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.
Part of Stalin's industrialization scheme was the movement of people 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 USSR into an urbanized country in the western sense. Even in 1940 just over two-thirds of the population were 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.
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 per cent 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. 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 must always be at, or beyond, the limits of capacity, so that maintenance and infrastructure were neglected, with deleterious long-term results.
Moreover, even if the crash programmes 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 workers' real wages were about one-tenth of what they had been in 1926-7. 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 (the young members of the Communist Party} 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.
From October 1930 a series of regressive measures were introduced into labour relations: a decree was issued forbidding the free movement of labour, unemployment relief was abolished on the grounds that there was "no more unemployment", and a single day's unauthorized absence from work became punishable by instant dismissal. Punitive measures against negligence were announced, followed by a decree holding workers responsible for damage done to instruments or materials. 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. Finally, on December 27,1932, came the reintroduction of the internal passport, which had been denounced by Lenin as one of the worst stigmas of tsarist backwardness and despotism.
Further signs of the increasing restriction of personal freedoms emerged in these years, as changes became apparent in official attitudes toward the intelligentsia and technical experts. It was felt that the new communist specialists in every field were now well enough equipped to take over from their bourgeois predecessors. The result was a tightening of state control of all intellectual endeavour, and a rigid enforcement of soviet ideological criteria in every sphere of culture, science, and philosophy. The summer of 1928 saw the public trial in Moscow of 53 engineers on charges of sabotage in the so- called Shakhty Case. The theme, repeated in endless propaganda over the following years, was that bourgeois specialists could not be trusted. Large numbers were subsequently arrested. By 1930 more than half of the surviving engineers had no proper training. In all institutes and academies, ideological hacks were intruded to ensure Marxist, or rather Stalinist, purity of theory and practice. Similar repressive measures were exercised in the arts.
The Purges
In late 1934, just when the worst excesses of Stalinism seemed to have spent themselves, Stalin launched a new campaign of political terror against the very Communist Party members who had brought him to power; his pretext was the assassination on December 1 of his leading colleague and potential rival, Sergey Kirov, in Leningrad (as Petrograd had been renamed in 1924, following Lenin's death). That Stalin himself had arranged Kirov's murder - as an excuse for the promotion of mass bloodshed - was strongly hinted by Nikita Khrushchev in a speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956.
Over the next four years the centre of political life in the Soviet Union 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 - with the aim, presumably, to secure Stalin's personal power base. 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. The most brutal stage of the purges came with the appointment in September 1936 of Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov as chief of the Soviet security police or NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs). During this phase, known as the Yezhovshchina, 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 devastated. The industrial, engineering, and economic cadres, including those of the railways, were heavily purged. The army also suffered heavy losses. The officer corps as a whole lost about half its members. The cultural world suffered equally: 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, in the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, and throughout academe. Nor was the general public spared. In all, some 5 million people were arrested, of whom no more than 10 per cent survived. The Yezhovshchina was in fact one of the most brutal terrors in recorded history. The effects were long-lasting.