The Stalin Era
The first phase of Bolshevik power came to an end with the death of Lenin in January 1924. Lenin's partial, then total, disablement had provided a transitional period for a party leadership to emerge and for policies to be argued. But the leaders on to whom Lenin's heritage devolved were divided. Personal ambition and politico-ideological disagreement resulted in a series of factional fights that constituted the political history of the newly formed USSR over the next six years. The major division was between those who thought that the Russian Revolution could not survive on its own and that therefore the main effort should be in supporting revolution abroad, and those, Stalin most prominent among them, who now proclaimed the slogan "Socialism in One Country".
On the face of it, Trotsky was the natural heir to Lenin, since it was Trotsky who had organized the October 1917 coup and managed the Red Army in the Civil War. A superb orator and lively writer, he had an international reputation. His chances of succeeding Lenin, however, were more apparent than real. Trotsky had joined the Bolshevik party late (August 1917); he thus never belonged to its "Old Guard". He was personally unpopular for his arrogance and unwillingness to work as a member of a team. His Jewishness was no asset in a country in which Jews were widely blamed for the devastations wrought by communism. Last but not least, bored by the routine of paperwork, he was a poor administrator.
Although far less known, Stalin was much better positioned to succeed Lenin. Intellectually unprepossessing, a dull speaker and lacklustre writer, he operated behind the scenes. Having realized early that the centralized system of government that Lenin had created vested extraordinary power in the party machine, Stalin avoided the spotlight and instead concentrated on building up cadres loyal to him. By 1922 he was in a unique position to manipulate policies to his own ends by virtue of the fact that he alone belonged to both the Politburo, which set policy, and the Secretariat, which managed personnel. To thwart Trotsky he entered into alliances that dominated the Politburo and isolated their common rival. At the time of the 15th Party Congress in 1927, Trotsky and his faction were expelled from the party; many Trotskyites were exiled to Siberia or Central Asia, among them Trotsky himself.
Collectivization
Stalin's position as secretary general of the party's Central Committee, from 1922 until his death, provided the power base for his dictatorship. Having achieved a majority in the Politburo, and despite further power struggles - the fear of political rivals was an insecurity that was to dog him throughout his life - Stalin could now turn to the wider struggle, his mission to put socialism into tangible effect. In 1928 he thus abandoned Lenin's quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy in favour of headlong state-organized industrialization under a succession of five-year plans, supported by a socialized agriculture. This was, in effect, a new Russian revolution more devastating in its effects than those of 1917.
The burden fell most heavily on the peasantry, since Stalin's first concern was to persuade them to sell their grain surplus and feed the cities. With little economic knowledge and unreliable statistics, the party was suspicious of the market mechanism and moreover believed that the peasantry was divided into classes with different and opposed interests. The rich "kulaks", it was held, were implacable enemies of socialism. The "middle peasants", constituting the great majority, vacillated but could be brought to the proletarian side. And the "poor peasants", together with the "village proletarians", were reliable allies.
Although this idea of a rich exploiting kulak class was false, policies towards kulaks became harsher. During 1929 many fines were imposed, and dispossessions and even deportations took place. By the end of the year the official policy became "the liquidation of the kulak as a class". Over the following three years, many were arrested en masse, shot, exiled, or absorbed into the rapidly expanding network of Stalinist concentration camps and worked to death under atrocious conditions.
Convinced that only collectivization would make grain available to the authorities, Stalin compelled some 25 million rustic households to amalgamate into kolkhozes, collective or state farms, within a few years. Large grain quotas and crippling fines were imposed on the individual peasants. From mid-1929 decisions on the extent and speed of proposed collectivization were changed almost monthly, becoming ever more extreme. The First Five-Year Plan as approved in April-May 1929 envisaged 5 million peasant households collectivized by 1932-3; this figure was doubled by November and doubled again during December. By the turn of the year it was decreed that collectivization should be completed in Ukraine by the autumn of 1930 and in the other main grain areas by the spring of 1931. One of the most destructive effects of collectivization was in Kazakhstan, where a nomad herding population was forced, largely on ideological grounds, into permanent settlements, for which no economic basis existed. About one-quarter of a million managed to escape over the Chinese border. But, of roughly 4 million Kazakhs, more than a million, possibly more, perished. Elsewhere, resistance was met with attacks by troops and OGPU (political police} units.
The immediate result of the collectivization measures was a catastrophic decline in agricultural output across the country as a whole. Collectivization also imposed great hardship on the peasants, partly because they were left with no surplus on which to live, and partly because of their mass slaughter of farm animals to prevent their livestock being taken by the kolkhoz. Official figures given in 1934 showed a loss of 26.6 million head of cattle (42.6 percent of the country's total) and 63.4 million sheep (65.1 per cent of the total), and this is probably an understatement of the facts.
The government's reaction to the decline in output was to base its requirements for delivery of grain from the kolkhozes not on actual production but rather on what became the basis of Soviet agricultural statistics until 1953 - the "biological yield". This was based on the estimated size of the crop in the fields before harvesting; it was typically more than 40 per cent higher than the reality. And in 1932 even this tenuous link to the facts failed: the figure was distorted by merely multiplying acreage by optimum yield. The grain requisitions made on this basis were ruthlessly enforced by activist squads. Such action left the peasant with a notional but non-existent surplus. As a result, over the winter of 19323, a major famine swept the grain-growing areas. Some 4 to 5 million people died in Ukraine, and another 2 to 3 million in the North Caucasus and the lower Volga area. Both the "dekulakization" terror of 1930-2 and the terror-famine of 1932-3 were particularly deadly in Ukraine. During this period about 1.7 million tons (1.5 million metric tons) of grain were exported, enough to have provided some two pounds (one kilogram) a head to 15 million people over three months. There is no doubt that the party leadership knew exactly what was happening and used famine as a means of terror, and revenge, against the peasantry.
Industrialization
Crash industrialization was imposed at the same time as agricultural collectivization, since Stalin had convincingly argued that a slow socialization was impossible. From 1928 to 1929 he began to implement a programme of faster industrialization - in part to sharpen the class struggle with the errant elements of the peasantry.
To this effect a planned economy was to be introduced with, as its first task, the direction of all possible resources into intensive industrialization. The First 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 per cent (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 was both the basis of a set of real governmental and economic actions and a concept - organizational, ideological, inspirational, and, it might almost be said, transcendental.