Russia (41 page)

It was interested in industry-building, in infrastructural development and in resettlement. It was not interested in agriculture except as a means of dredging up resources to realize its ambitions. Peasants not prepared to work under direction in a collective should find jobs in towns. If they opposed the new system in any way they should be arrested and forced to work on government projects. But the combination of ideology, bureaucracy and enthusiasm created havoc in Ukraine. The Communist agronomist who had initiated the tractor-station programme described the consequences of the policy to create gigantic collective farms:

The policy … was implemented in an exceptionally bureaucratic and senseless manner. Collective farms of 55 to 100 hectares were suddenly transformed, without adequate technical preparation, into collectives covering tens of thousands of hectares … In some cases, ‘to simplify matters’, a whole region containing hundreds of villages was to declared to be a single collective. All boundaries between village lands were eliminated; and the entire expanse … [was] divided into farms of several thousand hectares each — without any regard to where the villages were actually situated. [Hence] cattle and agricultural machinery were scattered about over scores of kilometres.
²⁴

Many
of
the planners, as well as those charged with implementation, were raw recruits to their allotted specialisms. Furthermore, behind them loomed authority demanding results. In these circumstances, what enthusiasm could not achieve desperation often did. Inevitably things went wrong, but scapegoats were readily found to take the blame. Hundreds of thousands of peasant families were uprooted from their ancestral villages along with various others who had run foul of authority. Many of them were transported to distant and unpleasant places which were short of labour. As chaos mounted, reports arrived in the Kremlin of a growing death toll, and
of
crowds of destitute and starving peasants clogging the
roads. In 1932 the cities were also on the brink of starvation. The worst year of all was 1933, when it has been calculated that deaths exceeded births by almost 6 million.
²⁵
Then the crisis turned. The chaos subsided; conditions began to ease. Meanwhile a combination of censorship, propaganda and clever public relations muted concern about what had happened and diverted attention from where responsibility lay

The mood of urban Russia in the 1930s was surprisingly optimistic. The focus was on youth and hope and the building of a socialist paradise. Living conditions verged on the impossible. There were huge shortages and lengthy waiting-lines outside the shops. Many goods that were obtainable were shoddy. Only the black market, patronage networks and
protektsiia,
the deployment of friendships and favours, made life tolerable for many people. But for the young migrants there was hope and a sense of purpose. Mundane labour suddenly became heroic. A burly miner called Stakhanov, who cut more coal in a shift than others, was lauded like an heroic knight of old. It became possible for young people to rise, to exercise authority, to wield power. They were building a new and better world. As in Mussolini’s Italy, there was a sense of creating a new kind of man - in this case
Homo sovieticus.
²⁶

The results were visible, tangible. Impressive new buildings were rising, new cities in process of creation, new infrastructure under construction. In Moscow, new brick-and-concrete blocks of worker housing replaced ramshackle wooden building in the suburbs, overshadowing neglected monasteries and churches. A handsome underground-railway system was excavated beneath the city, equipped with deep, fast escalators and stations like palaces with their marble halls and striking statuary — palaces for the people. Across the continent new cities rose up with vast industrial plants. New canals were being cut, dams constructed, rivers diverted, and ‘palaces of culture’ erected in towns and even villages for the entertainment and instruction of the people. On dozens of different sites across the vast terrain, virgin lands were turned into swarming ants’-nests
of
activity as the regime mobilized the population to meet the overambitious targets that would at last realize the country’s immense potential. On one site just east of the Urals the whole amazing process could be observed in little —

a strange combination of soaring ambition, driving energy, faltering and sometimes highly defective execution, large-scale building, hard and primitive living conditions, idealism and ruthlessness.

Magnitogorsk at first conveys a confused series of impressions: heaps of bricks, timber, sand, earth and other building material, thrown about in characteristically Russian disorderly fashion; long lines of low wooden barracks for the construction labourers; towering new industrial structures, with belching smokestacks … The town is a product of ultramodern industrialization, yet … one’s first impression is that of an Asiatic city.
²⁷

Never before had so many resources and so much human energy been concentrated to realize impossibly ambitious plans in so short a time. The achievement was great; so was the human cost. The labour for big projects in the wilderness was found from the twin offspring of revolution: the enthusiastic believers and the sullen hordes of the oppressed. The cheerleaders of the enthusiasts were the Young Communists, who, in the words of an American observer at Magnitogorsk, were

always ready to fling themselves into the breach if some part of the building were lagging, willing to work under the hardest material conditions without reckoning hours … [But] at the other end of the scale were the unfortunate kulaks … who, after being stripped of their possessions, were sent here, sometimes with their families, to work for the success of a system that is based on their ruin.

The working day was long, wages low, rations minimal, the barrack-type housing primitive and sometimes miles away from the site. It was ‘the same story at the Chehabinsk tractor plant, at the Berezniki chemical works, at the Dnieprostroi hydroelectric power plant’ and, for that matter at the heavy-machine-building plant at Sverdlovsk, the iron and coal complex at Kuznetsk in central Siberia, the agricultural-machine factory at Rostov-on-Don, the motor-vehicle plant at Nizhnii-Novgorod.
²⁸

At the same time an 8o-mile canal was being cut to link Moscow directly to the Volga; others were cut across the Kola Peninsula to Murmansk in the far north, and to connect Lake Onega (and hence Moscow) with the White Sea. This last project, where conditions were among the harshest, was built by political prisoners, enemies of the regime. The Gulag system, which had its origins in the penal colonies of tsarist Russia, was much expanded; the camps were more rigorously run than their forerunners, and the death rate in the worst of them was very high. The largest lay north and east of Yakutsk, near the Kolyma goldfields.
²⁹

The first Five Year Plan, introduced in 1929, did not quite meet its ambitious targets, but its purpose was ultimately achieved. Modern industries were built. Moreover, the new factories and steel plants could be used to make tanks and various other types of military hardware — and much of
this capability was well out of reach of potential enemies to the east as well as the west. Even though consultants had occasionally been hired from the West, and some contracts were even let to Western companies, the operation was inefficient by Western standards — sometimes highly inefficient — but the regime could use media manipulation to assign blame for these failings and encourage improvement.

In the last months of 1930 the newspapers announced the execution of dozens of economists, engineers and other specialists. Arraigning real or supposed opponents of Stalin’s rule on trumped-up charges of ‘wrecking’ was found to be an effective way of explaining failures and attributing blame to others than the leadership. Such travesties of justice also served a psychological need of the public - that of identifying ‘the sinful’, the supposed authors of all their woes. As the pace of construction heated up and more shortcomings came to light the ‘show trial’was used more frequently, along with the Party purge.

In a series of trials in the later 1930s, prominent Party men including economic planners were tried publicly and executed, some for transparently false economic as well as political ‘crimes’ such as plotting to market butter containing broken glass. A public ever eager to see those in authority diminished was heartened by the spectacle, but the victims included scapegoats for the failures of industrialization. Ukrainians were not disappointed to see most of the provincial Party leaders fall. And as the purges cut wider they created huge possibilities for promotion. In 1938 the armed services were purged. Perhaps because of his long-standing acquaintance with German generals under military co-operation agreements, Tukhachevskii, the Chief of Staff, was shot, along with most of the senior commanders. Their replacements were raw and, on the whole, less able.

The new commanders were rushed through staff college and other training schemes in the hope of equipping them for command in time. But the critical juncture was only months away and, though the feared security agency itself was also purged, the leadership of the Soviet Union’s defences had been much weakened.

Stalin, the controlling genius of Russia’s fortunes, no doubt had his moments of paranoia, confusion, even panic, when confronting situations of which he was not the master. He also had the destructive capacities of a believer. He was, however, aware of the costs of his action. He subsequently confessed that the protracted struggle with the peasants over collectivization was the fiercest he had known: ‘It was terrible,’ he told
Churchill. ‘Four years it lasted.’
³⁰
The economic transformation cost the Soviet Union heavily in lives, although manipulation
of
the census figures for the late 1930s distorted the truth for some time. The scale of the deception has been calculated to have been as high as 2.9 million deaths, and it was most pronounced for provinces like Komi and Karelia, where GPU hard-labour camps had been sited. Such camps had been used ‘on a gigantic scale.’
³¹
Furthermore, what Stalin saw as political stabilization achieved by the purges of the later 1930s was highly destructive of talent and expertise in every imaginable field. Such was the price. What had it bought?

The chief benefit was in large quantities of military hardware and capacity. By 1941 the Red Army could field more than half of all the tanks in the world, including a thousand excellent T-34 tanks. A further forty T-34S were rolling off the production lines every week. There were almost 2,000 fighter aircraft in service, including numbers of the MiG-3.
³²
At its best, the standard of weapon design was excellent. Nevertheless, there were serious problems. Production of the better models was too slow, and the equipment was not distributed to best advantage. The ideas of the Red Army’s leading tanks specialist, D. Pavlov, had prevailed over those of Tukhachevskii.
³³
And after the purges there were problems of leadership, personified by the incompetent Marshal Voroshilov, who was responsible for a series of organizational mistakes which were to show up when hostilities began.

The Second World War was preceded by two curtain-raisers. The first clash to involve the Soviet Union came in August 1939, over the territory of Khalkhin-Gol in the Far East, which was in dispute with Japan.
³⁴
The second, in the autumn and winter of 1940, was with Finland. In the first, Soviet troops, deploying several hundred of the new tanks under General Zhukov, were successful in heavy fighting. In the second, Soviet forces were out-manoeuvred and badly mauled by Finnish troops who were seriously outnumbered. Although the Finns were eventually ground down by overwhelming force,
³⁵
the encounter did not bode well for the Soviet Union when Hitler ordered his surprise invasion in 1941.

After the Munich Agreement of 1938, France and Britain decided that they must make no more concessions to Hitler’s Germany and began to entertain the possibility of co-operating with the Soviet Union in defence of Poland and Romania. Eventually military talks were held in Moscow. However, the threatened states were reluctant to allow Soviet troops to cross into their territory before hostilities actually began, which was understandable but impractical given the nature of mid-twentieth-century warfare. For their
part, the Soviets were at least as worried about Japan as about Germany, and were disinclined to make sacrifices for powers which had been adamantly hostile to them until now. Irritated by the sluggish pace of negotiations, the Soviet diplomats became more and more ambivalent. Then the German government, with uncannily good timing, made an offer of attractive terms. A deal with Germany would remove the spectre of having to fight a war on two fronts. Besides, the Soviet Union had been ostracized for decades, and now a major Power was offering to treat with it on equal terms. Stalin was flattered,
³⁶
and decided it would be better to sup with the German devil than with the stand-offish French and British.

Under the secret terms of the Nazi—Soviet Pact which was then drawn up, Stalin connived at a German invasion of Poland in return for territory on his western frontier — eastern Poland as far as the river Bug, and a sphere of influence that included the Baltic states. But Stalin did not move when German forces invaded Poland on 1 August 1939. Only when it became obvious that the Poles had been decisively defeated did he order Soviet troops in, and call in the promises under the Pact.

Much as Alexander I had done with Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, Stalin had delayed a major war by concluding a spheres-of-influence agreement with Hitler. Not only had he delayed invasion, he had thrust out the Soviet Union’s western frontiers to create a useful screen against attack, and had regained old imperial territories lost in the aftermath of the Revolution. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became constituent republics within the Soviet Union. Finland remained independent, but after the winter war which followed it was forced to cede a strategically important area in Karelia, south of Murmansk and the northern shores of Lake Ladoga. For good measure Stalin also took the opportunity to take back Bessarabia. He did not expect to remain permanently at peace with capitalist powers — either Germany or, more particularly, Japan. But he now felt secure against any imminent attack from the West. He deceived himself.