PROPAGANDA AND HUNGER
To immense fanfare, on April 25, 1930, the separate constructions of the northern and southern sections of the Turkestan–Siberian Railway, known as Turksib, were joined at Aina-Bulak, some eight months ahead of schedule, using excavators purchased abroad and gargantuan amounts of manual labor, amid climate extremes and self-generated chaos. The Soviets engaged and persecuted “bourgeois” specialists and Kazakh jataki (horsemen without herds); unemployed Slavic workers had flocked in for the ration cards. The upshot would be Siberian grain imported to Central Asia to allow further expansion of cotton crops, and, in the short term, a propaganda coup.192 To the ceremony/banquet for thousands in the steppes (“Long Live Turksib! Long Live Stalin!”), a special train from Moscow carried officials and foreign guests, “a microcosm of the Soviet world . . . and its capitalist encirclement,” quipped an American journalist.193 A single Turksib could occlude many fiascoes, especially for people who wanted to believe. Not every person would be ideologized to the same depth, but life outside Communism was becoming unthinkable.194
The Rostov Agricultural Engineering Works followed, the largest of its kind in Europe, pronounced complete on June 1, 1930, after three years of construction.195 An iconic power station, Dneprostroi, at the cataracts of the Dnieper in Soviet Ukraine, was under fevered construction. Never mind that, for a time, half the derricks were occupied picking up the other half: the symbolism of harnessing nature in order to power a new industrial complex of projected aluminum plants and an integrated steel plant at Zaporozhe was linked in saturation coverage to individual transformation. “We build the dam, and the dam builds us” became the oft-repeated slogan.196 Epic constructions of the state-of-the-art steel blast furnaces—and of new people—at far-off Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk were bathed in bright spotlights, too, attracting hordes of foreign correspondents, many of whom were moved to renounce their skepticism.
The sites also drew peasant laborers seeking to transform themselves, escape from dekulakization, or find food. Reports of spot food shortages and starvation-induced disease were most extensive already in summer 1930 and emerged from the Central Black Earth region, the North Caucasus, Ukraine, the Soviet Far East, and Western Siberia.197 The authorities in Kiev implored Mikoyan to send emergency supplies (“All local resources have been used”). The OGPU noted that collective farmers in Ukraine were refusing to work because they were not being fed, threatening a vicious food-shortage circle.198 But it was in the Kazakh autonomous republic that hunger and mass flight were most extensive in the summer of 1930. More than 150,000 Kazakhs, and their nearly 1 million head of livestock, were said to be heading for Siberia, Uzbekistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and China.199 Propaganda notwithstanding, the collectivization that was supposed to finance industrialization was instead threatening to starve it.200
LUCK BEYOND BELIEF
Stalin kept up the pressure to suppress resistance; the OGPU had made 140,724 arrests between January 1 and April 15, 1930, and from the latter date through September 30 it would make another 142,993. But he was powerless to reverse an anticollectivization wave unintentionally incited by his “Dizzy with Success” article.201 The proportion of collectivized households, on paper, would collapse, from 56 percent as of March 1, 1930, to 24 percent by the summer.202 In the Tatar autonomous republic, collectivized households fell from 83 to 13 percent. Altogether, perhaps 8 million households quit, taking 7 million draft animals. At the same time, at least 5 million households remained in collectives, and more than 4 million of them had joined only recently, meaning that this was their first agricultural season in the new way.203 The regime’s violence and the peasants’ resistance had put the spring sowing and thus the fall harvest under threat, with consequences for industrialization. Stalin—and the country—needed a miracle.
Getting collective farms up and running was not for the squeamish. A few 25,000ers were able to pry loose scarce tools, scrap metal, construction materials for barns and silos, spare parts for machines, generators, books, tobacco, and workers from their home factories for their collective farms, and many put their skills to use as mechanics to repair inventory. Peasants went from threatening 25,000ers to protesting their transfers.204 Tellingly, the vast majority of the volunteers would end up staying in the countryside as new rural officials. (On average, a 25,000er ended up in one of every three collective farms in the principal grain-growing regions, and in one of every five collective farms overall.) By and large, despite minimal regime support and their own ignorance, it seems they helped salvage the spring 1930 sowing season. One key contribution was their introduction of the brigade system into the fields.205
Regime concessions were even more consequential for the spring sowing. Peasants who quit collective farms were given back their seed grain if they promised to sow crops. Belatedly, the regime made clear that although the main fields, draft horses, and plows would be collectivized, some livestock could remain in households’ possession. For those who stayed in the collectives, gigantomania, whereby entire counties were combined into a single collective farm, was abandoned.206 Those who remained were also permitted to cultivate their own household plots of fruit and vegetables. Perhaps 33 percent of what these farmers grew in 1930 would come from these plots. The regime was keen to demonstrate the collectives’ superiority to individual household farming and allowed the collective farms to retain a sizable 3.5 tons of grain per household. Stalin would never again countenance such a generous retention. What the farmers did not consume, they could sell. Stalin assumed that the collectively worked fields would soon render small household plots and the maintenance of animals uneconomical, but for now his regime sent out a decree to “forbid the closing of markets, reopen bazaars, and not hinder the sale of their products on the market by peasants, including collective farmers.”207
Beyond 25,000er mobilization and grudging regime flexibility, local solutions to the chaos emerged. The central authorities had proved unable to settle on how collective farmers would be compensated, but the farmers sowed crops anyway as locales came up with their own compensation formulas.208 Sheer luck made an incalculable contribution in the form of spectacularly favorable weather. “Nature gave us an extra month of spring,” one official rejoiced, and, given how late the sowing campaign had begun, that month was crucial for the harvest.209 With harvest projections suddenly going from doubtful to promising, grain exports to earn hard currency for machinery imports would be increased far beyond what the Five-Year Plan had anticipated for 1930, to more than 5 million tons. Mikoyan crowed at a Moscow regional party conference in early June that “one more year, and we shall not only secure ourselves enough grain, but become one of the largest grain producers in the whole world.”210