The Soviet State under Stalin

Stalin’s Role in the Soviet State

The crisis of modernisation: from indirect to direct mobilisation

  • The emergence of the Stalinist machine opened up new approaches to the underlying problem of backwardness. By the late 1920s a very different situation made available to the government a third strategy – to tackle the peasantry head on and take what was necessary by force as it had during the period of War Communism. The precondition of this was the strengthened ruling group and a powerful and ruthless leadership.
  • Strategies of direct mobilisation appeared once more on the Party’s agenda, with Stalin as their main sponsor.
  • By 1929 the Stalinist machine provided the spine of such as system. And the emergence of Stalin as undisputed leader gave the system a unity and decisiveness it lacked during the power struggle. Meanwhile the other organs of the coercive machinery were the army and police which had a decade of relative stability to grow their traditions.
  • As leader of such a group, Stalin was in a position to pursue the twin goals of industrial growth and military power more ruthlessly than any other Russian ruler. During the 1930s he showed that he possessed both the will and ability to do so.

Introduction of Collectivisation and Industrialisation (Five Year Plans)

A Social Revolution

  • In 1929 the Soviet Government launched a final assault on the capitalist countryside. NEP men and kulaks were expropriated, and the remaining peasants were formed into collective farms headed by government appointed directors. Collectivisation and dekulakisation were the beginnings of a ‘revolution from above’ which within a few years had completed the social revolution that begun in 1917. Once it was completed, there were no longer any classes living off the ownership of property; all members of Soviet society lived from wage labour.
  • Since the proclamation of the Stalin constitution in 1936, the Soviet Government has recognised the existence of only two classes- the proletariat and the peasant and also the Soviet intelligentsia a larger group than its tsarist counterpart, for it includes all categories of white collar workers, from scientists to artists to clerks.
  • The revolution from above did not merely destroy the old order. It also established the institutions that have characterised Soviet society ever since. These were: collective and state farms; a planned economy geared for rapid industrial growth; and a centralised political system headed by the General Secretary, supported by the secret police and controlling a rigidly censored communications system.
  • Built a huge and powerful fiscal system, and coercive machinery strong enough to contain the vast social pressures it generated.

Collectivisation

  • The many problems facing the Soviet Government all turned in the last resort on the fiscal problem – that of extracting more resources from society in order to pay for the modernisation of the army and economy. As the peasants made up almost 85% of the population the problem in essence was to extract more labour and resources from the peasantry.
  • By 1928 neither of the major strategies considered in the 1920s seemed adequate (Bukharin vs. Trotsky). Stalin conceived a third strategy which contained elements of both right and leftwing strategies, but applied them with a brutality that would have appalled most participants in the debates of the 1920s.
  • Problems with the NEP began to accumulate rapidly from 1926-27. The procurement crisis of December 1927 – the direct result of these shifts in policy – threatened to undermine the economic logic of the entire Bukharinite strategy. Instead of placing more grain in the marketplace, peasants marketed less grain in order to put the prices up.  
  • The answer was in Lenin’s final articles ‘On Co-operation’. It was to collectivise agriculture – collectivisation. The peasants would slowly give up small scale private agriculture, and join together in large, collective farms, which would enjoy all the advantages of modern technology and large scale production.
  • When the number of collective farms expanded the kulaks would find themselves isolated, and less and less able to compete with the collective farms. Private enterprise would be squeezed out of the rural sector, and at the same time agricultural productivity and the living standards of the majority of peasants were steadily increasing.
  • The peasantry were reluctant to join collective farms. By 1928, 97% of the area under the crops was still farmed by individual peasant households.
  • The commitment to mass collectivisation: Stalin argued for advance. Stalin urged party officials to seize hoarded surpluses of grain. Stalin travelled to the Urals and western Siberia to urge Party officials to secure hoarded grain by force if necessary. His solution to the procurement crisis therefore became known as the (above). In short it was a sort of dress rehearsal for a coercive solution to the whole complex problems under the NEP.
  • In the short run the Urals Siberian method was a success. By the spring of 1928, grain procurements were satisfactory. By the summer, it was clear that squeezing the peasants would lead them to cut down the amounts they sowed and diminish the grain surpluses.
  • The Urals Siberian method had broken the smychka, it had broken the peasantry’s trust in the government. And the government was determined not to retreat.
  • On Nov. 7 1929, he published a famous article called the ‘Great Turn’. He ordered an all out drive to collectivise agriculture, expropriate the richer peasants, and abolish the private sector in the countryside. The party officials and government who for the past two years had visited villages to collect grain now reappeared, but this time to organise whole villages into collective farms. The policy of systematically eliminating the richer peasants was known as dekulakisation. In this way the government tried to divide the peasantry the better to rule them.
  • It succeeded in imposing its will partly because of the strategic weaknesses of all peasantries – their illiteracy, their geographical dispersion, and their inability to coordinate resistance.
  • By Feb. 1930 the Government was claiming that 50 percent of peasants had joined collective farms. An easing of pressure during the springtime sowing led to a temporary decline in numbers. By July collective farms included only 24% of peasant households and commanded 34% of sown area, and 90% and 94% sown area in July 1936. By 1936 collectivisation was effectively complete, and rural capitalism had been destroyed.
  • As a result of collectivisation, the 25 million small peasant farms of the 1920’s had been replaced by three new institutions: collective farms, state farms, and machine tractor stations.
  • The impact of collectivisation: The government claimed that collectivisation had the support of most poor and middle peasants.
  • The reality was that collectivisation was resisted, not just by the minority of kulaks but the majority of peasants. And their resistance, which often took violent forms, turned mass collectivisation into a virtual civil war between the ruling group and the country’s peasants. Peasant resistance took many forms. There were direct attacks on Party officials or army units as they went about the task of collectivisation. Many peasants hid their stocks of grain in the ground. Vast numbers slaughtered their cows, pigs, poultry and even horses rather than see them turned over to a collective farm. The Party defined all who opposed the collectivisation as enemies of the Soviet regime. The term kulak itself expanded in meaning and was coined to all peasants who opposed the regime even if they were not wealthy.
  • Such uncertainty and chaos in the spring of 1930 that there were serious fears that sowing would be impossible. It may have been this that induced Stalin to slow down the pace. Collective farms he said must not be made by force and must rest on the active support of the masses. Party officials reacted quickly, and pressure on the peasants was eased, but not diminished.
  • The results of collectivisation: A HUMAN AND ECONOMIC DISASTER FOR THE PEASANTRY - For the majority of the peasants and for the economy as a whole, collectivisation was a disaster. Total grain production declined and did not return to the 1928 levels until the late 1930’s. The peasants’ slaughter of almost half their livestock was a catastrophe for an agricultural country and condemned a whole generation of Russians to a meatless diet. Rather than giving livestock to collective farms, peasants killed their animals. In five years, 46% of cattle, 46% of horses and 65% of sheep were lost.
  • Materials standards of living declined sharply in towns, but even more in the countryside so much so that Alec Nove wrote: “1933 was the culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standard known in recorded history.”
  • But while grain harvests declined, state procurements rose. And in the Ukraine and Volga provinces and imposition of higher grain procurement quotas, at a time when total harvests had declined, created a famine in winter 1932-33. Recent estimates suggest that 4-6million may have died in these man-made famines. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of kulaks were forced into labour camps, and conditions in the camps were such that large numbers died of hunger or overwork or from brutal camp discipline.
  • During the collectivisation years, over 5 million kulaks officially deported to Siberia, while several million were reportedly departing from their homelands.
  • A FISCAL VICTORY FOR THE GOVRNMENT - In the early 1930’s, procurements and exports increased. In other words, the proportion of agricultural produce at the disposal of the government increased. Where as procurements and exports accounted for 15% of the harvest in 1926, by 1933 they accounted for almost 35%. In 1933, the gain was magnified by the low prices the government had to pay and one stage it resold it for four times the amount it paid to the farmers.
  • Although in the short run the kolkhozy had failed as farms, they had succeeded as fiscal devices – as extractors of resources. And the basic reason is straightforward. Instead of dealing with 25 million independent farms, the state now dealt with about 250,000 collective farms each of which was headed by a state appointed chairman.
  • Once it had broken the peasantry, the government could afford some modest, but significant, concessions. A crucial concession allowed the collective farm peasants to retain a small plot of land for their own private use and to sell the produce at free market prices.
  • From the government’s point of view, the real achievement of collectivisation was that at last it gave the Soviet state direct control of the rural sector and thereby greatly increased its fiscal capacity. Collectivisation was the fiscal advance necessary to secure for the Soviet government the sort of power over the countryside that the tsarist government had in its height. Direct mobilisation through the massive use of coercion offered a solution to the problems of the 1920s.
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Industrialisation

  • The first three Five-Year Plans: The commitment to rapid industrialisation was made in the late 1920’s, before the Party really knew how its targets would be achieved. As Communists, the Party leaders had always assumed that, in the long run, a communist economy would be planned. Instead of abandoning the production and distribution of goods to either arbitrary will of individual capitalists or the blind control of market forces, these vital matters would be planned by society as a whole.
  • But the Government did not commit itself firmly to a long term plan of industrial development ...

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