The XXth Century Political History of Russia: lecture materials. Gennady Bordyugov
«revolution from above.» It is extremely important to understand in what way and by what means the Leninist principles embodied in the NEP were revised and replaced by a purely Stalinist understanding of the course to be taken in advancing the country further and strengthening the new, post-Leninist regime.
In December 1927, at its XV congress, the ruling party adopted a program concerning the smooth «reconstruction» of the NEP. This Program envisaged the involvement of peasants in cooperative production on a scale realistic for that time, and was orientated towards a gradual, balanced, carefully considered tempo for industrial modernization, the strengthening of ties between city and countryside and, most important, the retention, to quite a considerable extent, of individual peasant ownership as the basis for the development of the agrarian sector of the economy and the market. At the same time the resolutions adopted by the Congress permit us to judge quite precisely the serious ideological changes that had occurred in the position of the ruling party. If the idea of socialism, as a system of civilized cooperatives, survived in the resolutions of the Congress, it was present only in an extremely reduced and stunted form. In one of the principal documents, «Concerning Directives on the Drawing up of a Five-Year Plan for the Economy», repeated mention was made of the need to overcome the anarchy of the NEP market and to set up a stricter framework for its operation. In general the market was seen in a very negative light; indeed it figured in the document only in one capacity, as the private market. The market was seen as a capitalist leftover, an attribute of capitalism as such, and was judged accordingly. Moreover, the process of overcoming the anarchy of the market was seen, in the long run, in terms of transforming the system of government regulation of the market into «an apparatus for the socialist distribution of goods.»
The redefinition of socialism implicitly adopted at the Congress strengthened the orientation towards strict centralization and a strictly regulated economic system. It might be said that the ideological shift towards the idea of «state socialism» had begun, but it was still envisaged at this stage as existing within the context of the market, which for doctrinal reasons naturally aroused hostility.
These ideological maneuvers were soon transferred to the practical plane with the occurrence of the grain procurement crisis at the end of 1927 – beginning of 1928. The immediate cause of the crisis had been mistakes in the economic administration, in particular the reduction of government grain prices at the beginning of the procurement campaign. In the winter of 1927/28 the largest granaries effectively ceased selling grain to the cooperation and to state purchasers. Hoping for more favorable market circumstances, and more advantageous conditions for selling, the «middle peasants» too began hoarding grain. The main point, however, was that both concrete tactical mistakes, and a fundamental strategic miscalculation, came together in the procurement crisis of 1927/28.
Analyzing the causes of the crisis in retrospect, Nikolai Bukharin concluded that the grain problem had already been neglected in the period from 1925 to 1927. The country’s leadership, including the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Iosif Stalin, had «for some period of time failed to take heed of the state of affairs with regard to grain, and for some time carried on with the process of industrialization, which was financed by foreign currency reserves and taxes.» Instead of paying attention, during the previous years, to the situation of the grain sector and achieving a significant increase in the rate of construction, on a firm basis, in one to three years» time, the leadership ran into inevitable difficulties, Bukharin observed. These difficulties became even more evident when the very sources on which we had been relying for some time were exhausted and we all realized that we could no longer continue on that basis. This moment coincided with our greatest problems. But once things had worked out in that way, once these difficulties had become an objective fact, we ended up in the first round of extraordinary measures.
From the very beginning a certain group within the leadership was inclined to see the outbreak of the grain procurement crisis in war-like terms, as a fresh attack on socialism by petty bourgeois elements, as a «kulak strike», an attempt to push apart the limits in which the dictatorship of the proletariat had placed capitalist elements, although in actual fact it was the market that resisted the grain procurements. All the evidence suggests that the Party leadership did not initially intend to apply the extraordinary measures over a long period. Exiled in Alma Ata, Lev Trotskii saw these measures generally as «a crutch for Rykov’s policies.» Probably, this was the view of all the members of the Politburo, who unanimously supported the extraordinary measures at a meeting on 6 January 1928. At that moment, the Party leaders simply failed to see any other solution. All other alternatives for overcoming the problem were rejected.
The extraordinary measures undertaken in the winter of 1928 proved completely ineffective. In the summer of that year, the government was forced to spend its mobilization reserves and purchase grain abroad. Six months earlier such measures would have been sufficient to put out the crisis and buy time for a serious review of policy. But the resort to extraordinary measures set in motion the machine of chrezvychaishchina and for the first time since the end of the Civil War the system of forcible purchasing of grain was reinstated. That section of society whose existence depended on the NEP, and who regarded it as the only possible normal form of economic and political life, was hit particularly hard by this policy.
These people were distinguished by their inner orientation, their political and sociopsychological outlook. Some of them were ossified, bureaucratized chinovniki, resistant to change of any kind; others were principled supporters of the NEP, while yet others favored organic economic growth rather than the various zigzags of the left. In the eyes of the leadership they constituted a force for historic inertia, and as such became the butt of the extraordinary measures. Their active or passive resistance forced the Party leaders from time to time to demand ideological controls and a purge of the Party organization. However, millions of non-Party people had spontaneously formed their own ideology, one remote from complex Party doctrine. It was expressed in the question: who is responsible for the fact that a year ago everything was more or less all right, while now everything is deplorable and unbearable? The Communists, the Komsomol, the Jews – such was one answer given by these despairing and embittered people. Others blamed the «would-be bourgeoisie», or the kulaks. The search for «enemies», the attempt to personify the guilty, became a kind of safety-valve through which mass dissatisfaction, both among city workers and among the rural poor, could be expressed.
The Shakhtii case, dubbed by Stalin «the economic counter-revolution», became the mechanism through which this question, matured in the minds of millions, took form. The «case» arose in March 1928, and the trial took place in May that year, that is to say, during the period when mass discontent and bitterness at the extraordinary measures had swollen into open indignation. The «Shakhtii case» was quite obviously fabricated, but its significance lay in the fact that it gave rise to the theory of «wrecking». This theory allowed the Party to point the finger at «concrete wrongdoers» and deflect mass dissatisfaction away from the Party leaders. The reaction to the «Shakhtii case» in the consciousness of the masses was quite simple. Statements of the following kind, made by peasants and workers in relation to the Shakhtii specialists, can be found in numerous political summaries and research surveys issued by the OGPU: «The bullet was too good for them, they should have been sent to the crematorium alive».
Support for the Shakhtii trial and the inferences drawn about the «wreckers» remained a stable socio-psychological phenomenon over a period of several months. Against the background of growing economic problems, extraordinary measures, queues and strikes, practically no one expressed any doubt or skepticism concerning the judicial correctness of the trial in the «Shakhtii case». On the contrary, among the lower strata of the proletariat the conclusions of the trial were taken to savage extremes:
What should be done? That’s for the Party Central Committee, our guide, to answer. Probably we should take up our knives and bullets again and get rid of all these famous doctors and generals, those that are still alive.
Thus in the spring of 1928 this growing social aggression was offered a personal target: the «wreckers». But the first target had already been named in January, when blame was laid on the kulaks who had organized the «grain strike». In this way a specific ideological and socio-psychological mood was created, which to some extent filtered into the Party’s ranks as well. Attempts were made to overcome the reluctance among many