The Red Flag: A History of Communism (29 page)

Despite the practical difficulties of ‘proletarianization’, however, party institutions became increasingly obsessed with class and ideological purity. Under Lenin, absolute unity had also been demanded, but by the end of the 1920s, any opposition was seen as a real evil, a danger to the party that needed to be extirpated.
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Communists increasingly resented the continuing influence of the bourgeois specialists in state administration. Following the so-called ‘Lenin Levy’ of workers into party ranks of 1924, party cells in factories were often very proletarian in composition, and could be very hostile to bourgeois specialists and the managers who worked with them. But particularly radical was a new ‘proletarian’ intelligentsia, angry at the continuing influence of the old bourgeois intellectuals, or ‘fellow travellers’ as Trotsky termed them. The NEP was a period of relative cultural liberalism compared with the 1930s, when great poets like Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova could be defined as ‘fellow travellers’ and were able to publish. But this was deeply resented by many of the new ‘proletarian’ party intellectuals.

The militant, civil-war culture of class struggle had retreated from society at large to the confines of the party after 1921, much as had happened in Western Europe. The difference, of course, was that the Communist party was in power. The gap between official ideology and a reality of trade, merchants and unemployment was therefore stark. The NEP merely reinvigorated radicals’ class hatred and socialist radicalism.

The main supporters of this radical line within the party leadership were the members of the leftist United Opposition, and they subjected
the leadership’s policies to harsh criticism. But in late 1927 Stalin and Bukharin succeeded in having them removed from the party: in October Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee, and from December purges of the left took place throughout the party. Trotsky was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1928, and left the USSR in 1929, for Turkey, France, Norway and, finally, Mexico.

However, paradoxically, the defeat of the United Opposition coincided with the victory of much of its programme. Now Stalin had worsted his great enemy Trotsky, he could steal the left’s ideas, though he gave them a more nationalistic colouring. The deteriorating international environment after 1926 was central to his calculations. The NEP strategy seemed most convincing in the mid-1920s, at a time of relative peace with the West, because it promised growth through foreign trade. But worsening diplomatic relations only strengthened those who favoured a more self-reliant economic policy. Many Bolshevik leaders were convinced from 1926–7 that the British and the French were planning an invasion with the help of East Europeans. This was, of course, untrue, and the fears seem enormously exaggerated in retrospect. But Stalin, ever suspicious of the foreign ‘bourgeoisie’, and seeing the world through the eyes of the former colonized Georgian, seems to have been genuinely fearful. If the Soviet Union was to ‘avoid the fate of India’ and not become a colony of the West, he warned, it had to build heavy industry and increase its military budget.
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In these circumstances Stalin adopted much of the left’s critique of NEP, and concluded that the Plan was not delivering the industrial development the USSR required. The NEP strategy was a fundamentally slow and gradual one: the peasantry would be allowed to profit from producing food, and as they used their profits to buy industrial goods – such as textiles and tools – their increased prosperity, it was reasoned, would benefit industry. At the same time the government could export now-plentiful grain in exchange for much-needed imported machinery. However, whilst grain production did improve and industrial production increased to pre-war levels, this was not a strategy that was going to deliver rapid industrialization – especially at a time when international grain prices were low.

In 1927 a poor harvest and food shortages forced the leadership to make a decision: to maintain the prices paid to peasants for grain, at the expense of industrialization, or to cling on to ambitious investment
targets and use state power (and ultimately force) to extract grain from the peasantry, thus effectively ending the market in grain and destroying NEP. Stalin chose the latter. Echoing his modus operandi as food commissar in the South during the civil war, he went on a highly publicized visit to Siberia to ‘find’ grain, though in reality he had already decided where it was – in the coffers of ‘selfish’ kulak hoarders. The party, he declared, had to wage a class struggle against kulaks; poor peasants were to be mobilized against the rich proprietors to seize the hidden food, so contributing to the industrialization and defence of the USSR.

Stalin’s revolution was not confined to agriculture. It was a grand ideological campaign, an opportunity to end the retreat of 1921 and ‘leap forward’ to socialism on all fronts, much as the Radical United Opposition had proposed. The market was to be outlawed, and with it all forms of inequality, between intellectuals and workers, and between workers themselves. At the same time the USSR was to be dragged out of its backward state and brought into an advanced socialist modernity. The era was described as one of radical ‘Cultural Revolution’. Religion and peasant ‘superstition’ were to be eliminated, and ‘backward’ ethnic cultures brought up to the level of the advanced Russians. The party was to be reinvigorated with messianic zeal so that it could mobilize the masses to achieve miraculous feats of development.

Stalin encountered stiff resistance from Bukharin and his allies, accused of being a ‘Right deviation’, and at first he faced a majority of opponents in the Politburo. He had embarked on what he was to call the ‘Great Break’ with the past. Prometheus had again been unbound, as both modernizer and violent revolutionary.

In his memoir
I Chose Freedom
(written in 1947 after his defection to the United States), Viktor Kravchenko reminisced about his time as a 23-year-old technical foreman and Communist Youth (Komsomol) activist in a Ukrainian metallurgical factory during the year 1929:

Kravchenko recognized that he was one of a minority. He was a typical activist in the new Stalinist order. From working-class origins (his father had taken part in the 1905 revolution) and educated under the new regime, he was determined to bring modernity to his country. He was precisely the sort of person Stalin intended to occupy the vanguard of his new revolution. Stalin saw socialism as a something that would be spread from the ‘advanced elements’ to the ‘backward’ by a committed, quasi-military force. But post-revolutionary socialism was also intimately linked with industrialization. With his slogan ‘There are no fortresses in the world that working people, the Bolsheviks, cannot capture’, he deliberately transferred the radical Communism of the revolution to the industrial front.
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Industrialization was a semi-military campaign, designed to defend the USSR against aggressive imperialists. As Stalin declared with a certain prescience in 1931, ‘We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must close this gap in ten years. Either we achieve this, or they will do us in.’
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The First Five-Year Plan was drawn up in 1928, and marked the beginning of the end of the market economy. But the term ‘plan’, with its scientific connotations, is misleading. Whilst it certainly bristled with figures and targets, they had often been plucked out of thin air by Stalin himself and were impractically ambitious.
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They are better seen as appeals for heroic effort. Stalin was encouraged in his ambitions by Marxist economists, who applied Engels’ curious notions of dialectical materialism to economics: utopian plans, they claimed, were entirely feasible because Marxism had proved that revolutionary ‘leaps’ forward were a verifiable natural phenomenon and therefore equally applied to the economy.
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The old ‘bourgeois’ science, they insisted, had been discredited; a new ‘proletarian’ science, which took account of the will-power of the masses, would replace it. This, then, was a militarized ‘command’ economy based on theorized wishful thinking, not a genuinely planned one.

The Stalinists’ first objective was to render the party and the state suitable instruments for their socialist offensive. Officials had to be loyal and true believers; any ‘rightist’ sceptics were to be removed. In practice, this meant purges, usually on the basis of class background. The Shakhty trial of ‘saboteur’ engineers in 1928 was designed to show how dangerous the bourgeois specialists were, and many were sacked or arrested.

However, the Stalinists hoped that their ‘revolution’ would be popular, and the next stage was for the suitably purged and re-energized party to mobilize the working class and poor peasantry. The sober bourgeois disciplines that Lenin had been so eager to impart under NEP were scrapped; the populist militarism of the civil-war era returned. Regular work was replaced by ‘storming’ (
shturmovshchina
) – working intensively to fulfil plans, usually at the last minute. The party organized ‘shock work’ brigades in which workers took ‘revolutionary vows’ to achieve production records. Money, partly because there was so little, partly because it violated ideological principles, was not much of an incentive. In many factories production ‘communes’ were created, where wages were shared equally, echoing the
artel
of old. Self-sacrifice and the achievement of socialism were to be reward enough.
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Workers, however, were given some incentives, even if they were not straightforwardly material ones: higher status, upward mobility and the opportunity to vent their fury against unpopular bosses. Stalin explicitly declared that his ‘Great Break’ would not just be an economic revolution but also a social one. Denunciations of bourgeois specialists were encouraged by the party, and detachments of reliable workers were sent out from factories to root out bourgeois and bureaucratic attitudes in government. The obedient and committed (as long as they were ‘workers’) had much to gain from these purges, for the regime was committed to replacing the bourgeoisie with a new proletarian ‘red’ intelligentsia. Indeed, this was an age of social mobility.
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Many of the Communists who came to rule the Soviet Union in its years of senescence, the so-called ‘Brezhnev generation’, retained an unflinching loyalty to the regime precisely because they had benefited so much from education and promotion during the 1930s.

The regime, however, was not content to target the bourgeois specialists; it also had its sights on the supposedly ‘bureaucratic’ Communist managers – the Shramms of the factory – whom it believed had become
too close to the specialists. Stalin inaugurated a nationwide campaign of ‘self-criticism’ and ‘democracy’, which entailed bosses submitting themselves to popular criticism. In part, this was intended to put pressure on sceptical specialists and managers to fulfil the state’s ambitious targets. But there was also another motive: if workers were to ‘feel that they were the masters’ of the country, as Stalin put it, they would be more committed to a self-consciously revolutionary regime, and therefore to their work.
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This was not a return to the workers’ control of 1917, but even so, some workers, organized by the local party ‘cell’, were given more influence over the production process, whilst the bosses and specialists were the targets of criticism and could easily fall victim to charges of ‘sabotage’. As Kravchenko, who edited a factory newspaper at the time, remembered, ‘self-criticism’ was certainly manipulated, but was not mere rhetoric:

These strategies of mobilization had mixed success. Some do seem to have been enthusiastic shock-workers. They approved of the party’s revolutionary rhetoric, hated the old managers and specialists, and could expect privileges and favours from the regime. John Scott, a twenty-year-old American who went to work at the massive Magnitogorsk metallurgical complex in the Urals in 1931, remembered the war-like atmosphere and the spirit of self-sacrifice that it encouraged: