The Great Terror

In this unitary system, politics as such had disappeared, except in the form of intrigue at the highest level for Stalin’s favor. In a sense, this may sound paradoxical; there was more “political” agitation and propaganda in the press and on the radio, in factory speeches and official literature, than anywhere in the world. But it was totally passive. It consisted solely of the handing down of, and working up of enthusiasms for, the decisions of the General Secretary. A new generation of industrial managers had risen, competent in the techniques of administration, in which the threat of the forced-labor camp spurred on the directors, just as a piecework system drove the worker to his limits by the threat of hunger. The new industrialists—even those at the highest level, like Tevosyan, Malyshev, and Saburov—were little more than the unquestioning technicians of the new scheme of things.

The planning system, which had been quite chaotic in the 1930s, now settled into a new rationality; increases in productivity—at least in the heavy industrial production which was Stalin’s main interest—at last became regular. The system had huge wastages and inefficiencies. Its planning was, in many fields, largely mythical. And the general unworkability of its distribution network was made up for by a large extralegal market. But, all in all, the economy Stalin had created was at least an operating reality. Its built-in wastages were not great enough to prevent achievement of its main aim—the continuing investment in industry of a high proportion of the national income. They were, however, great enough to hold the expansion bought at such sacrifice down to a level lower than that of various capitalist countries.

Detailed comparisons were in any case impossible to make, owing to the secrecy and distortion of the Soviet statistical system of the time. But what provided confidence to the Party elite, and gained the admiration of certain intellectuals abroad, was the more general fact that industry had been “created” in a fairly backward country. It was hoped that the method might be applicable in the really backward lands of the East.

But the old Russia had not been all that backward. It had already been the fourth industrial power before the Revolution. In the reign of Nicholas II, the railway network had doubled in length in ten years, and there had been a great upsurge in the mining and metal industries. As Lenin said:

… The progress in the mining industry is more rapid in Russia than in Western Europe and even in North America…. In the last few years (1886–1896) the production of cast metal has tripled…. The development of capitalism in the younger countries is accelerated by the example and aid of the older.⁵⁵

And the trend continued right up to 1914.

Since 1930, Stalin had enlarged the industrial base. But he had done so by very wasteful methods—far more wasteful economically, and in human suffering, than those of the original Industrial Revolution. He had not made the best use of his resources, solving the problem of rural overpopulation by removing precisely the most productive section of the peasantry, and wasting much of the original skilled engineering force by decimating it on false charges of sabotage. (It is true, indeed, that a high proportion of Russia’s skill had been killed or had emigrated during the Revolution itself.) Even in 1929 it was reasonably clear, economically speaking, that milder measures could have produced equally good results, as they had in Meiji Japan, for example.

As long ago as Khrushchev’s time, Kommunist

, the main theoretical and political organ of the Central Committee, summed up the charges against Stalin’s planning system. He personally interfered with the work of planning organizations, enforced arbitrary goals, and radically changed plans in a way that made whole sections of them meaningless. He thus inflicted lasting harm on the Soviet planning work and on the Soviet economy. Indeed (Kommunist went on), it was Stalin who was responsible for lasting troubles in the Soviet economy which, to cover up his personal guilt, he used to ascribe to difficulties allegedly inherent in the rapid growth of the economy. In particular, “arbitrary planning caused immense damage to agriculture which still suffers from the results of the cult of Stalin’s personality.”⁵⁶