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The scale of the famine of 1921–1922 in Russia and part of Ukraine surpassed by far that of all other famine disasters of previous decades. According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) over 40 million people from 35 provinces suffered from famine in 1921–1922. According to information from the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture about 60 % of agricultural territories of Russia were affected by the disaster. Famine, and the diseases and epidemics that it provoked, caused over 5 million deaths. Thanks to the aid of overseas organizations – the American Relief Administration first and foremost – the death toll did not increase. The ARA provided food for 10.5 million people at the peak of its activity in August of 1922. Egregiously, this contribution of the United States in saving millions of Russian lives remains unrecognized— even by the current regime of the Russian Federation.
The famine catastrophe had a great demographic, economic, and social impact. The results of a new analysis of the situation in a number of provinces reveal a direct relationship between famine and peasant revolts. The famine was the determinative factor in the pacification of peasant revolts.
The urgent necessity to overcome the crisis and claims by peasants boosted the introduction of market and commodity-money relations. The new Land Code authorized the lease of land and the hiring of labor. Soon after that the agricultural tax in kind was replaced with the unified agricultural tax mostly paid in cash.
With the introduction of the market, private traders appeared in the national economy. The state aimed at privatization of handicraft, small-scale and (some time later) medium-scale industry. The leasing of state companies and licenses to operate (a special form of lease) were authorized. Cooperation was promoted. Industrial companies under the Supreme Council of National Economy were allowed to form trusts. They operated on the basis of self-support, self-finance and self-repayment. Universal labor duty was abrogated, and the system for equal remuneration of labor at state companies was cancelled. In-kind compensation (rations in kind) was replaced with wages. The rationing system was finally cancelled.
Industrial management was decentralized. The number of branch central offices for industrial management was dramatically decreased. The National bank was created to regulate and revitalize finances. It had the right to issue chervonetses (bank bills backed by the gold standard) instead of devaluated Soviet rubles. The ruble became a convertible currency in Russia and abroad by 1924.
These swift and profound changes in economic policy took place at the same time as important steps in state construction. The state of disunity that had followed the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917–1918 was replaced with a movement toward unification; it resulted in the creation of the United Soviet Socialist Republics in December, 1922. The Russian Communist party played the central role in the unification movement and the creation of a union of equal Slavic (Russia, the Ukraine, Byelorussia) and Transcaucasian republics (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia). The Central Asian republics (Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia, Tajikistan) joined the union in late 1920s.
In 1923/1924 the Constitution of the USSR was adopted, the USSR government was created and the second chamber of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR was assembled.
The New Economic Policy led to an economic upturn. Agriculture and related branches of industry started to develop. Commerce contributed to the process, creating a nation-wide market. Social stratification began at the same time. The mass of the population began to envy the prosperous life of kulaks and the city bourgeoisie.
The policy was confronted with its first crisis in 1923; it was the «crisis of sales.» At that time, industrial prices were adjusted according to the needs of the countryside. But the desire to get the highest profits possible provoked a rise in prices of industrial goods by more then three times in relation to prices for agricultural production. The unevenness of prices led to a decreased spending capacity in rural areas. The government intervened in the price formation and administratively lowered industrial production prices and increased prices for agricultural production.
The reconstruction process was over by the mid-twenties. However, it was substantially influenced by a reduction in military spending. The armed forces, for instance, were reduced to 600 thousand people from 5.3 million people. Yet the future of the Soviet Union depended on the activity of capitalist powers. A perception of increased military threats could influence the further support of the NEP.
In 1925 the government decided to move towards industrial modernization of the country to place it among developed countries, making it capable of defending its borders. The industrialization program required an increase in grain exports to purchase necessary machinery and equipment.
The new phase of NEP began at the same time as the intensification of the power after the death of the founder of the Soviet state Vladimir Lenin. Leon Trotsky started to actively criticize the expanding bureaucracy because administration functionaries were appointed directly by Joseph Stalin instead of being elected by the people. And since Stalin was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the party became the only institution providing access to the nomenklatura. The nomenklatura was to become the basis of Soviet state organization. But Trotsky’s «new course» was based on the idea of free discussion of any issue. He believed that the old guard of the party was turning into a group of «new-style bureaucrats» who had forgotten the language of the revolution and were adopting a «party-style» of speech. This fact made it necessary to replace the old functionaries with new ones.
This was also the moment when Stalin advanced the theory of «Socialism in One Country» – that is, that a socialist regime could be established independently in the USSR. Other party leaders, such as Grigorii Zinoviev and Leo Kamenev, disagreed. They argued that socialism could only triumph if the Western European proletariat revolted as well, which meant in effect a «world revolution.» They regarded Stalin’s theory «national-bolshevist,» implying that it was more nationalist than socialist.
In 1927, with the tenth anniversary of the October revolution at hand the struggle among party leaders became more intense. Besides personal ambitions it was also driven by objective reasons. The NEP had not completely succeeded; it did not reach down to the production collectives – the fundamental components of the economy. Industry could not continue to exist without active state support. Workers demanded an administrative guarantee of their interests, and over a third of the peasantry (proletarians, half-proletarians, and the poor) were directly supported by the government’s intervention in the economy. Tax policy was based on the class principle. The same principle was applied to the elections to different levels of soviets. The bureaucracy became the indispensable component of every sphere of life.
The preceding analysis demonstrates that the country was nearing a historic choice between further pursuit of the NEP and an increase in the centralization of and administrative interference in all domains of state policy. Not only did the new crisis of the NEP reveal all of these contradictions; it also changed the direction of Russia’s development in the 20th century.
Theme 6
NEP DOWNSIZING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE POLICY OF EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES INTO A PERMANENT SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT
The end of the 1920s – beginning of the 1930s was a period in which the policy of NEP (New Economic Policy, 1921–8) was overthrown in favor of the Stalinist «revolution from above.» It is extremely important to understand in what way and by what means the Leninist principles embodied in the NEP were revised and replaced by a purely Stalinist understanding of the course to be taken in advancing the country further and strengthening the new, post-Leninist regime.
In December 1927, at its XV congress, the ruling party adopted a program concerning the smooth «reconstruction» of the NEP. This Program envisaged the involvement of peasants in cooperative production on a scale realistic for that time, and was orientated towards a gradual, balanced, carefully considered tempo for industrial modernization, the strengthening of ties between city and countryside and, most important, the retention, to quite a considerable extent, of individual peasant ownership as the basis for the development of the agrarian sector of the economy and the market. At the same time the resolutions adopted by the Congress permit us to judge quite precisely the serious ideological changes that had occurred in the position of the ruling party. If the idea of socialism, as a system of civilized cooperatives, survived in the resolutions of the Congress, it was present only in an extremely reduced and stunted form. In one of the principal documents, «Concerning Directives on the Drawing up of a Five-Year Plan for the Economy», repeated mention was made of the need to overcome the anarchy of the NEP market and to set up a stricter framework for its operation. In general the market was seen in a very negative light; indeed it figured in the document only in one capacity, as the private market. The market was seen as a capitalist leftover, an attribute of capitalism as such, and was judged accordingly. Moreover, the process of overcoming the anarchy of the market was seen, in the long run, in terms of transforming the system of government regulation of the market into «an apparatus for the socialist distribution of goods.»
The redefinition of socialism implicitly adopted at the Congress strengthened the orientation towards strict centralization and a strictly regulated economic system. It might be said that the ideological shift towards the idea of «state socialism» had begun, but it was still envisaged at this stage as existing within the context of the market, which for doctrinal reasons naturally aroused hostility.
These ideological maneuvers were soon transferred to the practical plane with the occurrence of the grain procurement crisis at the end of 1927 – beginning of 1928. The immediate cause of the crisis had been mistakes in the economic administration, in particular the reduction of government grain prices at the beginning of the procurement campaign. In the winter of 1927/28 the largest granaries effectively ceased selling grain to the cooperation and to state purchasers. Hoping for more favorable market circumstances, and more advantageous conditions for selling, the «middle peasants» too began hoarding grain. The main point, however, was that both concrete tactical mistakes, and a fundamental strategic miscalculation, came together in the procurement crisis of 1927/28.
Analyzing the causes of the crisis in retrospect, Nikolai Bukharin concluded that the grain problem had already been neglected in the period from 1925 to 1927. The country’s leadership, including the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Iosif Stalin, had «for some period of time failed to take heed of the state of affairs with regard to grain, and for some time carried on with the process of industrialization, which was financed by foreign currency reserves and taxes.» Instead of paying attention, during the previous years, to the situation of the grain sector and achieving a significant increase in the rate of construction, on a firm basis, in one to three years» time, the leadership ran into inevitable difficulties, Bukharin observed. These difficulties became even more evident when the very sources on which we had been relying for some time were exhausted and we all realized that we could no longer continue on that basis. This moment coincided with our greatest problems. But once things had worked out in that way, once these difficulties had become an objective fact, we ended up in the first round of extraordinary measures.
From the very beginning a certain group within the leadership was inclined to see the outbreak of the grain procurement crisis in war-like terms, as a fresh attack on socialism by petty bourgeois elements, as a «kulak strike», an attempt to push apart the limits in which the dictatorship of the proletariat had placed capitalist elements, although in actual fact it was the market that resisted the grain procurements. All the evidence suggests that the Party leadership did not initially intend to apply the extraordinary measures over a long period. Exiled in Alma Ata, Lev Trotskii saw these measures generally as «a crutch for Rykov’s policies.» Probably, this was the view of all the members of the Politburo, who unanimously supported the extraordinary measures at a meeting on 6 January 1928. At that moment, the Party leaders simply failed to see any other solution. All other alternatives for overcoming the problem were rejected.
The extraordinary measures undertaken in the winter of 1928 proved completely ineffective. In the summer of that year, the government was forced to spend its mobilization reserves and purchase grain abroad. Six months earlier such measures would have been sufficient to put out the crisis and buy time for a serious review of policy. But the resort to extraordinary measures set in motion the machine of chrezvychaishchina and for the first time since the end of the Civil War the system of forcible purchasing of grain was reinstated. That section of society whose existence depended on the NEP, and who regarded it as the only possible normal form of economic and political life, was hit particularly hard by this policy.
These people were distinguished by their inner orientation, their political and sociopsychological outlook. Some of them were ossified, bureaucratized chinovniki, resistant to change of any kind; others were principled supporters of the NEP, while yet others favored organic economic growth rather than the various zigzags of the left. In the eyes of the leadership they constituted a force for historic inertia, and as such became the butt of the extraordinary measures. Their active or passive resistance forced the Party leaders from time to time to demand ideological controls and a purge of the Party organization. However, millions of non-Party people had spontaneously formed their own ideology, one remote from complex Party doctrine. It was expressed in the question: who is responsible for the fact that a year ago everything was more or less all right, while now everything is deplorable and unbearable? The Communists, the Komsomol, the Jews – such was one answer given by these despairing and embittered people. Others blamed the «would-be bourgeoisie», or the kulaks. The search for «enemies», the attempt to personify the guilty, became a kind of safety-valve through which mass dissatisfaction, both among city workers and among the rural poor, could be expressed.
The Shakhtii case, dubbed by Stalin «the economic counter-revolution», became the mechanism through which this question, matured in the minds of millions, took form. The «case» arose in March 1928, and the trial took place in May that year, that is to say, during the period when mass discontent and bitterness at the extraordinary measures had swollen into open indignation. The «Shakhtii case» was quite obviously fabricated, but its significance lay in the fact that it gave rise to the theory of «wrecking». This theory allowed the Party to point the finger at «concrete wrongdoers» and deflect mass dissatisfaction away from the Party leaders. The reaction to the «Shakhtii case» in the consciousness of the masses was quite simple. Statements of the following kind, made by peasants and workers in relation to the Shakhtii specialists, can be found in numerous political summaries and research surveys issued by the OGPU: «The bullet was too good for them, they should have been sent to the crematorium alive».
Support for the Shakhtii trial and the inferences drawn about the «wreckers» remained a stable socio-psychological phenomenon over a period of several months. Against the background of growing economic problems, extraordinary measures, queues and strikes, practically no one expressed any doubt or skepticism concerning the judicial correctness of the trial in the «Shakhtii case». On the contrary, among the lower strata of the proletariat the conclusions of the trial were taken to savage extremes:
What should be done? That’s for the Party Central Committee, our guide, to answer. Probably we should take up our knives and bullets again and get rid of all these famous doctors and generals, those that are still alive.
Thus in the spring of 1928 this growing social aggression was offered a personal target: the «wreckers». But the first target had already been named in January, when blame was laid on the kulaks who had organized the «grain strike». In this way a specific ideological and socio-psychological mood was created, which to some extent filtered into the Party’s ranks as well. Attempts were made to overcome the reluctance among many Communists to «activate», in carrying out the extraordinary measures, Party «radicals», who at the slightest difficulty would pose the question: «Isn’t there a Shakhtii plot here?» – a reluctance that was put down to degeneration and demoralization among the Party ranks. But if facts of this kind were occasionally made known to the whole country, the political struggle which occurred among the Party leadership in March 1928 was carefully concealed from the rest of society.
Bukharin, in particular, characterized the external and internal situation of the country as «very grave». The program of the XV Congress of the Communist Party was effectively torn apart by the crisis. Bukharin did not admit this directly, but his view was made evident in his demand for a new «overall plan» and the admission that the Party leadership had behaved worse than «superempiricists of the crudest kind». The failure, or at any rate partial failure, of the program of the XV Congress— instead of the smooth «reconstruction» of the NEP, the country had been dragged into crisis – was also obvious to Stalin. But he did not share the forebodings that the extraordinary measures would inevitably lead to civil war. By contrast, Bukharin considered his main task to be that of proving the real danger of civil war and the need for urgent and public repeal of the extraordinary measures. The anti-crisis programme of the «right faction», set out at a key moment in the plenum of the Central Committee in July 1928, was quite simple: the repeal of the extraordinary measures, an increase in the purchase price of grain, the abolition of the ration system, differentiated taxes, and so on.
In the key speech to the plenum, delivered on the Politburo’s orders by Anastas Mikoyan, it was emphasized that the Party had no intention of transforming the temporary extraordinary measures into a permanent policy, since this would threaten the alliance of peasants and workers, the stability of the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist construction. With regard to the extraordinary measures even Lazar Kaganovich declared: «They must not be brought into the system… It is all the more necessary to declare a decisive struggle against an ideology that wants to legitimize distortions».
Nevertheless Aleksei Rykov observed, first, that Kaganovich, in his speech, had identified administrative with economic measures, proof of which could be found in the restriction of the law of value in Soviet society and in the fact that bourgeois economy was perceived as the opposite of the Soviet economic system, and, second, that he had called for effort to be put into denouncing «distortions», rather than into considering the further application of the extraordinary measures themselves, or into analyzing the actual results of the grain procurement campaign. In a word, the plenum left a wide margin for very different interpretations of official policy. It is not accidental that members of the Central Committee repeatedly ask ed for clarification: to be precise, «what was the strike about?» The extreme left faction found the answer in the situation of the collective farms, the extreme «right» in the thesis «look to the market», still others in the development of individual peasant ownership. Under these conditions it was extremely difficult to imagine precisely how, and under what slogans, the next grain procurement campaign of 1928/9 would be conducted.
It was all the more difficult to predict the further course of events because the July plenum had seen the emergence of a faction that was far to the left of Stalin. The position of this faction was expressed, in particular, by several secretaries from regional committees: «Our task is not to stamp out the hatred of the poor towards the kulak, but to organize it.»
Vyacheslav Molotov also attempted to give a theoretical foundation to the events of the winter and spring of 1928. He accused those who forgot about the real class basis of the crisis of committing a sin against Marxism. Thus there formed within the Central Committee a group that was orientated towards the use of very harsh anti-NEP measures. And although Stalin himself took a more moderate position, he made a number of theoretical and political gestures towards the new left. This appeal to the far left was manifest, for example, in the theory of «tribute», that is, an additional tax which he proposed should be imposed on the peasants, and which the state would need to levy on a temporary basis in order to preserve and develop further the present tempo of industrial development. The following pronouncement was typical of Stalin’s utterances at the plenum:
«Our policy is not a policy of inflaming the class struggle… but that is not to say that the class struggle has been abandoned or that it – this very same class struggle – will not become more acute.»
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