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

The following estimates, made by Alexander Baykov, will give some idea of the magnitude of the achievement of the Soviet economic system in the period 1928-1940:

1928

1940

Coal (million tons)

35.0

166.0

Oil (million tons)

11.5

31.1

Pig iron (million tons)

3-3

15.0

Steel (million tons)

4-3

18.3

Cement (million tons)

1.8

5.8

Electric power (billion kw.)

5.0

48.3

Cotton textiles (million meters)

2742.0

3700.0

Woolen textiles (million meters)

93.2

120.0

Leather shoes (million pairs)

29.6

220.0

Railroad freight (billion ton-kilometers)

934

415.0

Total population (millions)

150.0

173.0

Urban population (estimated percentage)

18.0%

33.0%

Employed persons (millions)

11.2

31.2

Total wage payments (millions of rubles)

8.2

162.0

Grain crops (millions of hectoliters)

92.2

111.2

There can be little doubt that this tremendous achievement in industrialization made it possible for the Soviet system to withstand the German assault in 1941. At the same time the magnitude of the achievement produced great distortions and tensions in Soviet life. Millions of persons moved from villages to cities (some of these entirely new) to find inadequate housing, inadequate food, and violent psychological tensions. On the other hand, the same move opened to them wide opportunities in free education, for themselves and for their children, as well as opportunities to rise in the social, economic, and party structures. As a consequence of such opportunities, class distinctions reappeared in the Soviet Union, the privileged leaders of the secret police and the Red Army, as well as the leaders of the party and certain favored writers, musicians, ballet dancers, and actors, obtaining incomes so far above those of the ordinary Russian that they lived in quite a different world. The ordinary Russian had inadequate food and housing, was subject to extended rationing, having to stand in line for scarce consumers’ items or even to go without them for long periods, and was reduced to living, with his family, in a single room, or even, in many cases, to a corner of a single room shared with other families. The privileged rulers and their favorites had the best of everything, including foods and wines, the use of vacation villas in the country or in the Crimea, the use of official cars in the city, the right to live in old czarist palaces and mansions, and the right to obtain tickets to the best seats at the musical or dramatic performances. These privileges of the ruling group, however, were obtained at a terrible price: at the cost of complete insecurity, for even the highest party officials were under constant surveillance by the secret police and inevitably would be purged, sooner or later, to exile or to death.

The growth of inequality was increasingly rapid under the Five-Year plans and was embodied in law. All restrictions on maximum salaries were removed; variations in salaries grew steadily wider and were made greater by the nonmonetary privileges extended to the favored upper ranks. Special stores were established where the privileged could obtain scarce goods at low prices; two or even three restaurants, with entirely different menus, were set up in industrial plants for different levels of employees; housing discrimination became steadily wider; all wages were put on a piecework basis even when this was quite impractical; work quotas and work minimums were steadily raised. Much of this differentiation of wages was justified under a fraudulent propaganda system known as Stakhanovism.

In September 1935, a miner named Stakhanov mined 102 tons of coal in a day, fourteen times the usual output. Similar exploits were arranged in other activities for propaganda purposes and used to justify speedup, raising of production quotas, and wage differences. At the same time, the standard of living of the ordinary worker was steadily reduced not only by raising quotas but also by a systematic policy of segmented inflation. Food was purchased from the collective farms at low prices and then sold to the public at high prices. The gap between these two was steadily widened year by year. At the same time the amount of produce taken from the peasants was gradually increased by one technique or another. When collective farms had to shift to tractors and combines these were taken from the farms themselves and centralized in machine-tractor stations controlled by the government. They had to be hired at rates which approached one-fifth of the total output of the collective farm. One of the chief sources of governmental income was a turnover tax (sales tax) on consumers’ goods; this varied from item to item, but was generally about 60 percent or more. It was not imposed on producers’ goods, which were, on the contrary, subsidized to the extent of half the government’s expenditures. Price segmentation was so great that in the period 1927-1948 consumers’ prices went up thirtyfold, wages went up eleven-fold, while prices of producers’ goods and armaments went up less than threefold. This served to reduce consumption and to falsify the statistical picture of the national income, standards of living, and the breakdown between consumers’ goods, capital goods, and armaments.

As public discontent and social tensions grew in the period of the Five-Year plans and the collectivization of agriculture, the use of spying, purges, torture, and murder increased out of all proportion. Every wave of discontent, every discovery of inefficiency, every recognition of some past mistake of the authorities resulted in new waves of police activity. When the meat supplies of the cities almost vanished, after the collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930’s, more than a dozen of the high officials in charge of meat supplies in Moscow were arrested and shot, although they were in no way responsible for the shortage. By the middle 1930’s the search for “saboteurs” and for “enemies of the state” became an all-enveloping mania which left hardly a family untouched. Hundreds of thousands were killed, frequently on completely false charges, while millions were arrested and exiled to Siberia or put into huge slave-labor camps. In these camps, under conditions of semi-starvation and incredible cruelty, millions toiled in mines, in logging camps in the Arctic, or building new railroads, new canals, or new cities. Estimates of the number of persons in such slave-labor camps in the period just before Hitler’s attack in 1941 vary from as low as two million to as high as twenty million. The majority of these prisoners had done nothing against the Soviet state or the Communist system, but consisted of the relatives, associates, and friends of persons who had been arrested on more serious charges. Many of these charges were completely false, having been trumped up to provide labor in remote areas, scapegoats for administrative breakdowns, and to eliminate possible rivals in the control of the Soviet system, or simply because of the constantly growing mass paranoidal suspicion which enveloped the upper levels of the regime. In many cases, incidental events led to large-scale reprisals for personal grudges far beyond any scope justified by the event itself. In most cases these “liquidations” took place in the cells of the secret police, in the middle of the night, with no public announcements except the most laconic. But, in a few cases, spectacular public trials were staged in which the accused, usually famous Soviet leaders, were berated and reviled, volubly confessed their own dastardly activities, and, after conviction, were taken out and shot.

These purges and trials kept the Soviet Union in an uproar and kept the rest of the world in a state of continuous amazement throughout the period of the Five-Year plans. In 1929 a large group of party leaders who objected to the ruthless exploitation of the peasantry (the so-called “Rightist opposition”), led by the party’s most expert theoretician of the Marxist ideology, Nikolai Bukharin, was purged. In 1933 about a third of the members of the party (at least a million names) were expelled from the party. In 1935, following upon the murder of a Stalinist supporter, Serge Kirov, by the secret police, many of the “Old Bolsheviks,” including Zinoviev and Kamenev, were tried for treason. The following year, just as the Spanish Civil War was beginning, the same group were tried once more as “Trotskyists” and were shot. A few months later another large group of “Old Bolsheviks,” including Karl Radek and Grigori Pyatakov, were tried for treason and executed. Later in that same year (1937) evidence that the Soviet army leaders had been in communication with the German High Command was sent from the German secret police, through Benes, the president of Czechoslovakia, to Stalin. These communications had been going on since before 1920, were an open secret to careful students of European affairs, and had been approved by both governments as part of a common front against the Western democratic Powers; nevertheless this information was used as an excuse to purge the Red Army of most of its old leaders, while eight of the highest generals, led by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevski, were executed. Less than a year later, in March 1938, the few remaining Old Bolsheviks were tried, convicted, and executed. These included Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov (who had succeeded Lenin as president of the Soviet Union), and G. Yagoda (who had been head of the secret police).