use of provocateurs was necessary in all the trials staged by the GPU
(4 ??
organs.
Repression continued after the Industrial party trial. Preparations began for a trial of the so-called Toiling Peasants' party. Judging by the massive arrests of agrarian economists, agronomists, other agricultural specialists, and cooperative members, the "organs" intended to fabricate an underground organization with tens of thousands of members. This was logical. In a peasant country a "peasant party" had to be proportionately larger than an Industrial party. The "organs" selected Professor Kondratiev as the leader of the Toiling Peasants' party. Professor Chayanov's fantastic novel, My Brother Alekseis Journey to the Land of Peasant Utopia (published in 1920 under the pseudonym Ivan Kremnev), which predicted that in 1984 (Chayanov was the first to choose this date, long before Orwell) Russia would be a free peasant country, was designated as the organization's secret program. Yaroslavsky, writing in Pravda, made a point for the benefit of the investigator in the case: "Now, after the exposure of this clandestine organization of bourgeois restorationists, this kulak manifesto takes on a special significance."18 The newspapers pointed to a direct link between the "kulak conspirators" and the party's right wing: "All the sympathies of the Kondratievites were on the side of the rights in their struggle against the party leadership. The rights were smashed. And now, thanks to the vigilance of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leaders of the Kondratievites have been placed on GPU rations."19 For reasons unknown, the trial of the Toiling Peasants' party never took place. Those arrested, including Kondratiev and Chayanov, perished in prisons or in camps.
In March 1931, a trial of Mensheviks was held in Moscow. The majority of the accused worked in the planning agencies; they were accused of wrecking activities "in the planning sphere"—of raising or lowering figures so as to prevent fulfillment of the plans. This trial is of particular interest to historians because one of the defendants, Mikhail Yakubovich, who spent twenty-two years in prisons and camps, survived. In 1967, in a letter addressed to the prosecutor general of the USSR, Yakubovich described how the trial was rigged.
Massive arrests and some trials of "wreckers" continued. The arrests were not limited to the "technical" intelligentsia—engineers, technicians, planners, and managers—but included even rank-and-file workers. 'The class enemy," said one article on the reasons behind the poor functioning of the rail system, "the White Guards and the kulaks, still have the potential to infiltrate the railways by taking 'modest' and inconspicuous jobs as 'oilers.'"20 Oilers, switchmen, and yardmen, not to mention engineers and firemen, went off to prison and the camps, along with milling machine operators, metalworkers, and others blamed for breakdowns in production and failure to fulfill unfulfillable plans. They swelled the ranks of the monstrously enlarged army of prisoners, which occupied a more and more important place in the program for building communism. A significant number of the major objectives of the first five-year plan were brought to completion with the help of prison labor. The Baltic—White Sea canal was built entirely by prisoners. Approximately 500,000 prisoners21 over a period of twenty months cut their way through the Karelian granite, by manual labor, without machinery, to build a canal that proved unnecessary.22
But the race continued, and in Stalin's words: 'The party whipped the country on, rushing it forward at full speed."23
In 1932 the summing up began. By juggling figures (making calculations with percentages, in rubles whose value was fixed at will by the planning organs, and using 1913 as the base year for comparisons), it was possible to claim that the "main indices" of the plan had been fulfilled. Where it was not fulfilled, wreckers were to blame. Of course, some indices could be checked. The plan had called for an increase of 15—20 percent in the buying power of the ruble. But the reality of inflation was obvious to all Soviet citizens. The plan promised the "elimination of the shortage of manufactured goods by the end of the planning period," an increase of 69 percent in real wages, and "for a number of the most important consumer goods, a doubling of the norms of consumption."24 The waiting lines for goods bought with ration cards, including bread, were hours long and left no doubt that these promises had not been kept. Nevertheless, in an unusually short time gigantic industrial projects were completed in the Urals, the Kuznetsk basin, the Volga region, and the Ukraine. Factories were built in Moscow and Leningrad, textile mills in Central Asia, and so on. The Turkestan—Siberia Railway, built before the revolution, was extended and a branch added to Karaganda. In all, 5,500 kilometers of rail were laid. (The plan called for 16,000.)
A great deal was accomplished. Stalin had a right to ask at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934: "Is this not a miracle?"25 But it was not. The plan was realized primarily through "domestic accumulation," which was obtained thanks to the "consumer asceticism" Strumilin had written about—that is, the ruthless exploitation of the population. The country was exporting raw materials, including foodstuffs—grain, meat, sugar— for which there was a severe need at home. At the same time, the importing of vitally needed goods, such as wool, cotton, rice, and leather, was stopped. Timber was exported at dumping prices: "We must cut down not only the amount of timber that grows in a year, but much more; in essence, our task is not to utilize the forests, but to obliterate them."26 Production was expanding, in oil and gold, which were also exported, the increased amounts of gold and timber obtained largely through prisoner labor. Even certain treasures from Russian museums were sold, and gold was extorted from the citizenry by every possible means. According to Walter Krivitsky, Stalin decided to revive the customs of the good old days by resorting to the simplest means of acquiring foreign currency: manufacturing dollars in the cellars of the GPU. In 1908 Stalin had directed the "expropriations" from the state treasury at Tiflis; a quarter of a century later he gave the order to begin manufacturing $100 bills in Moscow, in the Lubyanka.27
The five-year plan could not have been implemented without foreign assistance. In 1928 a group of Soviet engineers arrived in Detroit and requested that Albert Kahn and Company, an eminent firm of industrial architects in the United States, design plans for industrial buildings worth $2 billion.28 Close to a dozen designs were to be made in Detroit, the rest in the Soviet Union. According to an agreement with the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR, the American firm agreed to design all aspects of Soviet industry, heavy and light. Foreign designers, technicians, engineers, and skilled workers built the industrial units of the first five-year plan. Primarily they were Americans, who pushed the Germans out of first place after 1928; after them came the Germans, British, Italians, and French. The dam on the Dnepr was built by the firm of Colonel Hugh Cooper, a prominent American hydraulic engineer; the majority of the largest Soviet power plants were equipped by the British firm Metropolitan-Vickers; Western companies designed, built, and equipped Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Urals Machinery Works, the Kaganovich Ball Bearing Plant in Moscow, an automobile plant in Nizhny Novgorod, and a truck plant in Yaroslavl, among others. Ordzhonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry, was able to state with full justification: "Our factories, our mines, our mills are now equipped with excellent technology that cannot be found in any one country. ... How did we get it? We bought the most highly perfected machinery, the very latest technology in the world, from the Americans, Germans, French, and English, and with that we equipped our enterprises." And he added caustically, "Meanwhile, many of their factories and mines still have machinery dating from the nineteenth century, or the early part of the twentieth."29