But the country could not ignore reality. An army of workers and technicians was thrown into fulfilling the senseless plans. It seemed that the ideas of Trotsky and Bukharin on the militarization of labor, rejected in the early 1920s, were being revived. The only quota that was met far ahead of time was the employment index. The expectation was that the state economy would employ 14.7 million, but by 1932 22.9 million were employed. The shortage of qualified workers was compensated for with quantity. Just as masses of soldiers are thrown into battle when firepower is lacking, millions of former peasants, undisciplined, ignorant of the tools and machinery, were mobilized to carry out the five-year plan.
The rapid growth of the urban population led to a catastrophic worsening of the housing situation. Food supplies in the cities were severely strained. Strumilin, future academician and one of the authors of Stalin's version of the five-year plan, wrote in Essays on Soviet Economics in 1927 that the rate of accumulation, "given our long experience of consumer asceticism, could exceed all known records." All records for "consumer asceticism" were indeed surpassed during those years in the villages, which literally starved to death. But even in the cities the situation was extremely critical. In April 1929 bread was rationed. By the end of the year, rationing was extended to all foodstuffs, then to manufactured goods. In 1931 additional "coupons" were issued, for it was impossible to obtain one's allotment even with ration cards.
The real situation for workers in this period can be seen from the reports by GPU agents that survived in the Smolensk archives. In 1929 (and the situation only worsened after that) a worker received 600 grams of bread a day, plus 300 grams for each member of his family; between 200 grams and 1 liter of vegetable oil a month; 1 kilogram of sugar a month; and for clothing, 30-36 meters of cotton a year.8 A significant number of workers ate in the factory canteens. A novel by Fedor Gladkov described one such canteen at the Dneprostroi dam project: "I go to the factory kitchen and am sickened by the very sight of the vile poison being made there. I go to the work sites, where the food is delivered in thermoses. The bluish swill stinks like a corpse and a cesspool. The workers prefer plain bread and water."9 One GPU agent reported the complaints of the workers who ate in Canteen No. 7: "In the so-called soup it is hard to find pieces of anything.
It is not soup, but vegetable water; there is no fat, and the meat is not always washed sufficiently. ... [In some cases] little worms were found in the lunch."10
In the summer of 1931 Stalin declared war on "egalitarianism." Equality was said to be a petit bourgeois notion. A pejorative term was used for it: uravnilovka, "leveling." Inequality officially became a socialist virtue. A new system of wage scales was introduced, with payment depending on output (piece rate) as well as on one's job category. The workers were to be stimulated from then on by material incentives. Certain nonmaterial incentives, awards and honorific titles, were also introduced, but material benefits always came with them. Their recipients obtained promotions, special rations, and so on. There were at least six different prices for the same merchandise: (1) government prices for goods purchased with ration cards; (2) "commercial" prices, significantly higher, for goods purchased without ration cards; (3) "moderately increased prices" for goods sold exclusively in working-class districts (these were lower than "commercial" but higher than government prices); (4) prices in "model stores," general stores where prices were higher than "commercial" prices; (5) prices at the torgsin, a store where goods were sold only in exchange for gold or foreign currency; and (6) market prices.
Prices never stopped climbing, wages rose only nominally, and production quotas constantly increased. To accelerate the pace of the work, the "shockworkers' movement" and the system of "socialist emulation" were utilized.
This period saw the rise of special stores and special dining halls for the various categories of leaders. And hierarchical precedence was strictly respected. The wife of a member of the Politburo of the German Communist party, who was in Moscow in 1931, recalls how, one fine day, a section of the dining room of the Hotel Luxe, reserved for the Comintern, was marked off. It was thenceforth set aside for the highest-ranking officials only, and the food they were served was better than that given to second- or third- class Comintern officials.11
GPU agents in Smolensk reported the reaction of the workers to these new perquisites for officialdom.12 Similarly, Ante Ciliga related what an old Leningrad worker told him: "We live worse now than at the time of the capitalists. If we had had to face such starvation, if our salaries had been so low in the days of our old masters, we would have gone on strike a thousand times."13 In fact, the workers did go on strike: there are GPU reports to this effect in the Smolensk archives. But it was very difficult to strike, for many reasons: workers were fired, which resulted in the loss of ration cards, eviction from factory housing, even arrest; the trade unions "worked together as one" with management;14 and the official propaganda never stopped assuring the workers that Soviet power was their power, that if only they went one step further, the happy days of communism would begin. Besides, the wreckers were responsible for all the difficulties.
In April 1929, when work on the first five-year plan was just starting, Stalin was already preparing his scapegoats. Wreckers like those in the Shakhty trial, he declared, "are sitting now in all the branches of our industry."15 Wrecking and sabotage, he said, had occurred and will continue to occur.16 Arrests and trials confirmed the general secretary's words. The first five-year plan period was also a time of major show trials. In August 1930 a number of bacteriologists "under the leadership" of Professor Ka- ratygin were arrested and tried in closed session for allegedly bringing on an epidemic among horses. The Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, then traveling around the Soviet Union, chose that moment to comment approvingly, in numerous interviews, on everything he had seen in the land of the victorious proletariat.
In September 1930 it was announced that forty-eight figures prominent in the food industry, headed by a Professor Ryazanov, had been shot for creating difficulties in the food supply system.
In November—December 1930 the second full-scale show trial after Shakhty was organized in Moscow, the trial of the so-called Industrial party. The indictment alleged that the clandestine Industrial party had no fewer than 2,000 members. Eight of them were placed on trial. The Shakhty trial had proven that too large a number of defendants detracted from the spectacle. That experience was taken into account. The accused were charged with wrecking activities carried out on orders from French President Raymond Ротсагё, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Dutch oil magnate Henri Deterding. Except for those arrested, there were no witnesses and no material evidence at all. They all confessed their guilt, especially Professor Ramzin, the "head" of the party. Ramzin had been a Bolshevik in 1905— 1907, but had left the party and devoted himself to a career in engineering. After the revolution he had loyally cooperated with the Soviet authorities. Suddenly he was the head of an anti-Soviet "clandestine organization." The defendants confessed to everything: to being in league with the capitalist emig^ Ryabushinsky, who gave them their instructions, and to having planned to install a former tsarist minister, Vyshegradsky, as minister of finance after the overthrow of Soviet power. In the course of the trial it came out that both Ryabushinsky and Vyshegradsky were dead, but that did not affect the outcome of the trial. Five of the accused were sentenced to be shot, but were pardoned. Ramzin was released very quickly.17 The