Stalin Flashcards
Collectivisation
The main type of collective farm was the kolkhoz (plural kolkhozy and habitants of collective farms are sometimes referred to as kolkhozniks). where all the land was held in common and run by an elected committee.
To form a kolkhoz, between 50 and 100 households were put together.
All land, tools and livestock had to be pooled. Under the direction of the committee, the peasants farmed the land as one unit. Much larger areas could be farmed more efficiently through the use of tractors and other machinery. These would be supplied by the state through huge machine and tractor stations (MTS). Experts could help peasants to farm in more modern ways using metal ploughs and fertilisers. However, by the kolkhoz model statute of 1935 each household was allowed to keep its own private plot of up to one acre.
Why Did Stalin Introduce Collectivisation
- Support Rapid Industrialisation - Stalin judged that the only way to raise the capital needed to develop Soviet industry was to use the land. The necessary first step towards this was the collectivisation of Russian agriculture. This involved taking the land from the peasants and giving it all to the state. The peasants would no longer farm the land for their own individual profit. Instead, they would pool their chorts and receive a wage. Stalin calculated that this change would allow the Soviet Union to use the collective profits from the land to finance a massive industrialisation programme. For him, the needs of the land were always subordinate to those of industry.
-End of 1920s- Stalin talks about achieving a great turn, achieving socialism once and for all in the economy and society, wants to do this at break neck pace.
-Control peasants- dont work with/trust- Crush and use peasants.
-Dekulak- ideological- extension of class warfare- eliminate kulaks as a class, but just want to stop hoarding.
-Increase urban labour, increase work force - efficiency due to large plots of land and better farming technology, so freed up workforce so increase in urban workforce.
Stalins Collectivisation- implementation
Stalin’s experience of implementing the Urals-Siberian method in 1928 and again in 1929 (see page 174) decided him that forced collectivisation and the elimination of the kulaks as a class were needed to bring the peasantry under control once and for all. By this time Bukharin and the right had been defeated, and there was a ground swell of opinion among Party activists who were concerned about the amount of power the kulaks had over the economy. Stalin hoped that collectivisation would lead to an increase in the state’s share of larger harvests at a lower price. It would also make a large pool-of surplus rural labour available to industry.
In November 1929 the Central Committee resolved to recruit 25,000 industrial workers (known as the 25,000ers) to go to the countryside alongside Party officials, reinforced by army and police units. They would be given instructions not to come back without organising a collective farm. In the first two months of 1930, roughly half the Soviet peasantry around 60 million people in 100,000 villages) were herded into collective farms. However, the process was so disruptive that, concerned to ensure the sowing and harvesting of grain took place, Stalin called a halt. In an article in Pravda (Dizzy with success’) on
2 March 1930, he hypocritically stated that collective farms cannot be set up by force’
and accused local officials of excessive zeal. The number of peasant households in collective farms fell from 58 per cent to 24 per cent between March and June. In September, with the harvest in, the collectivisation offensive began again as vigorously as ever and by the end of the 1930s 90 per cent of households were collectivised - 25 million peasant households had been combined into 250,000 kolkhozy.
Stalins collectivisation- offensive agasint kulaks
The attack on the kulaks was central to the whole collectivisation policy. Stalin called for the liquidation of the kulaks as a class on 27 December 1929. Their number was exaggerated and the definition of kulak was elastic. Any peasant who opposed collectivisation was dubbed a kulak or an ideological kulak. The focus on the kulaks was deliberate to mask the fact that it was an offensive against the peasantry as a whole. A minority of the poorer peasants supported and at first benefited from de-kulakisation. There was no real class division in the villages and no class war to fan. De-kulakisation was a way of frightening the peasants into submission.
In a chilling foretaste of what was going to happen in the Great Terror, each region was given a number of kulaks to find. They were found whether they existed or not. Quotas were frequently exceeded to demonstrate the vigilance of the GPU (the secret police) or the local Party organisations.
The kulaks were divided into three categories:
* counter-revolutionaries who were to be shot or sent to forced-labour settlements
* active opponents of collectivisation who were to be deported to other areas of the Soviet Union, often to Siberia
* those who were expelled from their farms and settled on poor land
The deported kulaks, or rather peasants identified as kulaks, played an important part in developing industrial resources in remote places at minimal cost.
Inmates of the gulag labour camps and punishment brigades built canals, roads or the new industrial centres. Andrea Romano has calculated that in the years
1930-31 about 1.8 million peasants were deported in cattle trucks to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other inhospitable areas, many of them dying there. A further 400,000 households were uprooted but remained in their districts. Some
390,000 people were arrested, most were sent to camps and approximately
21,000 were shot. In May 1933 it was decided to stop the mass deportation of kulaks; the disruption of agriculture and the difficulties in organising resettlement were too great. However, this did not mean any let-up of the pressure on kulaks. They would be dealt with in a different way, as we shall see in the Great Terror.
As well as its impact on the villages, the campaign had an impact on the towns.
Many more families than were deported chose self-de-kulakisation and joined the 3 million a year leaving for the towns. This produced overcrowding and strained the rationing system to breaking point.
Stalins collectivisation - peasant opposition
The peasants resisted collectivisation bitterly despite the mass deportations.
* In 1930 there were 13,754 outbreaks of mass unrest.
* The demonstrations, riots and even full-scale uprisings involved over 2.5 million peasants.
*Acts of Kulak terrorism claimed 3,155 victims among Bolshevik activists and Soviet officials
In many instances troops had to be brought in. Peasants burned crops, tools and houses rather than hand them over to the state. One of the main forms of resistance was to slaughter animals and eat or sell the meat rather than hand over the beasts to the kolkhoz. The dramatic fall in livestock figures, bears this out.
Action by women olten proved the most effective form of opposition. There was a wave of women’s revolts’ (bab’i bunty) in the North Caucasus in February
1930. Kaganovich, a member of the Politburo, recognised that women had played the most advanced role in the reaction against the collective farm.
The women’s protests were carefully organised, with specific goals such as stopping grain requisitioning or retrieving collectivised horses. They reckoned, sometimes correctly, that it would be more difficult for troops to take action against all-women protests. The government found their tactics difficult to deal with.
The peasants deeply resented the attack on their traditional ways of life. In 1930 the village commune, the Mir; was abolished. Thousands of churches were closed, church bells were melted down and priests persecuted. This was part of the Cultural Revolution (see page 216). Millions just left. Between 1928 and 1941, 20 million peasants made for the towns and industrial areas. Kevin McDermott calls this a demographic shift of unprecedented scope that altered the face of the Soviet Union’. The towns were under immense strain and the government brought in internal passports to control the vast movement of people.
Stalins Collectivisation- Famine
In 1932 and 1933 in the Ukraine, a major grain-producing area in the Soviet Union, famine raged. Yet in 1933 state procurements were more than double the level under the NEP and exports continued. To conceal the extent of the crisis people were prevented from fleeing from the famine area. Robert Conquest, one of Stalin’s sternest critics writing before the archives were open, stressed that the Soviet collectivisation terror took more lives than were lost by all countries on all fronts, in the First World War. Conquest emphasised Stalin’s criminal responsibility’ for the Ukraininan famine in which 7 million died of starvation and saw it as part of a campaign to smash Ukrainian nationalism.
This interpretation is rejected by Wheatcroft and Davies, but they accept that it was a man-made lamine caused by ruthless and excessive grain procurements.
They have had access to the archives and their figure for deaths is 5.7 million, still an enormous figure’.
Hunger meant theft of grain from collective farms soared, most of it by collective farmers themselves. In August 1932, even though he knew there was a famine (he used the word in a letter to Kaganovich and Molotov in June), Stalin himself drafted the ‘law of five ears of corn’ (see below). Kolkhozniks were arrested for ‘hairdressing’ - the cutting of individual ears of corn in the fields, hence the title commonly given for the law. By the end of 1933 about 1,000 people had been executed - as this figure was only 4 per cent of those convicted, the numbers arrested was clearly huge. Laws like this, and de-kulakisation, explain why peasants formed the vast majority of those in Soviet camps throughout the 1930s, and why peasants would remain a substantial part of the prison population until Stalin’s death.
Stalins Collectivisation - The kolkhoz model statute and private plots
In 1935 a special Party Congress was called to adopt a model statute or charter for collective farms. It remained the basis for kolkhoz organisation until well into the 19605. It laid down rules for the payment of kolkhozniks for work on the collective farm and for the relations between the kolkhozy and the MTS. It also legalised private plots of up to one acre for each household. Livestock was limited to one cow and calves, one sow and piglets, four sheep, and any number of rabbits and poultry. Livestock was generally pastured on collective land. It has been estimated that these private plots provided 52 per cent of vegetables, 57 per cent of fruit, 70 per cent of meat and 71 per cent of milk as well as butter, honey and wool to Soviet
Impact of collectivisation- Economic Disaster
Any assessment of collectivisation reveals a very mixed picture. Economically, it appears to have been a disaster. The fact that grain harvests dropped dramatically in the early 1930s, when grain was most needed, and did not recover to their 1928 level (apart from 1930, which was an exceptional year until the latter half of the 1930s is a damning indictment. This is an even worse performance when you compare the figures with the last harvest of tsarist Russia in 1913 (80.1 million tons). The Soviet Union also lost a huge proportion of the animal population. Meat production did not reach pre-collectivisation levels until after 1953.
Sheep and goats go from 146 million (1928) to 50 million (1933)
Impact of Collectivisation - Economic Success
However, although the overall grain harvest declined in the early 1930s, state procurements did not. This was more important to Stalin than making agriculture more productive. The state collected the grain it needed to feed the rapidly growing workforce and to sell abroad to pay for industrial equipment.
What is more, dispossessed peasants from the overpopulated countryside fed to the towns, so providing labour for the new factories. Collectivisation had succeeded in its main purpose - to provide the resources for industrialisation.
This view, however, has been challenged by several historians. They believe that valuable resources had to be diverted to agriculture: in 1933 there were less than half the horses there had been in 1928 and there were not enough Iractors to replace them. In the vain effort to make good the deficit, tractors alone consumed half the production of quality steel in the USSR in 1932.
Impact of Collectivisation - Political Success
For the Party, collectivisation was an essential part of its modernisation drive.
The Party did not want a sizeable sector of the economy to be dominated by the private market or to be at the mercy of the peasants who hoarded grain.
In this sense, collectivisation was a political success. The Party gained control of the villages and did not have to bargain with the peasants anymore. It had established a system, using local soviets and MTS, of controlling the countryside and making agriculture serve the towns and workers.
Impact of Collectivisation- Devastation for the peasants
As for the impact on the peasants themselves, the death toll and human costs of de-kulakisation and the famine were horrendous as we have seen. Millions died and millions fled from or were forced out of the villages. A way of life that had existed for 500 years vanished forever. For those who stayed, collectivisation was a second serfdom’. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s study of peasant attitudes makes it clear that peasants blamed Stalin for collectivisation and the famine; they saw him as their inveterate enemy, they wished him dead, his regime overthrown, and collectivisation undone, even at the cost of war and foreign occupation’
Features of the Five Year Plan
The plans were dominated by an emphasis on the development of heavy industry. Stalin and the Supreme Economic Council (Vesenkha) agreed that the lions share of investment should go into coal, iron, steel and other heavy industries. These would provide the power, capital equipment and machine tools that could be used to manufacture other products. The soviet Union would then be less dependent on the West for these goods and could move towards self-sufficiency or ‘autarky. This decision meant that consumer industries producing clothes, shoes and similar products would be downgraded. Soviet citizens were asked to sacrifice their standard of living for longer-term objectives. There were two main reasons behind this:
1 It seemed to the Stalinists that Western industrial revolutions had been underpinned by the initial development in coal, iron and steel.
2 They were driven by the need to develop the sort of industries that could protect the Soviet Union should it be attacked from the West.
Three other features of the plans are worthy of note:
* The setting of production and output targets which industrial enterprises had to achieve was absolutely central. Five-Year Plans set down broad directions and could be changed as they went along. There were also shorter one-year or even quarterly plans which set more specific targets for individual enterprises.
The targets were backed by law, so failure to meet targets could be treated as a criminal offence. Bonuses were paid to enterprises that exceeded their plan target.
* Huge new industrial centres were constructed virtually from nothing, for example at Magnitogorsk in the Urals and Kuznetz in western Siberia. Most of these were located east of the Ural mountains, a strategic decision to make them less vulnerable to attack from the West.
* Spectacular projects were conceived to demonstrate the might of the new Soviet industrial machine. This has been called ‘gigantomania. The Dnieprostroi Dam in eastern Russia was, for two years, the world’s largest construction site and it increased Soviet electric power output fivefold when it came on stream. Other projects included the development of Magnitogorsk steel works, the Moscow-Volga canal and the prestigious Moscow metro with its elaborate stations and high vaulted ceilings.
Stalins Five Year Plans
Stalins Great Turn, the Five Year Plans would achieve socialist industry , industrial economy once and for all - away from the NEP.
Gosplan set up in 1921, an economic body in charge of strategic planning. Decided that by the end of the 1920s if they continue with the NEP Russia will not industrialise.
1917, Vesenskha set up- operating body
First Five-Year Plan
1928-1932, Say that it was cut short as so successful.
Ridiculously high production targets to meet as Vesenskha and Gosplan constantly outbid each other- an initial target for coal was that in five years produce 35 million tonnes, eventually reached 75 million tonnes.
Did achieve rapid industrial growth in heavy industry, workforce doubled, party and workers support plan.
The emphasis was on heavy industries - coal. oil, iron and steel, electricity, cement, metals. timber. This accounted for 80 per cent of total investment; 1,500 enterprises were opened. Coal and iron output doubled.
However, Consumer industries see very little growth, even a decline. Lack of skilled workers created major problems as workers were constantly changing jobs.
In reality, many targets were not met. The Great Depression had driven down the price of grain and raw materials, so the USSR could not earn enough from exports to pay for all the machinery it needed.
Also, a good deal of investment had to go into agriculture because of the forced collectivisation programme. However, the Soviet economy was kick-started: there was impressive growth in certain sectors of the economy and there were substantial achievements
Second Five-Year Plan
1933-1937. Continued focus on heavy industry. By 1937, the USSR was virtually self-sufficient in machine-making and metalworking. Move industries to east and start up new industries in the east to protect from the West.
There was greater emphasis on communications. especially railways to link cities and industrial centres. A total of 4,500 enterprises opened. The plan benefited from some big projects, such as the Dnieprostroi Dam, coming into use.
Continued industrial growth at a slower pace but still growth. Food supplies recover and standards of living improve, not because of five year plan however. In 1937 growth slows after 3 good years (33-36) due to high targets leading to the stealing of raw materials to meet targets and a decrease in quality of goods.
Consumer goods industries still lagging
Third Five-Year Plan
1938-1941. Focus of armaments as resources were diverted to them due to increasing threat from Hitler- in 1936 Hitler invaded the Rhineland. Workers and managers blamed for economic slowdown of 1937 and can be put in prison for being late or changing jobs without permission. Many Factories ran short of materials leading to difficulties at the beginning of 1938 due to an exceptionally hard winter and the diversion of materials to the military. Gosplan was thrown into chaos when the purges created shortages of qualified personnel, such as important managers, engineers and officials, who linked industries and government. .Germany invade in 1941 cutting plan short.
Political Impact of the Five Year Plans - First Five Year Plan
In April 1929, two versions of the plan were produced - a basic and a much higher optimum version.
The latter was chosen. This envisaged targets being increased by astonishing amounts, for instance, coal up from 35 to 75 million tons and iron ore from 6 to 19 million tons. To many, these seemed hopelessly unachievable.
This frenetic pace and enthusiasm did not just come from above. The idea that the Soviet Union was at last on the road to socialism, via industrialisation, inspired Party members and urban workers alike. Young people especially were gripped by the feeling that they were creating a new type of society that would be far superior to that of their capitalist neighbours. After the compromises of the NEP, there was a return to the war imagery of the civil war and War Communism. There was talk of a ‘socialist offensive’, and of mobilising forces on all fronts. Groups of enthusiasts became shock workers who strove to increase productivity and urge each other on with socialist competition’. There were ‘campaigns’ and ‘breakthroughs, ‘ambushes’ by class enemies. People who opposed or criticised the regime’s policies thus became guilty of treachery. Bourgeois specialist-baiting and denunciation by workers was positively encouraged from 1928 as part of a Cultural Revolution.
The massive mobilisation of labour played a crucial role as the number of industrial workers in the USSR doubled during the First Five-Year Plan.
Collectivisation made a major, if largely unplanned, contribution. Millions poured in from the countryside completely lacking in training or experience of living conditions. It was almost impossible to forge a disciplined and diligent workforce. Specialist-baiting was not conducive to discipline and Stalin called a halt in a speech in June 1931. There was a further ideological retreat when Stalin attacked petty bourgeois egalitarianism’:
Higher wages and other incentives were used to encourage workers.The authority and status of management was now supported and a decree at the end of 1932 allowed managers to sack unsatisfactory workers and deprive them of ration cards, social benefits and factory housing. However, the managers needed the workers, especially skilled workers, if they were to reach output levels anywhere near their targets. A tough approach would lead to workers literally voting with their feet and moving on in search of better conditions.
It was a quicksand society. Labour turnover was astronomically high. At Magnitogorsk alone in the course of 1931 the total number of workers went up considerably but this increase was just a fraction of the number on site at some time during the year. Magnitogorsk was a revolving door (see Figure 3).
Political impact of the Five Year Plans - Second Five Year Plan
The year 1932 was one of crisis but the First Five-Year Plan was presented as a great success by emphasising heavy industry rather than light industry and agriculture, and focusing on quantity rather than quality. The Second Five-Year Plan was more realistic. Total investment was reduced and resources concentrated on completing projects in progress like the big plant at Magnitogorsk and other metal works. Three good years followed from 1934 to
1936. There was a gradual recovery of agriculture, a rapid increase in industrial output and rationing ended in 1935.
At ten o’clock on 30 August 1935, Alexei Stakhanov, a pneumatic-pick operator, began his special shift cutting 102 tons of coal in five hours, almost sixteen times the norm. He was given perfect conditions and, exceptionally, a support team. Afterwards there was a great deal of publicity. Stakhanov, the Soviet Hercules’, was put on the front cover of Pravda. He said, ‘In our country, under socialism, heroes of labour must become the most famous.
On 11 September, Pravda used the term ‘Stakhanovite movement’ for the first time and in November Stalin called for Stakhanovism to spread widely and deeply’ across the entire Soviet Union. Record mania swept the country. The Stakhanovite movement was seen as a way of compelling management to adopt new production methods and increase rates of production. Those reluctant to do so were branded as saboteurs. With pressure from above to meet increased targets and from below from workers wanting to be Stakhanovites, who would have wanted to be a manager in Soviet Russia at that time?
Historians have differing views on the effectiveness of the Stakhanovite movement. Lewis Siegelbaum argues that bonuses and gifts were showered on a favoured few. Ordinary workers, however, responded with violence, sabotage or demands to be classified as Stakhanovites, and the attempt to resurrect the mood of grass roots enthusiasm associated with the First Five-Year Plan broke down due to the purges .
In the second half of 1936 the situation deteriorated: a terrible harvest, shortages, an economic slowdown and dramatic industrial accidents, such as the Kemerovo mine disaster. The imperatives of meeting production targets of the Five-Year Plans led regional Party and economic leaders into self-protective practices that involved a systematic deception of the centre. Desperate to fulfil targets, managers sought to bribe or steal from others to get raw materials; factories turned out substandard or useless products or fiddled the figures. The local Party leadership and even local NKVD often colluded with this because they did not want to be held responsible for unfulfilled targets.
The political impact of the Five-Year Plans - The regime’s response to the economic slowdown
The regime explained the slowdown as due to criminal negligence and deliberate sabotage by officials and managers, and indiscipline by rank-and-file workers.
Its response was purges of officials and managers and the increasingly tough Labour decrees of 1938 and 1940. Both responses made the problem worse.
Under the Labour decree of 1938 a stricter system of work-record books was introduced. Managers were ordered to refuse employment unless the employee could produce a satisfactory work-book with details of and explanation for his/ her previous changes of employer.
The Labour decree of 1940 contained the following terms:
* Working day lengthened from seven to eight hours, and working week lengthened from five out of six to six out of seven days (Sunday was to be the normal day of rest), without additional pay.
* Changing jobs without specific authorisation became a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment.
* Absenteeism (arriving more than 20 minutes late for work on two occasions) was to be punished by up to six months compulsory labour at 75 per cent normal pay.
* Employers who failed to report cases of the above, or who took on such workers were liable to criminal prosecution.
The Labour decrees were almost universally detested and were a part of the austerity measures brought in to restrict budget expenditure as the large increases in defence expenditure in the Third Five-Year Plan had repercussions throughout the economy. There was a level of popular discontent that dismayed the NKVD.
Gulags
The first corrective labour camps (Gulags - an acronym for ‘Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Settlements’) after the revolution were established in 1918 after the attempted assassination of Lenin and a rapidly growing internment system during the Civil War. In March 1940, there were 53 separate camps and 423 labour colonies in the USSR and the utilisation of deportees and prisoners was fundamental to the realisation of some of the greatest achievements in industrialisation during the 1930s. For example, the Belomor Canal, which connects the White Sea with the Baltic, was almost entirely constructed by hand, using 250 000 prisoners between 1931 and 1933 It is estimated that almost 25 000 prisoners died in the first winter building the canal, their bodies thrown into the ditch they had been digging. Prisoners also worked in mines or cut timber without pay. The increase in prisoner numbers coincided with collectivisation; even political prisoners would now be forced to carry out hard labour, and prisoners were underfed, housed in poor conditions and worked long hours in a difficult climate. Prisoners could be executed if they refused to work.
It is possible that around 10% of prisoners in the Gulag died each year, although official figures obscure accuracy. The Gulags were situated all over Russia - some of the most hostile in Siberia, Kazakhstan and arctic Russia - and by 1939 it is estimated there were approximately 2.9 million people in the labour camp system forced to maintain the state’s industrial output.
