On the industrial side the 1930s were to be a period of Sturm und Drang. A planned economy was to be introduced with, as its first task, the direction of all possible resources into intensive industrialization. This was to be supported by a socialized agriculture.

The Five-Year Plan had not been finalized by the time it was announced in April–May 1929, though it had been expected to come into operation six months earlier. In its initial form it prescribed goals for 50 industries and for agriculture and provided some relation between resources and possibilities, but over the period that followed it was treated mainly as a set of figures to be scaled upward. The industrial growth rate originally laid down was 18–20 percent (in fact, this had already been achieved, at least on paper). Later in the year Stalin insisted on nearly doubling this rate.

The plan was thereafter a permanent feature of Soviet life; the First Five-Year Plan was followed by a series of others. The plan may be considered in two main aspects. It was, or was the basis of, a set of real governmental and economic actions. And it was a concept—organizational, ideological, inspirational, and, it might almost be said, transcendental.

Understanding of the economic side of the industrialization drive of the 1930s was long confused by two factors. The first was the claim by the communists that they were implementing a rational and fulfillable plan. The second, which came later, was the claim that they had in fact secured unprecedented increases in production.

The primary task, as to an only slightly lesser degree throughout the Stalin epoch and even later, was the buildup of heavy industry. At the end of 1932 it was announced that the First Five-Year Plan had been successfully completed. In fact none of the targets had been reached, or even approached.

Extravagant claims were made and continued to be issued until the late 1980s. It was only then revealed by Soviet economists that the true rate of growth in production over the period (including that of the Second Five-Year Plan, slightly less strongly stressing heavy industry, which now followed) was only about 3.5 percent per annum, about the same as that of Germany over the same span of time. Nevertheless, during this period a number of important industrial enterprises were completed, though there was much waste as well. The Syrtsov group (see below) held the new industries to be “eyewash,” and there was certainly great emphasis on the propaganda side. Some undertakings were ill-considered: the Baltic–White Sea Canal, supposedly completed in 1933, employed some 200,000–300,000 forced labourers but proved almost useless. On the other hand, the great Dneproges dam was a generally successful hydroelectric project on the largest scale. The same can be said of the Magnitogorsk foundries and other great factories. The characteristic fault was “giantism”—the party’s inclination to build on the largest and most ostentatious scale. One result was that there were continual organizational problems. More crucial was that the main concern was that production figures always be at, or beyond, the limits of capacity, so that maintenance and infrastructure were neglected, with deleterious long-term results.

There was a movement of population from the country to the towns. Between 1929 and 1932, some 12.5 million new hands were reported to have entered urban work, 8.5 million of them from the countryside (though it was ruled that kulaks should not be given jobs in the factories). These are striking figures, though they did not change the U.S.S.R. into an urbanized country in the Western sense. Even in 1940 just over two-thirds of the population was classified as rural and just under one-third as urban. It was not until the early 1960s that the population became equally urban and rural.

Even if the crash programs had been intrinsically sound, the party had not had time to prepare adequate technical and managerial staff or to educate the new industrial proletariat. And few genuine economic incentives were available: in 1933 worker’s real wages were about one-tenth of what they had been in 1926–27. Hence, everything had to be handled on the basis of myth and coercion rather than through rationality and cooperation. It is impossible to estimate such intangibles as the level of genuine enthusiasm among the Komsomols sent into the industrial plants or how long such enthusiasm lasted. But there was certainly an important element of genuine enthusiasts, and the remainder were at least obliged to behave as such.

In October 1930 the first decree was issued forbidding the free movement of labour, followed two months later by one that forbade factories to employ people who had left their previous place of work without permission. At the same time unemployment relief was abolished on the grounds that there was “no more unemployment.” In January 1931 came the first law introducing prison sentences for violation of labour discipline—confined for the time being to railwaymen. February brought the compulsory Labour Books for all industrial and transport workers. In March punitive measures against negligence were announced, followed by a decree holding workers responsible for damage done to instruments or materials. July 1932 saw the abrogation of Article 37 of the 1922 Labour Code, under which the transfer of a worker from one enterprise to another could be effected only with his consent. On August 7, 1932, the death penalty was introduced for theft of state or collective property; this law was immediately applied on a large scale. From November 1932 a single day’s unauthorized absence from work became punishable by instant dismissal. Finally, on December 27, 1932, came the reintroduction of the internal passport, denounced by Lenin as one of the worst stigmas of tsarist backwardness and despotism.

At the same time, pay and rations were linked to productivity. Preferential rations for “shock brigades” were introduced, and in 1932 the then very short food supplies were put under the direct control of the factory managers through the introduction of a kind of truck-system for allocation to workers on the basis of their performance. This culminated in the much publicized Stakhanovite movement. It was announced that Aleksey Stakhanov, a miner, had devised a method for immensely increasing productivity. The method as stated was no more than a rationalization (in the Taylorian or Fordian sense) of the arrangements for clearing debris, keeping machines ready, and so on, and in fact it involved a large effort by a support team of de-emphasized assistants. A vast publicity campaign ensued, and Stakhanovites emerged everywhere. In fact, as more recent Soviet analyses have made clear, the whole thing was little more than a publicity gimmick. But it was linked with the policy of payment by piecework, intended to set the individual worker’s targets in industry higher than was normally possible, and was highly unpopular. This unpopularity could not be expressed in a normal fashion, but there were many press reports of sabotage of, or assaults on, Stakhanovites by “backward” workers.

Meanwhile, not only in the U.S.S.R. but in the communist movement the world over, “Stakhanovite” became the favourite word for a “shock worker” in any economic—or political—field. The new workers’ stratum, given much money and prestige, reflected the increasingly caste-oriented nature of Stalinist society, of which the bureaucracy-intelligentsia was the most notable feature. These years had in fact seen the establishment of a new social and economic system. Thereafter there were no substantial changes.

Internal, 1930–37

In the Communist Party the Stalinist grip had become complete in 1930 with the expulsion of Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov from the Politburo and Rykov’s replacement as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (the leading group of government administrators). The 16th Party Congress signaled the end of the Right “deviation” as the 15th Congress had marked that of the Left. As a result of the 16th Congress, held in June–July 1930, and a plenum of the Central Committee in December of that year, the Politburo consisted solely of Stalinists: Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, Mikhail Kalinin, Kirov, Stanislav Kossior, Valerian Kuybyshev, Molotov, Sergo (Grigory) Ordzhonikidze, and Yan Rudzutak, with Anastas Mikoyan, Vlas Chubar, and Grigory Petrovsky as candidate members, while Andrey Andreyev was head of the Central Control Commission, the party’s disciplinary body. (It should be noted that from 1926 to 1934 the chairman of this commission did not serve in the Politburo: Ordzhonikidze 1926–30; Andreyev 1930–31; Rudzutak from 1931.) Over the next few years opposition was reduced to a few party groups who clandestinely discussed the removal of Stalin and the reversal of the disastrous economic policies: Sergey Syrtsov (candidate member of the Politburo), Besso Lominadze, and others in 1930; Mikhail Ryutin and other Rightists in 1931–32; Aleksandr Smirnov and others in 1932–33. These were all fruitless, being exposed and denounced on short order. Their political effect was different. In the two latter cases (and in certain others) Stalin sought to have the offenders executed and was thwarted by a Politburo majority.

And there were, from Stalin’s point of view, further signs of insubordination. The struggles of the past few years over collectivization had been won, and a feeling had developed, even in high levels of the victorious Stalin apparat, that some degree of civil relaxation could now take place. The 17th Party Congress, assembling in January 1934, was described as the Congress of Victors. As Stalin noted, no deviations remained to be combated. The former oppositionists had been, in the case of most of the Leftists, readmitted to the party; the Rightists had never been expelled. Members of both groups held minor posts of varying importance. And Stalin, who had appeared indispensable during the crisis, now seemed to many to be unsuited to leadership in a more peaceable era. A group of important figures debated replacing him as general secretary by Kirov, while retaining him in some more honorary post. Some 166 delegates (out of 1,225) actually crossed Stalin’s name out in the balloting for the new Central Committee.

Stalin went on record in favour of the concessions to the more moderate policy proposed at the Congress. And there was a noticeable, if not a major, thaw, including the end of bread rationing in 1935. In literature the dogmatic RAPPists were discredited, and a new Union of Soviet Writers held its first Congress in 1934 under the new doctrine of “Socialist Realism.” Although the new policy was less overtly restrictive of the arts, this too was used for the rest of the Stalin period as a criterion for silencing or purging independent voices. Of the 700 writers attending the Congress, only about 50 survived to see the Second Congress in 1954, though the average age in 1934 was under 40.

It is now clear, in any case, that Stalin, if not in his public stance, felt threatened by any substantial relaxation and hampered by his inadequately obedient subordinates. At the end of 1934, on December 1, came an event that was to be crucial to the final establishment of the Stalinist system. On that date Kirov was assassinated in the Smolny building at Leningrad, ostensibly by a disgruntled communist, whose access to his victim had been arranged by senior local officials of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), as the secret police, reorganized in 1934 under Genrikh Yagoda, was now called. There is little doubt that Stalin sponsored this murder through Yagoda.

Kirov’s death was followed at once by a decree on the summary trial of terrorists. It was charged that the assassin was a member of a Zinovyevite terrorist group in Leningrad, all of whom were promptly shot. Zinovyev, Kamenev, and several score of their followers were arrested and sentenced in closed court to jail terms as having “political responsibility” for (though not yet direct involvement in) the murder. Stalin’s agent Andrey Zhdanov took control of Leningrad, and from 1935 to 1939 almost all Kirov’s following was extirpated.

Over the next four years the centre of political life in the U.S.S.R. was the exposure and suppression of ever-increasing circles of alleged plotters against the regime, all of them linked in one way or another with the Kirov case. The country was submitted to an intensive campaign against hidden “enemies of the people.” This manifested itself both in a series of public, or publicized, trials, and in a massive terror operation against the population as a whole.

There had been show trials even in early Soviet times, including that of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1922 and the Shakhty case in 1928. During the early 1930s several more were mounted, notably the “Metro-Vic” case, involving British and Soviet engineers, in April 1933, following the “Menshevik Trial” in March 1931. Both cases were mainly concerned with sabotage. (The Mensheviks were almost all economists and specialists accused of trying to establish Five-Year Plan figures lower than the country’s capability—though in fact they had tended to err on the optimistic side.) But while these trials received considerable publicity they were not made the central feature of Soviet politics.

In August 1936 the NKVD set up the Zinovyev-Kamenev trial (to be followed by two similar trials in 1937 and 1938). And these cases were presented as the crucial element in the country’s public life. Zinovyev, Kamenev, and 14 others confessed to terrorist plots in conjunction with Trotsky and were shot. In September the NKVD chief, Yagoda, was replaced by Nikolay Yezhov, from whom the Yezhovshchina, the worst phase of the terror in 1937–38, took its name. A new group, headed by Grigory (Yury) Pyatakov, was now arrested, figuring in the second great trial in January 1937. This time the charges included espionage, sabotage, and treason, in addition to terrorism.

On February 18, 1937, Stalin’s old ally and Politburo colleague Ordzhonikidze committed suicide. He was reported to have planned to criticize the new repressions at what came to be known as the “February–March” 1937 plenum of the Central Committee. The plenum’s main decision was the arrest of Bukharin and Rykov. At the same time Stalin, Molotov, Yezhov, and others called for great vigilance in the struggle against hostile elements in the party and outside it.

In 1936 a new constitution (often called the Stalin constitution) came into effect, guaranteeing all manner of human rights. It had no effect, and in the spurious elections called under its articles in December 1937 there was only one candidate for each seat.

At this time a further social and economic component of the Stalinist system became very important. There had been a number of concentration camps from 1918 on, and 65 existed in 1922. During the NEP there was a reduction in the number of prisoners, who probably only numbered some tens of thousands at the end of the decade. But a decision was then taken to systematically utilize their labour. By 1932 there seem to have been at least one million such prisoners, and by 1935 there were more than two million, with camps located largely in the Arctic (such as Kolyma and Vorkuta) but also in Kazakhstan and elsewhere. The system expanded further and became a regular feature of Soviet life.

During 1937 and 1938 the terror reached its climax. Starting in March it rapidly developed a mass character. To cope with the large-scale arrests, special extra-legal tribunals were set up, in particular the notorious NKVD “troikas,” which sentenced hundreds of thousands of people to death in their absence. The mass graves of the victims remained secret until the late 1980s.

The Communist Party itself was ruthlessly purged. Of the 139 full and candidate members of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Congress in 1934, 115 were arrested, and of the 1,966 delegates to that Congress, 1,108 were arrested. The local leaderships in Leningrad, in Ukraine, and elsewhere were almost annihilated. In the republics the charges in many cases were now dealt with in secret, and the main themes of intensive public propaganda invariably included “bourgeois nationalist” plotting. The local party and cultural leaderships perished. At the lower level, of the 2.3 million people who had been party members in 1935, just under half went to execution or died in labour camps.

At the centre People’s Commissariats and Party departments were likewise devastated. The industrial, engineering, and economic cadres, including those of the railways, were heavily purged. The army also suffered heavy losses. In May 1937 eight senior generals, headed by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, were arrested, tortured, and, on June 11, shot on the usual charges. Their trial, held in secret, was publicly announced, but this was the exception. Over the next two years almost all their senior colleagues were arrested, tried in secret, and executed: 3 of the 5 marshals, 13 of the 15 army commanders, 50 of the 57 corps commanders, and 6 of the 7 fleet admirals and admirals grade I. The officer corps as a whole lost about half its members.

The cultural world also suffered: several hundred writers were executed or died in camps, including such figures as Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pilnyak, and Isaak Babel. The same applied in all the professions. Plots were discovered in the State Hermitage Museum, the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, and throughout academe.

The purge also involved large numbers of the general public. In all not fewer than some 5 million people were arrested, of whom no more than 10 percent survived. During the Yezhovshchina, the U.S.S.R. was in fact submitted to one of the most brutal terrors in recorded history. The effects were long-lasting.

In March 1938 came the third Moscow Trial. Bukharin, Rykov, and others, among them the former police commissar Yagoda, confessed to several murders, including those of Kirov and the writer Maxim Gorky, as well as to treason, espionage, and so on. Bukharin was accused of planning to murder Lenin in 1918, though he denied this particular slander. After the executions the only survivors of Lenin’s last Politburo were Stalin and Trotsky, the latter in exile in Mexico. (Trotsky was killed by an NKVD agent in 1940.)

By the autumn of 1938 it had become clear that the terror was dislocating the entire life of the country, including the economy—production actually declined in 1938–39. In December Yezhov was removed from his police post, to be arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940. Lavrenty Beria took on the NKVD leadership and supervised a considerable reduction in the tempo of the purge. The system became institutionalized.

The major factions opposing Stalin had been defeated by 1930. The early months of 1937 had seen the defeat of the last attempt to restrain Stalin. The 18th Party Congress in March 1939 marked the final transformation of Soviet politics. All independence of mind on the part of any of the Stalinist leadership had effectively vanished. Thereafter the history of the U.S.S.R. until 1953 was, generally speaking, confined to Stalin’s decisions and the attempts of his subordinates to gain his confidence.

The removal of all alternative political figures was matched by what was later called “the cult of personality” of Stalin. History was falsified on a massive scale to give him a major role in the Bolshevik underground, the Revolution, and the Civil War—in particular in the new “Short Course” Communist Party history, which became the basic text of Stalinism and sold 40 million copies throughout the world. The country was blanketed in extremes of adulation.

Foreign policy, 1928–40

From 1928, in harmony with the increasing shift to the left at home, foreign and Comintern policy once again became radicalized, with the emphasis on the treason of the Social Democrats of the West.

From 1933 to 1934 the context changed abruptly. Hitler’s accession to power in Germany had been facilitated by Moscow’s refusal to let the German Communist Party cooperate against him with the Social Democrats and others. In fact, Nazi rule was at first interpreted as a victory for the communists, in that capitalism had been driven to its last resource, of naked force, and must soon collapse. By mid-1934 it had become obvious that the whole conception was wrong.

A new Comintern policy emerged, to be formalized at that body’s Seventh Congress in July–August 1935: to work toward a United Front of Communists and Socialists, soon broadened to a People’s Front of all “left” parties. At the same time in foreign policy Stalin turned to the bourgeois democracies as a counterweight to Germany. In September 1934 the U.S.S.R. joined the League of Nations. In May 1935 a Franco-Soviet treaty of mutual assistance was signed, and a Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty followed a few weeks later, though this treaty was only to take effect if France also came to the aid of the country under attack.

In July 1936 came the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War against insurgents led by General Francisco Franco and heavily supported by Germany and Italy. The Soviets provided a few hundred tanks and aircraft and a few thousand military specialists, and in addition as many as 42,000 volunteers of the International Brigades were largely raised by the Comintern. Stalin’s followers also progressively took over the Spanish government, especially concerning themselves with hunting down local Trotskyites. When it was clear that the war was lost, Soviet support was withdrawn. But meanwhile the U.S.S.R. had established a further claim to the allegiance of the European left. This was enhanced when, in the autumn of 1938, France and Britain were instrumental in having Czechoslovakia accept the Munich Agreement, the first step to that country’s disintegration and annexation, while the U.S.S.R. appeared to be the sole, though cheated, defender of collective security.

This was a misapprehension. It is now clear that Stalin had no intention of becoming involved militarily. And he had, in any case, for several years been sounding out the possibility of an alternative policy based on accommodation with Hitler. At first these approaches bore no fruit, but in his policy speech to the 18th Party Congress in March 1939, Stalin announced that the U.S.S.R. would not help “warmongers” who wanted others to “pull their chestnuts out of the fire,” and Maksim Litvinov, the spokesman for collective security, was removed as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs a few weeks later. Hitler, planning his attack on Poland, understood these signals and initiated serious contacts with Moscow.

At the same time France and Britain had belatedly seen that the only effective policy against German expansion was as strong an alliance as possible, and they too now sought Soviet support. There was justifiable mistrust on both sides, and the Western powers handled the negotiations reluctantly and clumsily. But in any case the West was offering a pact that might or might not deter Hitler and that might lead to Soviet involvement in an uncertain war if it did not; whereas Hitler’s offer was of a great increase in Soviet territory and, at least for the present, peace.

The German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, arrived in Moscow on August 23, 1939, and the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was signed that evening. The Germans invaded Poland on September 1, and Soviet troops entered the eastern part of that country on September 17. Under the Secret Protocols of the Pact (as amended later in the month) the Soviet Union received western Ukraine and western Belorussia, together with the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Heavy pressure was now put on these latter three, and they were forced to accept Soviet garrisons under treaties signed in September and October. The treaties guaranteed that there would be no interference in their internal politics.

A similar ultimatum was issued to Finland, but the talks broke down, and on November 30, 1939, the U.S.S.R. attacked the country and immediately set up a Democratic Republic of Finland, headed by the communist Otto Kuusinen. But militarily the “Winter War,” as the Russo-Finnish War of 1939–40 was called, started with a series of humiliating defeats for the U.S.S.R., and it was only in March that the sheer weight of numbers broke Finnish resistance. Even then, fearing Allied involvement, Stalin granted terms little worse than those offered in 1939 and dropped the Kuusinen “government.” The U.S.S.R. gained the Karelian Isthmus, certain border changes in the north, and a base on the Gulf of Finland.