Stalinist leaders attempted to replace market mechanisms with the elements of a planned, socialist economy. The state's planning agency, Gosplan, took on the expanding burden not only of industrial investment, but of planning for all aspects of the Soviet economy. Through its series of five-year plans, the agency and its burgeoning number of commissions set priorities for the country's different economic sectors based on political priorities decided by the party leaders. Gosplan established prices and determined production and distribution quotas.
As with other aspects of the socialist offensive, the sudden thrust of the state into the private economy came at a high cost. State agencies were woefully unprepared for the task of supplanting private markets. Shortages racked the economy in all basic commodities. Goods disappeared even from state stores and were costly when they did appear. Hidden inflation from shortages and deficit industrial investment devastated the value of the currency, dropping it by more than half by the end of 1930. Rationing, which had begun as early as 1928 for bread, broadened to include almost all staple goods. Many areas of the country moved to barter of the few goods that existed, and families began to use any items of metal value on the black markets that sprang up outside the official price and rationing systems. Assessing the effects of this informal economy, one official commented ironically that it amounted to a social redistribution of wealth in unanticipated ways.
Such unanticipated consequences affected urban workers as well as rural inhabitants. The value of wages plummeted and, during the early 1930s, many state enterprises were so strapped for cash that they failed routinely to meet wage payments. This was due, of course, not only to money shortages, but also to widespread corruption and graft within the rapidly expanding state economic system. During the early 1930s, workers relied increasingly for food and other basic necessities on the growing rationing system in their workplaces and through trade union organisations. In order to keep a steady workforce, factory administrations suddenly found themselves in the business of providing housing, food and clothing shops, cafeterias, remedial education and other services that were not part of their production tasks for the state. In effect, they were forced to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing service and trade economy. This kind of corporatist economy was not what state planners had had in mind by a socialist revolution, but neither was it a capitalist economy.[7]
The domestic and international contexts
Stalin's industrial and agrarian revolution marked a radical break with the state capitalism of the 1920s, the gradualist policies of economic development and the social armistice that had underpinned NEP. Some of the most prominent leaders in the party opposed Stalin's plunge into social war and socialist modernisation, yet the Stalinists, supported by significant numbers within the party, believed that radical measures were necessary, and the grain crisis of the late 1920s was only one of several events that convinced Stalin that the revolution itself was in jeopardy. Domestically, the grain crisis was a signal to Stalin and those around him of the gathering strength of anti-Bolshevik social forces. In the mid-i920s, voting for local soviets had showed a small but disturbing trend towards support of former Menshevik and SR candidates.[8]Bolshevik leaders were convinced that this vote reflected strong pressure from kulaks and local private employers on poor peasants to vote anti-Bolshevik or not to vote at all. Moreover, finance commissariat studies claimed to show an alarming growth of private capital in the country, as opposed to only moderate rates of growth of the state's revenues.
These trends were disturbing enough, but they seemed to herald a growing capitalist backlash inside the Soviet Union at a time when the country found itself increasingly isolated internationally. The virulent destruction of the communist movement in China in 1927 and the triumph of the nationalists suddenly presented Soviet leaders with a major threat along their weak and long southern borders. Moreover, the Chinese disaster occurred at the same time that the British government broke off relations and threatened war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet budget was already over-extended and foreign governments, led by the British example, expressed reluctance to offer the investment credits the Soviets needed for increased industrial development. By the late 1920s, the Soviet Union was weak, isolated and seemed to face a growing domestic as well as international threat. Such was the perception of the Soviet leaders, and not only Soviet leaders. In 1927, the German ambassador in Moscow cabled his superiors in Berlin to prepare a German response in the event that the Bolshevik government should collapse.[9]
In these conditions, Stalin turned inward. He became convinced that building socialism in one country was the only alternative left to the Soviet Union, and he believed that the country needed to modernise quickly. In 1929, Stalin delivered the famous speech in which he declared the need to make up one hundred years of backwardness in ten, lest the country and the revolution be crushed. He called on the party and the working class once again to renew the revolution - to destroy the kulak class, once and for all, and to industrialise the country for its own defence. Stalin's revolution had begun.
Social dynamics and population movements
Policies of rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation produced dramatic population and demographic shifts during the 1930s and altered both the regional and urban-rural balance in the country. In some areas, these policies - combined with the effects of widespread famine - precipitated death and migration on a nearly biblical scale. The forced relocation ofpopulations, policies of mass repression and the reconstruction of different nationalities added to the momentous and often calamitous changes experienced by the Soviet population under Stalin's rule. Industrialisation alone accounted for a significant growth in the number of urban centres and urban populations. In the years between the 1926 and 1937 all-union censuses, the overall population of the Soviet Union increased from 147 million to 162 million - about a 9 per cent increase - but the urban population in the country doubled during the same period, from about 26 million to 52 million. Only 18 per cent of that increase came from natural growth rates of the urban population, while about two-thirds (63 per cent) resulted from in-migration to existing cities and towns. Almost 20 per cent of the growth in urban populations resulted from the industrial transformation of rural population centres into cities and towns. In the Russian Republic alone, the number of population centres classified as cities increased from 461 to 571. The number of cities with populations over 50,000 increased from 57 to 110. In the country as a whole, the number of population centres classified as urban centres increased in the years between 1926 and 1937 from 1,240 to 2,364.
Rural areas emptied as cities filled up. In 1926, the urban population made up 18 per cent of the overall population of the USSR, but by the late 1930s, urban areas accounted for 30 per cent of the population. The most significant population shifts occurred, of course, during the early 1930s, the years of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation, and while all areas of the country were affected, the growth in industrial urbanisation affected some areas more than others. The greater Moscow and Leningrad urban areas experienced significant growth, their populations doubling during the late 1920s and 1930s. Areas such as eastern and western Siberia, the Urals and the Volga coal and industrial basin underwent rapid, almost unchecked, growth in their overall populations, and especially in their urban populations. These were the areas of the country that the regime targeted for intensive industrial development and mineral and other natural resource extraction. During the 1930s, the population of the Far Eastern administrative district soared 376 per cent. The population of eastern Siberia expanded by 331 per cent, western Siberia by 294 per cent, and the Urals by 263 per cent. The mining and industrial city of Kemerovo, in western Siberia, saw a sixfold increase in its population; Cheliabinsk, not far away, experienced a fourfold population increase, as did the rail, river and manufacturing centre of Barnaul, south of Novosibirsk. Cities such as Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk (the once and future Ekaterinburg), Vladivostok and Khabarovsk (the administrative centre ofthe eastern Siberian district) saw their populations triple during the late 1920s and 1930s.
7
Stephen Kotkin,
8
Michel Reiman,