Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

A historian, who might question the assumptions or the stages in this theory, would also see that the theory made it possible for Bolshevik Russia to abandon most of the influences of Western ideology in Marxism (such as its humanitarianism, its equality, or its antimilitarist, antistate bias) and allow it to fall back into the Russian tradition of a despotic police state resting on espionage and terror, in which there was a profound gulf in ideology and manner of living between the rulers and the ruled. It should also be evident that a new regime, such as Bolshevism was in Russia, would have no traditional methods of social recruitment or circulation of elites; these would be based on intrigue and violence and would inevitably bring to the top the most decisive, most merciless, most unprincipled, and most violent of its members. Such a group, forming around Stalin, began the process of establishing “Communism in a single country” in 1927-1929, and continued it until interrupted by the approach of war in 1941. This program of heavy industrialization was organized in a series of “Five-Year Plans,” of which the first covered the years 1928-1932.

The chief elements in the First Five-Year Plan were the collectivization of agriculture and the creation of a basic system of heavy industry. In order to increase the supply of food and industrial labor in the cities, Stalin forced the peasants off their own lands (worked by their own animals and their own tools) onto large communal farms, worked cooperatively with lands, tools, and animals owned in common, or onto huge state farms, run as state-owned enterprises by wage-earning employees using lands, tools, and animals owned by the government. In communal farms the crops were owned jointly by the members and were divided, after certain amounts had been set aside for taxes, purchases, and other payments which directed food to the cities. In state farms the crops were owned outright by the state, after the necessary costs had been paid. In time, experience showed that the costs of the state farms were so high and their operations so inefficient that they were hardly worthwhile, although they continued to be created.

The shift to the new system came slowly in 1927-1929 and then was put violently into full operation in 1930. In the space of six weeks (February-March 1930) collective farms increased from 59,400, with 4,400,000 families, to 110,200 farms, with 14,300,000 families. All peasants who resisted were treated with violence; their property was confiscated, they were beaten or sent into exile in remote areas; many were killed. This process, known as “the liquidation of the kulaks” (since the richer peasantry resisted most vigorously), affected five million kulak families. Rather than give up their animals to the collective farms, many peasants killed them. As a result, the number of cattle was reduced from 30.7 million in 1928 to 19.6 million in 1933, while, in the same five years, sheep and goats fell from 146.7 million to 50.2 million, hogs from 26 to 12.1 million, and horses from 33.5 to 16.6 million. Moreover, the planting season of 1930 was entirely disrupted, and the agricultural activities of later years continued to be disturbed so that food production decreased drastically. Since the government insisted on taking the food needed to support the urban population, the rural areas were left with inadequate food, and at least three million peasants starved in 1931-1933. Twelve years later, in 1945, Stalin told Winston Churchill that twelve million peasants died in this reorganization of agriculture.

To compensate for these setbacks, large areas of previously uncultivated lands, many of them semiarid, were brought under cultivation, mostly in Siberia, as state farms. Considerable research was done on new crop varieties to increase yields, and to utilize the drier lands of the south and the shorter growing season in the north. As a consequence, the area under cultivation increased by 21 percent in 1927-1938. However, the fact that the Soviet population rose, in the same eleven years, from 150 million to 170 million persons, meant that the cultivated acreage per capita rose only from 1.9 to 2.0 acres. The use of semiarid lands required a considerable extension of irrigation; thus there was an increase of about 50 percent in the acreage irrigated in the decade 1928-1938 (from 10.6 million acres to 15.2 million acres). Some of these irrigation projects combined irrigation with the generation of electricity by waterpower, and provided improved water transportation facilities, as in our Tennessee Valley Authority; this was true of the famous project at Dnepropetrovsk on the lower Dnieper River, which had a capacity of half a million kilowatts (1935).

The reduction in farm animals, which was not made up by 1941, combined with the efforts to develop heavy industry, resulted in increased use of tractors and other mechanized equipment in agriculture. The number of tractors rose from 26.7 thousand in 1928 to 483.5 thousand in 1938, while in the same decade the percentage of plowing done by tractors increased from 1 percent to 72 percent. Harvesting was increasingly done by combines, the number of these increasing from almost none in 1928 to 182,000 in 1940. Such complicated machinery was not owned by the collective farms but by independent machine-tractor stations scattered about the country; they had to be hired from these as they were needed. The introduction of mechanized farming of this type was not an unmixed success, as many machines were ruined by inexperienced help and the costs of upkeep and fuel were very high. Nevertheless, the trend toward mechanization continued, partly from a desire to copy the United States and partly from a rather childish enthusiasm for modern technology. These two impulses combined, at times, to produce a “gigantomania,” or enthusiasm for large size rather than for efficiency or a satisfactory way of life. In agriculture this gave rise to many enormous state farms of hundreds of thousands of acres which were notoriously inefficient. Moreover, the shift to such large-scale mechanized agriculture, in contrast to the old czarist agriculture organized in scattered peasant plots cultivated in a three-year, fallow-rotation system, greatly increased such problems as spreading drought, losses to insect pests, and decreasing soil fertility, requiring the use of artificial fertilizers. In spite of all these problems, Soviet agriculture, without ever becoming successful or even adequate, provided a steadily expanding base for the growth of Soviet industry, until both were disrupted by the invasion of Hitler’s hordes in the summer of 1941.

The industrial portion of the First Five-Year Plan was pursued with the same ruthless drive as the collectivization of agriculture and had similar spectacular results: impressive physical accomplishment, large-scale waste, lack of integration, ruthless disregard of personal comfort and standards of living, constant purges of opposition elements, of scapegoats, and of the inefficient, all to the accompaniment of blasts of propaganda inflating the plan’s real achievements to incredible dimensions, attacking opposition groups (sometimes real and frequently imaginary) within the Soviet Union, or mixing scorn with fear in verbal assaults on foreign “capitalist imperialist” countries and their secret “saboteurs” within Russia.

The First Five-Year Plan of 1928-1932 was followed by a Second Plan of 1933-1937 and a Third Plan of 1938-1942. The last of these was completely disrupted by the German invasion of June 1941, and had, from the beginning, undergone periodic modifications which changed its targets in the direction of an increased emphasis on armaments because of the rising international tensions. Because of the inadequacies of the available Soviet statistics, it is not easy to make any definite statements about the success of these plans. There can be no doubt that there was a great increase in the physical output of industrial goods and that this output was very largely in capital equipment rather than in consumers’ goods. It is also clear that much of this advance was uncoordinated and spotty and that, while Soviet national income was rising, the standard of living of the Russian peoples was declining from its 1928 level.