 1934 , p 80.

56. Forward to the Second Five-Year Plan… , p 1.

57. Preliminary Commission of Inquiry, The Case of Leon Trotsky (London, 1937), p 383.

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