The requisitioning of grain made the catastrophe complete. Peasants resisted, rose up, and were slaughtered; in the ensuing famine, millions of men, women, and children died. In Western Siberia, a ragtag peasant army of sixty thousand briefly occupied twelve districts, cut Soviet communications, and captured a number of towns. Strikes immobilized factories across the new Soviet Empire, and even at Kronstadt naval base, an original stronghold of the Revolution, the sailors rebelled. To forestall a popular uprising against the Party itself (which, after all, had never been popular, and had taken power by a coup), Lenin abandoned “War Communism” and in March 1921 instituted the so-called “New Economic Policy,” or NEP, which restored a small measure of capitalism to the land. It suspended the requisitioning of grain (substituting for it a fixed tax in kind), tolerated small businesses and other entrepreneurial endeavors, a certain differentiation in wages, and abolished compulsory labor and labor armies; but it kept transport, heavy industry, and banking under state control. This experimental mixed economy (or “State Capitalism,” as it was also called) was supposed to be transitional to state socialism, and with its help over the next several years the country struggled back to its feet.
The going was hard. In 1922, for example, Red Army rations (the most liberal in the land) were two to three pounds of bread and one pound of meat or fish for two to three days. About 20 ounces of lard, 20 ounces of sugar, and some salt were also given out per month. Meager as this was, there was seldom any meat at all available, and the fish, wrote one visitor to Moscow at the time, was
always scrawny and dripping with water when weighed out. One day the fish had little white worms crawling all over them. On the way to Tsedom, I held the wrapped parcel in the palm of one hand raised above the shoulder. By the time I got halfway across the bridge over the Moscow river, the soaked wrapper fell apart, and the fish stuck out. Right then and there, a young man clad in a technician’s outfit tapped me from behind on my shoulder and said, prodayosh, tovarish? [are you selling, comrade?] I pointed to the worms, but he shrugged his shoulders, said nichevo [doesn’t matter]. More protein into the bargain, he added. He shoved a handful of rubles into my hand, thrust the bundle into a shopping bag and went on his way.689
After Lenin’s death in January 1924, there was a struggle for control of the Party machine, from which Stalin emerged triumphant. And after a brief period of collegial pretense among his colleagues, by 1928 he had begun to impose upon the nation the manifold and heavy perversions of his will. By then the half-measures of NEP had run their salutary course and were proving insufficient to sustain economic growth. Many Bolshevik leaders advocated a gradual transition toward socialism, but in the midst of the uncertainty as to how to proceed, Stalin thrust his own agenda to the fore. Against every reasonable objection, he insisted on a rapid, spectacular development of industry through mammoth engineering projects at the expense of consumer needs, and on the collectivization of agriculture (against near-universal peasant opposition), which renewed the famine of the “War Communism” years. Evidently convinced that the disorganized Allied Intervention in the Civil War had been the prelude to another, more concerted effort by the same powers “to dismember and destroy the first Socialist State,”690 Stalin proclaimed in February 1931 to an assembly of factory managers:
To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten... old Russia was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans, she was beaten by Turkish Beys, she was beaten by Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian Pans, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all – for her backwardness. ... If in ten years we do not cover the distance that other, more advanced countries have taken fifty or a hundred years to traverse, we will be crushed.691
This strangely pathetic view of Russia’s history – after all, by the time of the Revolution Russia had become the world’s greatest empire as well as its fourth largest industrial power – boded ill for its people, since their future was now in the hands of a man whose personal insecurities were the paramount facts of their political life.
“Determined to transform a mainly agrarian economy into a self-sufficient industrial behemoth,”692 as one writer put it, Stalin at once embarked on a program of forced industrialization based on Five-Year Plans. Individual entrepreneurs were once more eliminated, private enterprise in agriculture replaced by large mechanized collective farms, and wildly unrealistic labor and production quotas set. The central economic planning commission called for coal and oil production to double, iron production to triple, and (within the same five years) for the biggest power plant in Europe to be raised on the Dnieper. A 1,000-mile railroad was also to be constructed from Siberia to Turkestan, and numerous dams, metallurgical plants, and tractor works built. Stalin approved the plan, then decided it wasn’t ambitious enough. “Tempos decide everything,”693 he announced, and pressed for the goals to be met in four, even three years. The figures infatuated everyone, even the poet Mayakovsky (as expressed in “Forward, Time!”) shortly before his own disillusionment and suicide. Stalin’s opponents suggested that light industries be built up first, to meet the basic consumer needs of the nation, but he purged the Party hierarchy of all dissent and forged ahead.
The rebuilding of the devastated European part of the country, with its existing industrial capacity and skilled labor force, had priority, and assured a more rapid return on investment, since the Siberian economy was still largely agrarian, centered on small craft industries, and lacked the means and infrastructure to exploit its resources. Overall, it accounted for less than 2 percent of the national industrial output, and by 1923 had dropped to about half the level it had reached before 1917.
That, however, was destined to change with the development of the Kuznetsk Coal Basin and of major industries along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Monolithic iron foundries and steel mills were built at Magnitogorsk, an immense tractor plant at Chelyabinsk, a huge locomotive works at Ulan Ude, electric power stations at Irkutsk, and numerous other factories for the production and handling of glass, chemicals, processed foods, and so on, at Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk. Under Lazar M. Kaganovich, Stalin’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, the Trans-Siberian Railway was extended southwestward from Semipalatinsk through Alma Ata into Turkestan, thoroughly renovated with new rolling stock and other equipment, variously extended with branch lines (most notably, from Vladivostok to the commercial port of Nakhodka and from Ulan Ude toward Ulan Bator), and double-tracked throughout. Wooden bridges were also replaced with spans of steel. “Industrialization was the new faith,” said one commentator, “factories were its cathedrals, its priests were the elite workers who smashed production targets and led the way to the future.”694