22.06.2023

First plan realities

Clearly the first five-year plan had nothing to do with the realisation of socialist planning. In the second of two articles, Jack Conrad investigates the counterrevolution within the revolution

In February 1931, Stalin talked of fulfilling the five-year plan in “the basic, decisive branches of industry” not in four years, but in “three years”.¹ This was the speech where he issued his famous justification: “We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in 10 years. Either we do so, or we shall go under.”² Alec Nove - obligingly, half apologetically - adds the obvious, but highly charged, fact that “1941 was 10 years away”.³ Stalin doubtless expected war (not that that stopped him being caught completely unaware by the launch of Operation Barbarossa on June 22 1941).

Certainly, by demanding the maximisation of output in every branch, in every enterprise, productive capacity was violently shunted forward. But this could only but be done in an unbalanced, chaotic manner. For instance, the target for oil production was supposedly reached in two and a half years. Naturally this was the cause of much official rejoicing. But it completely disrupted and overwhelmed auxiliary sectors. Storage, refining and transport facilities failed to achieve the pace needed to adequately handle the premature triumph. Such unevenness is, of course, the very antithesis of planning. Obviously, no coordination existed between what were closely related branches of the economy. And, while oil that could not be refined and transported had target-value, it had no use-value.

In the oil industry there was a discrepancy between output and the facilities needed to handle it, while in engineering the discrepancy was between output and the raw material and labour inputs. The plan was fulfilled in three years and output increased fourfold. Yet steel production fell short by some 40%. How machine tools, pumps, turbines, etc were built without the planned input of steel is probably explained by extravagant managerial lies, the very low base level in this sector and the ability of enterprises to circumvent the target system by unofficially obtaining scarce raw materials and labour - thus denying others. Hence, whereas spontaneity gives capitalism a certain coherence, in the Soviet Union spontaneity could only but drain what coherence might otherwise have existed.

So, yes, the first five-year plan was a mockery of planning - a salient fact recognised at the time by a number of observers. Amongst them the left Mensheviks, Aaron Yugov, Solomon Schwartz, O Domenevskya, Fedor Dan and Yu Braginskaya, organised around the émigré journal Sotsialistichesky Vestnik (Socialist Herald). Braginskaya insisted that the projected growth of the Soviet economy in general, but especially in areas such as machinery and construction, could not be sustained by the iron and steel industry. The execution of the plan “has hardly been sinned against by being overly well thought out”, she damningly wrote.⁴ Existing capacities and potential had been wilfully ignored. There was no organic interconnection between all branches of industry and all stages of production. Gosplan simply decreed maximum growth. But overfulfilment in one sector resulted in underfulfilment in another. The economy was therefore liable to fly apart at any moment.

Christian Rakovsky, one of Trotsky’s closest allies, issued the same sort of warning:

Today they increase the programme for coal and iron to make it possible to fulfil the programme for machine building; tomorrow it will be necessary to expand the programme for machine building to make it possible to fulfil the enlarged programme for coal and iron in order to guarantee the new programme for machine building. In the midst of this spiral it suddenly turns out that it is posing tasks for transport that transport will not be able to cope with, unless the latter receives an appropriate supply of iron and steel - and so the programme for coal and iron is boosted again and the circle begins anew. Hence the exaggerated tempos, the exaggerated figures, the exaggerated plans, which collapse as soon as they come into touch with reality.⁵

Rakovsky - along with Nicolai Bukharin and the Sotsialistichesky Vestnik Mensheviks - thought that the attempt to overcome the underaccumulation of the means of production (ie, Russia’s historic backwardness) in the shortest possible time by maximising the development of every sector, every branch, every unit, had to result in unevenness, bottlenecks and endless delays. The projected iron and steel complexes, chemical plants and engineering factories of the first five-year plan were, therefore, follies, destined to slowly fall into ruin like the pyramids of ancient Egypt. So reasoned Rakovsky, Bukharin and the Sotsialistichesky Vestnik Mensheviks. Obviously, a vastly overstated prediction. By the late 1930s these follies were churning out steel, artificial fertilisers, tractors and tanks. Nevertheless, the gigantic projects tied up enormous resources … and, as everyone knows, delays and shortages became a permanent feature of the system.

Tajar Zavalani, who had first-hand experience of the first five-year plan, observed that the only way the authorities could cope with the chaos they had created “was to improvise, to waste precious materials and leave other things undone”.⁶ The regime was compelled to cut across its own lines of command and impose its own priorities to make sure that what was absolutely vital got done. The armed forces, key enterprises, prestige projects had to be granted privileged status ... and in the process ‘priority Peter’ robbed ‘non-priority Paul’.

Nonetheless, the results of the first five-year plan were in comparative terms hugely impressive - the rest of the world had been sent reeling by the great crash. In the subsequent recession industrial production fell by 10%-50% in the capitalist countries, while in the Soviet Union it officially doubled. At the end of 1932 Pravda triumphantly announced that the five-year plan had been fulfilled in four and a quarter years. In 51 months, it was claimed, the gross output of Soviet industry leapt from 15.7 to 34.3 billion roubles - 93.7% of the planned target for the five-year period. The minor shortfall was explained as being due to foreign warmongering and the necessity of devoting more resources than expected to the armed forces (1932 witnessed the beginning of a series of border clashes with imperial Japan in Manchuria that only ended in 1939).

However, in the “main link” - ie, “heavy industry” - there was overfulfilment, boasted Stalin.⁷ He admitted that developing heavy industry involved enormous investment of raw material and labour-power. But, he claimed, the party (ie, himself) had “declared frankly that this would call for serious sacrifices, and that it was our duty to openly and consciously to make these sacrifices if we wanted to achieve our goal”.⁸ Put another way, the promise to increase living standards by between 77.5% and 85% proved to be a cruel hoax.

Nowadays, there is no serious doubt that official claims about the first five-year plan were absurdly exaggerated. Recomputations by western experts, even in the 1940s, reveal much lower increases. Estimates for national income between 1928 and 1937 - ie, two five-year plans - vary between 33%, 64% and 74% (the discrepancy largely resulting from the use of US 1925-34 prices, US 1940 prices or real 1926-27 Soviet prices as statistical weights).⁹ Nonetheless, even allowing for rouble inflation and the probable inaccuracy of Soviet figures, the production of waste and the effective destruction of the statistically invisible, but economically significant, handicraft, small workshop and domestic sectors, to put it mildly, a “great deal was achieved”.¹⁰

The engineering works of Moscow and Leningrad were comprehensively updated with the purchase and installation of foreign technology; the giant Dnieper hydroelectric dam started to generate electricity; the vast Magnitogorsk iron and steel complex arose, as if from nothing; and, all in all, 1,500 new factories and other industrial enterprises were put into operation. The Soviet Union was being modernised.

Collectivisation

As mentioned in part one of this article, the aim of “total” collectivisation was absent from the “definitive text” of the first five-year plan. Events forced Stalin’s hand. The industrialisation drive, by its very chaotic nature, exacerbated the existing goods famine and, as its speed was relentlessly upped month by month, runaway inflation punctured the value of the rouble.

The price of grain could have been upped in compensation, as would be normal under a market economy - even a mixed economy, as under the New Economic Policy. But that Stalin was unwilling to countenance and hence the state’s options effectively closed. Higher real agricultural prices would divert (maybe halt) the industrialisation drive, and reassert the peasants’ bargaining power with a vengeance. Extraordinary measures - ie, grain requisitions, already recommenced in late 1927 - inevitably resulted in a delivery strike, a sowing strike, a refusal to rent land, a turn to non-confiscatory crops and diminishing returns. There was less and less, even when it came to requisitioning. Market relations were therefore breaking down and once again threatening hunger. Stalin, following the line of least resistance, went for “total” collectivisation. So in no way was this a preconceived move.

For a short while the idea was that industrialisation would go hand-in-hand with collectivisation. Industry was to supply 100,000 tractors and so Machine Tractor Stations were established. However, with the tractor factories still under construction, orders were issued, in late December 1929, to encourage every peasant to join one of the kolkhozy (collective farms). In reality force decided. The NEP and market relations were thereby abandoned in favour of coercion and a system of targets. Peasants were transformed into kolkhozniks and effectively re-enserfed. They could not, for example, move away from the collective farm without the express permission of the kolkhoz chair. Internal passports were soon reintroduced - a classic feature of tsarist oppression.

True, collectivisation was dressed up as a spontaneous mass movement of the peasants themselves (well, the middle and poor peasants). But this was piffle. Behind the facade of voluntary union lay the full might of the state. Meetings were convened where peasants were effectively compelled to vote in favour of collectivisation. Those who voted the wrong way were denounced as kulaks or semi-kulaks. There was not only bullying, but beating, confiscation and, within no time, mass killing. The real history of collectivisation is, therefore, written not by Stalin’s propagandists, but harassed regional and local officials. Their bland reports bear truthful, though unintended, witness to the human suffering.¹¹

In the 13th century Genghis Khan had laid waste to old Rus, and Stalin did the same to new Russia. He unleashed a ‘silent’ civil war on the countryside. Orders were issued demanding the liquidation of the kulaks as a class. It should be understood that the kulaks were an altogether vague category: eg, a hard-working, former Red Army hero could easily find himself branded as a blood-sucking kulak.

The kulaks were divided into three neat categories: the first set might be admitted into the kolkhoz as probationary members; the second were to be arrested, imprisoned, shot and their families exiled; the third merely exiled. Perhaps 1.5 million people in all were affected, among them so-called ‘ideological’ kulaks, ie, those middle or poor peasants who opposed collectivisation. Family obligations, friendship ties, hatred of local communist officials, loyalty to the Orthodox Church, etc, meant that there were many such potential kulaks.

Suffice to say, numerous protest demonstrations and revolts occurred - led not only by kulaks, but serving militia lieutenants and former Red Army officers too. The danger was of a full-scale jacquerie and Stalin was forced into changing course. His famous ‘Dizzy with success’ article appeared in Pravda (March 2 1930), in which cadres were blamed for being carried away by the collectivisation drive and using excessive force. A tactical withdrawal was ordered. Individual holdings were to be allowed. Low-quality and marginal land was once again divided up. There was the promise, though, to return to the offensive when the time was ripe. Agriculture would be totally collectivised and kulak resistance finally broken. By 1932 that promise had been delivered.

When it came to reporting agriculture, Stalin deviously tried to shift the focus. Instead of output, instead of surplus product, instead of improved productivity, he boasted that the first five-year plan had been fulfilled “three times over”. Now there were 200,000 collective and 5,000 state farms. Far above the original five-year-plan target … and this went hand-in-hand with the “routing of the kulaks as a class”.¹² This was akin to a transplant surgeon fulfilling their target three times over by killing off hospital visitors and harvesting their organs.

Collectivisation had nothing to do with boosting production, let alone civilising agriculture. Robert Conquest is quite right when he says that the “idea of smoothly planned progress was quite inapplicable”.¹³ Collectivisation was carried through barbarically and resulted in agriculture being hurled backwards - not least by the peasants’ gluttonous attempt to retain what was theirs. Mikhail Sholokhov’s ‘socialist-realist’ novel Virgin soil upturned (1932 and 1960) vividly conveys the bacchanalia of eating that attended the onset of collectivisation:

Not only those who had joined the collective farm, but individual farmers also slaughtered. They killed oxen, sheep, pigs, even cows; they slaughtered animals kept for breeding. In two nights the horned cattle of Gremyachy were reduced to half their number. The dogs began to drag entrails and guts about the village, the cellars and granaries were filled with meat. In two days the cooperative shop sold some 200 poods of salt, which had been lying in the warehouse for 18 months. “Kill, it’s not ours now!” “Kill, they’ll take it for the meat collection tax if you don’t.” “Kill, for you won’t taste meat in the collective farm.” The insidious rumours crept around. And they killed. They ate until they were unable to move. Everybody, from the youngest to the oldest, suffered with stomach-ache. At dinner-time the tables groaned under the weight of boiled and roasted meat. At dinner-time everybody had a greasy mouth, everybody belched as though they had been at a funeral repast in memory of the dead. And all were owlish with the intoxication of eating.¹⁴

Even when the butchery finally stopped, the kolkhozy lacked the expertise necessary for handling what little livestock remained. Neither the peasants - nor the 25,000 frontline workers mobilised from the towns - had been prepared or resourced. Tending two or three cows was within the grasp of any half-competent peasant. Milking, feeding, sheltering and maintaining herds of 200 or 300 was an entirely different matter. Not surprisingly, many animals “died from neglect”.¹⁵

The net result was that between 1928 and 1932 the number of cattle fell from 70.5 to 38.4 million, pigs from 26 to 11.6 million and sheep and goats from 146.7 to 52.1 million. Shortages of draft horses, due to slaughter and lack of fodder, the absence of tractors to replace them and lack of basic knowledge also disastrously reduced the grain harvest to below 70 million tons between 1931 and 1935.

Starvation

True, that grain possessed the same colour, the same shape and the same size as before. However, a new social spirit had taken hold. Once the grain had been cultivated on a mass of small family farms and had belonged to the individual peasant. Now farms had thousands of members, covered thousands of hectares and the grain belonged to the state. And, despite the string of poor harvests, because of urban expansion and the need to fulfil export contracts, more and more of that grain went to the state till the countryside starved.

Targets demanded a 40% increase in the value of exports, including grain, in order to pay for imports of foreign machinery needed for industrialisation. However, there was a little problem. The world capitalist economic crisis resulted in a precipitous fall in basic commodity prices. Hence, to keep its imports up to what was required, exports would have had to increase by 57%. That proved impossible - imports could only be increased by 35%.

The foreign correspondent of the New York Evening Post, Hubert Knickerbocker, reported that “many factories in the Soviet Union failed to receive important orders because imports had lacked coming up to plan by 5%” and that the export drive meant that “there was still less for the population to eat, wear and use”.¹⁶ Perceptively this US bourgeois journalist stressed that under Stalin’s plan “it is the state that is to become at once more powerful, not the population that is to become better fed, clothed, more comfortable and happy ... Power for the state has become an end in itself under the five-year plan.”¹⁷

Transforming necessary product into an addition to accumulation, yes, went hand-in-hand with less and less of everything - crucially food though. Shelves emptied. Queues grew longer and longer. People went hungry. To ensure the survival of the urban population rationing had to be reintroduced. John Scott - an American working in the newly established giant Magnitogorsk iron and steel complex - stoically testifies to the impoverished diet:

Foodstuffs, indirectly very important for the construction job, were as hard to get as industrial materials and supplies. Every industrial organisation was responsible for feeding its workers. It gave out food cards and then tried to supply the items indicated thereon. This, however, it often failed to do. In 1932 a rigger’s food card entitled him to (per month):

Bread 30 kilograms

Meat 3 kilograms

Sugar 1 kilogram

Milk 15 litres

Butter 1 kilogram

Cereal grain 2 kilograms

Potatoes In proportion to supply

During the entire winter of 1932‑33, however, the riggers got no meat, no butter, and almost no sugar or milk. They received only bread with a little cereal grain.¹⁸

And, when food deliveries did finally arrive, they were frequently near inedible. Stale bread, rotting potatoes and what passed for meat often being little more than bones, gristle and scraps.

One brilliant solution to the meat shortage, “proposed” by none other than Stalin himself, was the attempt to persuade workers to breed rabbits.¹⁹ Exhortations were repeatedly issued in the press, along with many and varied feeding tips and cooking recipes. But the “campaign failed to capture the public imagination” and ended in hysterical recriminations.²⁰ The only effective short-term answer to the food crisis, other than rationing, was the “massive expansion” of workplace canteens.²¹ Numbers catered for grew rapidly - from 730,000 in 1929 to 15,400,000 at the end of 1932. Canteens were habitually overcrowded and filthy. And, as might already be expected, the quality was appalling. That way, though, the cities were saved from starvation.

While urban workers ate much less meat, those in the countryside ate much less of everything - to the point where the years 1932-33 witnessed horrendous mass starvation. Donald Filtzer estimates that “as many as four million” died.²² Michael Ellman gives a five million figure.²³ Robert Conquest quotes Soviet sources from 1988 who claim that the “deaths in the terror-famine cannot have been lower than six to seven million”²⁴ - The human cost of Stalin’s spontaneous collectivisation movement.

Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs are worth mentioning on this score. A member of Stalin’s inner circle and his effective successor, Khrushchev claimed he had “no idea” how bad “things were” during collectivisation.²⁵ Unbelievable. The surely less well informed Hubert Knickerbocker could pun at the time that: “The plan is a method for Russia to ‘starve itself great’.”²⁶ And, while there was an eventual recovery from the collectrophe, there can be no doubt that, when it came to agriculture, the Soviet Union remained hopelessly inefficient right through till the 1991 fall. That notwithstanding, peasants would never again engage in economic blackmail. They were robbed of their market strength. Because of collectivisation, selling strikes, sowing strikes, etc were now impossible - and surely that, for Stalin, is what counted.

The peasantry had been reduced to an inert, sullen mass, incapable of acting in its own interests. The kolkhoz chair could treat general meetings of the collective farm as a rubber stamp and act to all intents and purposes in a manner little different from the old pomeshchiki (landlords). In public, peasants held the kolkhoz chair in the greatest respect, if not awe. They would approach him humbly with much bowing and scraping.²⁷ Of course, the kolkhoz chair had no property rights. An agent of the state, they could be replaced at any moment, for any reason. On the other hand, unlike the post-1906 capitalist farmers of tsarist Russia, the kolkhoz chair had no incentive to cut costs, experiment with new crops, introduce innovative machinery or new forms of labour organisation. Apart from a modicum of competence, the main quality that recommended the kolkhoz chair was a willingness to fall into line with orders issued from above.

Primary accumulation

Controversy has raged over whether or not, or to what degree, agriculture provided the surplus product necessary for primary accumulation. Agriculture, according to Alec Nove, “made a decisive contribution to the financing of the plan”.²⁸ Standard Soviet historiography also claimed that a “substantial contribution to industrialisation was made by the Soviet countryside”.²⁹

Tony Cliff, on this subject at least, had a much better handle on things:

Collectivisation has resulted in the freeing of agricultural products for the needs of industrial development, the ‘freeing’ of the peasantry from the means of production, the transformation of a section of them into reserves of labour-power for industry, and the transformation of the rest into part-workers, part-peasants, part serfs.³⁰

Because of collectivisation and the dramatic fall in the numbers of cattle, pigs and horses, there was more grain, cabbage and potatoes available to deliver to the towns (there were fewer animals to feed and the peasants were allowed to go hungry). Yet whether or not this represented a net transfer of surplus from agriculture to industry for purposes of primary accumulation is open to serious question.

There are those, such as Michael Ellman, who calculate that the “agricultural industrial surplus was negative throughout the first five-year plan (except 1931, when it was slightly positive)”.³¹ James R Millar, concludes that agriculture may well have become a drain on industry³² - an assessment echoed by Robert Conquest.³³ Quite possibly, therefore, agriculture received “tribute” from industry in the early 1930s. Not the other way round, as advocated by Trotsky, Preobrazhensky and Stalin. In other words, the ‘normal’ poles of unequal exchange were reversed.

Admittedly, there is a calculation problem: different results come from using 1913 or 1928 prices, certainly post-1928 prices: ie, the rouble names of products were arbitrary, inconsistent and on occasion totally bizarre. What is beyond doubt, though, is that, despite producing less, peasants were, for a few terrible years, subject to a regime of lethal exploitation. So much for maintaining the famed worker-peasant alliance.

Extensive wheat, barley and rye monoculture requires tractors, combine harvesters and artificial fertilisers delivered from industry. Because of the unplanned, politically motivated rush to total collectivisation, such means of production were largely absent during the first five-year plan. They were, though, with the second five-year plan, supplied, and on a substantial scale. Hence, in due course, the state presided over a slow but steady rise in agricultural production. However, the results were, in productivity terms, always disappointing. Therefore, it is quite conceivable that unequal exchange, which benefited agriculture, continued after the first-five year plan.

When it comes to primary accumulation, Ellman emphasises two main factors: firstly, the “fall in urban real wages” and, secondly, the role of coercion.³⁴ We, of course, would say this about so-called wages: certainly from the first five-year plan onwards, roubles were not money (ie, the general equivalent). Estimates of the drop in urban living standards vary considerably, but it could have been as much as 50%. Whatever the exact figure, there can be no quibbling about the role of coercion. Force atomised the industrial workforce, force dragooned peasants into the kolkhozy, force expropriated the kulaks, force supplied the gulag prison system with its human inputs, and force made them work. Nor should we forget that the whole population - not least the apparatus itself - lived under the shadow of coercion. During the purges the apparatus was decimated, hundreds of thousands were executed or died due to the appalling treatment meted out in the gulag. Fear ensured, in public at least, a robotic uniformity.

Certainly, during the course of the first five-year plan the number of registered workers shot up from 11.3 to 22.8 million. The urban population reached nearly 40 million (compared with the projected 32.5 million). Here, in the simultaneous fall in average living standards and the absolute increase in the number of workers made available through collectivisation, we surely find the main source of primary accumulation. Hence we read: industry “developed chiefly on the basis of its own resources”.³⁵ Stalin’s plagiarised version of Preobrazhensky, together with his programme of unequal exchange between agriculture and industry, resolves itself via increased exploitation within industry. Note, the proportion of national income devoted to accumulation rose from “19.4% in 1928 to 30.3% in 1932”.³⁶ A gouging increase.

So we arrive at a more realistic picture of the sort of accumulation that actually happened in the first five-year-plan (see diagram). It is, note, different in key respects from the tribute model first presented by Preobrazhensky and later taken up by Stalin.

The solid outer line can be taken as representing simple reproduction and the broken lines mark the changed brought about during period one (P1). However, instead of agricultural output going unaltered, it suffers a contraction, and it was the same with the consumption of the agricultural workforce - they went hungry, many to the point of starvation. Now, though, it is not the reduced (expected) consumption levels of the agricultural workforce that supplies tribute to expanding production in the industrial sector: it is the industrial workforce itself. This, in turn, allows for greater industrial output and not just in period one (P1), but period two (P2), period three (P3), etc. At some point - say, period four (P4) - industry is in a position where it can begin to supply the agricultural sector with the means of production, combines, tractors, artificial fertilisers, etc, which allows for the restoration and then - say, in period five (P5) - the boosting of agricultural output.

Undoubtedly, expectations of immediately boosting productivity in the industrial sector failed to materialise. That despite the initial enthusiasm for the first five-year plan amongst Komsomol members, the shock brigades, production communes and socialist competition. Nonetheless, when the new plants and machinery eventually came on stream, productivity did significantly rise.

The first five-year plan was an historic turning point. Members of the elite came to expect luxuries, they were supplied with servants, their apartments were spacious and well appointed. Meanwhile, the living standards of ordinary industrial workers and collective farmers were driven downwards ... often below the level of subsistence.

Note that from 1930 candid references to the embarrassing phenomenon of falling real wages (yes, so-called) were “no longer permitted” in official publications.³⁷ However, instead of blaming their own system for this and many other failings, those at the top hunted down “wreckers, spies, diversionists and assassins” (Stalin’s term for victimised workers, peasants, managers … and suspect apparatchiks).³⁸ The secret police arrested according to a “quota principle”.³⁹ A horror that stands out even amidst the horrors of the 20th century.

True, workers fought back in their own particular ways: nod-and-wink go-slows, sabotaging machines, intimidation of snitches, norm busters and uncooperative foremen … and simply by quitting. That way they won more roubles, increased food rations, better accommodation and all-in-all established a greater and greater degree of negative workers’ control.

The apparat, of course, responded by introducing round after round of draconian legislation. Workers were thereby, yes, re-enslaved. The position of women, national minorities and young people underwent a pronounced retrogression too.

Perhaps Stalin really did believe that the first five-year plan, and an ever expanding state machine, would really take the Soviet Union in the direction of communism.⁴⁰ But objectively his ‘second revolution’ was a counterrevolution within the revolution.

New laws

The market-and-state combination of the NEP proved unsustainable and was finally abandoned with the launch of the first five-year plan and a target and delivery system. Soviet society had entered the “kingdom of freedom”, hurrahed Stanislav Strumilin - a sick joke nowadays. Ostensibly the new system knew no limits - “other than technical and natural norms and laws”.⁴¹ Moshe Lewin comments, with not a little irony, that nothing was supposed to remain as an “obstacle to a non-monetary, rationally and ‘directly’ planned economy and hence the advent of the purest socialism”.⁴²

Hence, surely confounding the ideologues of the Soviet Union being a form of state capitalism - not in the Lenin-Zinoviev sense of the nominally working class state ruling over nationalised capitalist relations of production - this counterrevolution against the masses went hand-in-hand with the uprooting of capitalism. Not the transformation of the bureaucracy into a “ruling class” that sought to “accumulate capital” as speedily as possible (Tony Cliff).⁴³

A new set of social laws arose. At the most basic level the domination of use-value by organisation (target-value). Exchange took place not via the market, but via Gosplan’s allocations and targets (and, on the side, through barter arrangements). The market remained, but as a mere vestige. In the early 1930s, its main human representatives - the Nepmen and kulaks - were, of course, liquidated as a class.

However, Stalin had already coined his ‘Marxist’ justification for inflicting still further violence on society: the “intensification of the class struggle” under socialism. Because these “capitalist elements” - that is, the kulaks and Nepmen - were in decline, they supposedly increased their “resistance”.⁴⁴ Here was the ideological justification for the great terror that was to come.

1. JV Stalin SW Vol 13, Moscow 1953, p32.↩︎

2. Ibid p41.↩︎

3. A Nove An economic history of the USSR Harmondsworth 1982, p189.↩︎

4. Quoted in D Filtzer Soviet workers and Stalinist industrialization London 1986, p40.↩︎

5. K Rakovsky, ‘The five year-plan in crisis’ Critique No13, 1981, pp48-49.↩︎

6. T Zavalani How strong is Russia? London 1951, p15.↩︎

7. JV Stalin SW Vol 13, Moscow 1953, p177.↩︎

8. Ibid p178.↩︎

9. See N Jasny The Soviet 1956 statistical handbook Michigan 1957, p32.↩︎

10. A Nove An economic history of the USSR Harmondsworth 1982, p194.↩︎

11. In July 1941 the invading German army captured the Smolensk oblast (area) Communist Party archives. Consisting of 536 files and totalling about 200,000 pages of documents, they were eventually seized by the US army. The archives covered the period 1917-38 and included reports from local party committee meetings, Central Committee directives, letters of complaint from ordinary Soviet citizens, party purges, the financing of state farms, Komsomol activities and the collectivisation drive (see M Fainsod Smolensk under Soviet rule New York 1958). Besides this material, there are the surprisingly frank accounts carried in the regional Soviet press. And then, of course, there is the work of post-1991 historians, who have been given access to the Moscow archives (see The Russian Review Vol 61, No1, January 2002).↩︎

12. JV Stalin SW Vol 13, Moscow 1953, pp193-94.↩︎

13. R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1990, p20.↩︎

14. M Sholokhov Virgin soil upturned Harmondsworth 1977, pp127-28.↩︎

15. A Nove An economic history of the USSR Harmondsworth 1982, p174.↩︎

16. HR Knickerbocker The Soviet five-year plan and its effect on world trade London 1931, p192.↩︎

17. Ibid p236.↩︎

18. J Scott Behind the Urals Bloomington IN 1989, p78.↩︎

19. N Khrushchev Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev Vol 1, Providence RI 2004, p55.↩︎

20. D Filtzer Soviet workers and Stalinist industrialisation London 1986, p94.↩︎

21. Ibid p94.↩︎

22. Ibid p94.↩︎

23. See M Ellman Socialist planning Cambridge 1989, p106n.↩︎

24. R Conquest The great terror - a reassessment London 1988, p20.↩︎

25. S Talbot (ed) Khrushchev remembers London 1971, p58.↩︎

26. HR Knickerbocker The Soviet five-year plan and its effect on world trade London 1931, p240.↩︎

27. See G Guroff and FV Carstensen (eds) Entrepreneurship in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union Princeton NJ 1981, p267.↩︎

28. A Nove An economic history of the USSR Harmondsworth 1982, p212.↩︎

29. Istoriya sotsialisticheskoi ekonomiki SSSR Vol 3, Moscow 1977 - quoted in Socialism: theory and practice April 1979.↩︎

30. T Cliff State capitalism in Russia London 1974, p54.↩︎

31. See M Ellman, ‘Did the agricultural surplus provide the resources for the increase in investment in the USSR during the first five-year plan?’ Economic Journal December 1975, p853.↩︎

32. See JR Miller Soviet Studies July 1970 and Slavic Review December 1974.↩︎

33. R Conquest The harvest of sorrow London 1986, pp170-71.↩︎

34. M Ellman Socialist planning Cambridge 1989, p107.↩︎

35. Ibid p107.↩︎

36. A Nove An economic history of the USSR Harmondsworth 1982, p196.↩︎

37. D Filtzer Soviet workers and Stalinist industrialisation London 1986, p91.↩︎

38. JV Stalin Works Vol 14, London 1978, p248.↩︎

39. N Werth, ‘The mechanism of a mass crime’ in R Gellately and B Kiernan (eds) The spectre of genocide Cambridge 2003, p225.↩︎

40.  It is worth quoting Stalin on the second revolution, here writing in 1950: “In a period of eight to ten years we effected a transition in the agriculture of our country from the bourgeois, individual-peasant system to the socialist, collective-farm system. This was a revolution which eliminated the old bourgeois economic system in the countryside and created a new, socialist system. But that revolution did not take place by means of an explosion - that is, by the overthrow of the existing government power and the creation of a new power - but by a gradual transition from the old bourgeois system in the countryside to a new system. And it was possible to do that because it was a revolution from above, because the revolution was accomplished on the initiative of the existing power with the support of the bulk of the peasantry” (JV Stalin Marxism and the problems of linguistics Moscow 1952, pp38‑39, my emphasis). The stuff about gradualism is obvious bullshit, as is the notion of collectivisation having the “support” of the mass of the peasantry. However, that the second revolution was carried out from above is indisputable.↩︎

41. Quoted in M Lewin Political undercurrents in Soviet economic debates London 1975, p99.↩︎

42. Ibid p97.↩︎

43. T Cliff State capitalism in Russia London 1974, pp153-54.↩︎

44. JV Stalin SW Vol 12, Moscow 1953, p37.↩︎