Stalin In Power: Economic Policies

1. Stalin In Power:Economic Policies

2. Economic Policies: Collectivization • Stalin’s Economic policies had one essential aim – the modernization (inc. militarization) of the USSR – and two essential methods, collectivization and industrialization. • His Economic policies were part of what was called the Second Revolution, or the Stalin Revolution, or Stalin’s Revolution From Above

3. Was Stalin’s Economic Policy the outcome of opportunism or planning? • At first he seemed not committed to any specific ideas / ideology • Supported the Right (pro-NEP: gradual mod / ind) to defeat the Left (anti-NEP: rapid mod / ind) and then used the argument of the Left (anti-NEP: rapid mod / ind) to defeat the Right (pro-NEP: gradual mod / ind). • But having defeated both sides he was now free to judge policies on their economic merits, rather than as part of the game of power politics.

4. He would eventually adopt the Economic policies of the Left • His decision to end NEP was prompted by the acute shortage of food esp. of grain in 1927 – became known as the Grain Procurement Crisis: peasants, due to low prices and shortage of industrial domestic goods, grew less grain and may have hoarded surplus grain supplies – (so called “scissors crisis”) - at least this is what the govt., and Stalin believed (did the same under Lenin) • In 1927-1928 Stalin got the Party to agree to re-introduce the system of food requisitioning from the Peasants

5. From requisitioning he moved to a policy of Collectivization in 1928: combining small farms into big units: under state control: centralization and nationalization of land and food supply…Command Economy • Peasants no longer owned land – became employees of the government on the new Collective Farms. • Peasants were reluctant to give up the land they had waited so long to get: after Emancipation in 1861, through Stolypin’s Reforms after 1905, seized during 1917 Revolution and sanctioned by Lenin, taken under War Communism and given back again under NEP

6. Stalin’s Goals and Justification for Collectivization? • 1. Economic, 2. Ideological, 3. Political 4.Personal • 1. Economic • Food Supply • To increase the food supply: the food supply would not be dependent on the whim or will of the peasants and whether or not they wanted to produced a surplus, whether or not they were happy or unhappy with the supply and price of domestic or consumer goods in the cities. The supply of food would now be controlled by the government.

7. In addition, larger Collective Farms under centralized planning / planned economy, would improve efficiency, through use of crop rotation, fertilizer, mechanization, expertise, and therefore lead to greater food production. Peasants farms were very small, and their methods backward and inefficient • So more and more food would be produced and food production and supply would come under government control • Industrialization • Collectivization and Industrialization would complement each other:

8. He had began massive industrialization through the First Five Year Plan of 1928. This would involve huge expenditure on machinery, equipment, raw materials from abroad. Paying for these was a continuing problem. • Borrowing money from abroad was against Party principles and anyway foreign countries were not willing to loan money to the Soviet Union • The USSR had no money of its own. Selling agricultural produce abroad was the only answer to getting the money to pay for these items

9. 2. Ideological • Worker Revolution • This was meant to eventually be a workers’ revolution: Bolshevism / Communism was a Proletarian creed. October 1917 had been the first stage in the triumph of this Proletariat (with peasant support) and now it was time to make the peasants subservient to the demands of the industrial worker • it seemed that the central group, the group which gained most up to this point was the peasant; to be consistent with Communism, the peasant had to produce food, hand it over, to improve the lives of workers. NEP was unpopular with workers. 

10. Marxist – Leninism • state ownership of land had been the goal all along, Lenin had deferred it during NEP, allowing some capitalism and individual ownership so that the party could survive • but NEP was intended to be only temporary and it was time, now that the country had become stabilized after the Civil War, to move away from Capitalism – Lenin took one step backwards to take two forwards later on – now was the time to take those two steps forward.

11. 3. Political • Control over Peasants • He felt the party didn’t have sufficient control over the peasants: saw this as the opportunity to do so: He saw in the new policy the best means of dominating / controlling / centralizing control over the peasantry. • Socialism in One Country • Collectivization would help achieve the political goal of Socialism in One Country – the survival of the Revolution depended on the nation’s ability to turn itself into a modern industrial society within the shortest possible time. Collectivization was essential to modernization and industrialization, and therefore to Socialism in One Country

12. He made passionate appeals to subordinate everything to the driving need for national survival: justified the severity of Collectivization on this basis: (Read Document of 1931 appeal)

13. 4. Personal • His Legacy • Also saw it as a means of establishing his own greatness, his own legacy. When he introduced his radical economic changes, he claimed that they marked as significant a stage in Soviet Communism as had Lenin’s decision to proceed with the October Rev. This comparison was obviously intended to enhance his own status as a revolutionary leader following in the footsteps of Lenin. • Was concerned about his legacy, about being remembered as a Great Leader. His greatness would be in moving the country back to Communism, dominating the peasantry, and bringing economic prosperity to the USSR.

14. Implementation of Collectivization • Stalin first tried a combination of Voluntary and Mandatory Collectivization but the pace was too slow – only 4% of the peasants were collectivized by June 1929 (in a year and a half). Peasants didn’t want to lose their land: didn’t want to become virtual serfs again • In late 1929 he ordered an acceleration of the pace, demanding forced, mass Collectivization. By the end 1929 the percentage of peasant farms that had been collectivized had increased to 20% (see Documents)

15. He focused on the better off peasants, the Kulaks, who were most resistant to Collectivization. • He began a policy of Divide and Rule / Conquer to split peasant opposition. He called for the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”. • He blamed them for the Grain Crisis of 1927. He would get revenge on them for that and for opposing Collectivization

16. He encouraged the middle (marginal) and lower peasants to turn on the upper peasants / kulaks • He also encouraged city workers to assist with Collectivization against their enemy, the Kulaks. • He played on the workers’ resentment of the Kulaks and also the resentment of the middle and lower peasants for the kulaks.

17. In a major propaganda offensive he identified the class of Kulaks as the ones who were holding back the peasants and workers revolution – they were defined as rich peasants who had grown wealthy under NEP, monopolized the best land, and exploited cheap peasant labor to farm it. • By hoarding their farm produce they kept food prices high, thus making themselves rich at the expense of the workers and poorer peasants. Unless they were broken as a class, they would prevent the modernization of the USSR.

18. The Kulaks, Stalin decided, were to be excluded from Collectivization, he called this the “dekulakization” of the land • they were a conservative, counterrevolutionary element, a petit bourgeois class – they were to be treated as the “accursed enemy” and with force – this he hoped would send the middle and lower peasants (through fear, or from gratitude to the Communist for eliminating the Kulaks whom they didn’t like – also the poorer ones had little to contribute and so little to lose), running to join the collectives voluntarily or with the minimum amount of force – they would “snap to attention.”

19. Stalin decided that he wanted the Kulaks totally removed from the countryside – either to exile, work camps / gulags, or to the cities to become industrial workers. For resisting Collectivization, he would have his “sweet revenge” on them. Because they had gone against him, to him they had violated his trust, betrayed him and the Party and had to be severely punished (pg. 238) • But some Historians, such as Tucker, argue that Stalin’s characterization of the Kulaks as a big rich class of peasants was inaccurate, purposely so (to divide and conquer). Disagrees with Thompson. It was, according to Tucker, a Stalinist myth.

20. Tucker makes three points • 1. They were not really well off, only allegedly. The so called Kulaks were really only those industrious peasants who had, by their own efforts, by hard work and ability, proven more efficient farmers than their neighbors. They were not a class of exploiting landowners as described by Stalin’s propaganda campaign. Kulaks owned no more than 25-40 acres and hired day laborers. They were not prosperous farmers, much less agricultural capitalists as Stalin depicted them. There were no really prosperous peasants in the USSR at this time.

21. There was confusion between the Kulaks of the Czarist yrs and the Kulaks of the yrs after 1917 – Kulaks under the Czars did own up to 100 acres and represented an upper class peasantry, but this was no longer the case. There was no “sharp polarization between prosperous and poor peasants.” The kulaks were “in no position to become an economically and politically dominant group in Russia.” Tucker p.72.

22. 2. Again it was a myth that they hoarded food, grain surplus, and were responsible for the Grain Procurement Crisis. Some grain was withheld by the peasants in 1927-1928 – they were unhappy with the increase in the price of domestic goods and the drop in food prices – but the middle peasants were just as responsible for this. But really there never was much of a grain surplus; the problem was underutilization of land due to ancient farming methods, lack of modern machinery, equipment: This myth was part of Stalin’s propaganda to mobilize support for Collectivization.

23. Thompson disagrees (pg. 295): peasants withheld Grain supplies because prices had been decreased… held back for a higher price…Different procurement policies might have averted the grain collection crisis, but no evidence exists to support Tucker’s suggestion that Stalin helped to contrive it

24. 3. But the middle and lower peasants were next – their land was collectivized too, and the middle peasants in fact were the group which put up the greatest resistance to Collectivization. • Thompson agrees (p. 263) that so called kulaks (officially those owning 25-40 acres using seasonal hired labor) were not really prosperous, were only about 4% of the peasantry, were not solely responsible for withholding grain, - campaign against them was for the purpose of intimidating the middle peasantry, the biggest group, into snapping to attention (lower ones had too little to lose)

25. Irony: Collectivization, which was intended to increase the food supply, at first caused a serious decline in the food supply. Many of the Kulaks, and other groups of peasants, middle and lower class peasants opposed Collectivization. They resisted and when govt. authorities came to take control of their land, animals, and stocks of food, they burned the food and killed the cattle rather than hand them over. The food supply actually decreased – ironically. • Because of the mass slaughtering of Livestock by peasants being forced into collectives, by (SEE DOCUMENT)

26. 1928-1933 the following were slaughtered • -26.6 m head of cattle, (46.6 % of the total) • -15.3 m horses, (47% of the total ) • - 63.4 million head of sheep, (65.1 percent of the total)

27. Not taking into account the destruction of food, the food supply from the early Collectives was also less than what that land had produced from the land before Collectivization. • Collectives were mismanaged by the urban party members who were sent to the country to run the collectives - they lacked the knowledge and experience of farming / agriculture to be able to run these huge collective farms. Also, many Collectives were under staffed with peasant workers, as many peasants who at first had volunteered, or were coerced into being part of a Collective, simply ran away. • And ….. Lack of INCENTIVE to produce…..no profit incentive

28. Concerned about peasant opposition, the need for excessive force, the decline of the food supply – their cooperation was needed for the Spring sowing to be undertaken - Stalin ordered a temporary slow down in the pace of Collectivization in March 1930. • He was encouraged to do so to prevent the possibility of a famine and utter breakdown. He deflected all responsibility for the decline in the food supply from himself. He blamed the troubles on over zealous officials who were proceeded at too fast a pace with collectivization, in an article which he called “Dizzy with Success.” (read Document)

29. His concessions included: • 8 million households of the 14m collectivized households were given back their farms temporarily • Future collectivization would allow the peasants to retain a small private plot and a few animals for their own use (produced 22% of the total food production on only 4% of the land – testimony to the inefficiency of collectivization).

30. Tucker: The real problem was Stalin, he had caused the problem, with the rapid pace, war against the kulaks, policy of force – but he had to find someone to blame other than himself for bungling collectivization. But; • “Stalin was the arch-bungler, and he was ascribing to them his very own ways of bungling the job. Many politicians blame their faults on others. Stalin was all the more disposed to do so because of his personal inability to permit any shadow of blame to fall across the image of him as a leader without blemish. Still, in this instance, the accusations were so blatant a falsifying of what had happened that “Dizzy with Success” aroused widespread panic and consternation among rural officialdom.”

31. But the retreat was only temporary – “merely a necessitated tactical maneuver in a protracted campaign.” By the end of 1930, after he averted the threat of the breakdown of the spring sowing by his hasty concessions, Stalin re-introduced Collectivization - having cleared his own name by blaming the difficulties on local officials - in a more determined, organized, if somewhat slower, manner, but equally as brutal and with as much force and terror.

32. By 1932, 62% of peasant households were in collectives. His victory over the peasants was assured by about 1933, when 65% of the peasants and 90% of the grain was under collectivization. By 1937 this reached 93%. Independent agriculture was no more by the end of the 1930s. (See Documents)

33. Peasants still resisted post-1930 Collectivization: force and terror used to subdue them – historians talk about this as a new type of Civil War • Collectivization involved massive social upheaval for the Peasants. 130 million peasants had their lives reordered – involved a cultural revolution as well as a Civil War. • Peasants became employees living on collectives: millions were forced to the cites to work in the industrial factories. A system of internal passports was introduced to control their movements – they had to be assigned somewhere. (Documents)

34. Millions killed, millions deported, millions sent to the Gulags / forced labor prison camps, where up to 2m died from overwork or disease or were shot • Robert Conquest:; “the number dying in Stalin’s war against the peasants was higher than the total deaths of all the countries in WWI.” Yet he notes that in Stalin’s war only one side was armed and the other side bore almost all the casualties, many of whom were women and children, and the old. Stalin himself confided to Churchill at Yalta in 1945 that 10 million people had died in the course of collectivization (underestimate)

35. Stalin presided over more loss of life and human suffering than anyone before or since. Some 10m to 11m – could be up to 20m – died from the economic cataclysm, famine, and purges of the late 1920s and 1930s, and another 25 to 30m were lost to WWII). Thompson pg. 257

36. Ironically many peasants died of starvation / famine – the people producing the food died of starvation. Priorities for the food supply was • Industrial worker • Red Army • Overseas markets • Worst years of starvation were 1932-1933, when a national famine occurred, due to poor harvests, decline in production, excessive amounts of food sent abroad. Approx 6m people died during the famine.” Thompson’s figures….p.266

37. The Ukraine (where 3 to 4 m of the 6m died), and Kazhakstan esp. suffered most from food shortages. • In the Ukraine collectivization became part of a general assault on Ukrainians as reactionary nationalists and enemies of socialism - grain deliveries from there were set at excessively high levels. Stalin deliberately withheld grain from these non-Russian groups. Collectivization, starvation, used as a WEAPON TO SUBDUE THE DIFFICULT NATIONALITIES. This was a man-made famine. Deutscher, historian and former Polish Trotskyite, calls it “the first purely man made famine in history.”

38. While peasants and their children were dying of starvation by the millions, the Soviet govt. was exporting millions of tons of grain to earn foreign currency for industrialization. Grain exports rose from 2 m metric tons a year in the mid 20s to 4.8 m in 1930 and to 5.2m in 1931 but then went down to 1.8 and 1.7 m respectively in 1932 and 1933, and approx 800,000 tons in 1934 (poor harvests) . Tucker “The trade of human lives for technology was rendered all the more tragic by the very low prices that the exported grain fetched on international markets during the great Depression”.

39. But according to Stalin there was no famine (denied it) • Foreign journalists in Moscow heard about it but were forbidden from going into the countryside to find out for sure • Govt. and press maintained a conspiracy of silence, to protect the image of Stalin the great planner. Since the famine did not exist officially, then nothing needed to be done to help, and no help came from abroad, and the USSR could not appeal for outside help as it had in 1921.

40. It went unacknowledged in order to avoid discredit falling on Stalin. A large portion of the Soviet people was sacrificed on the altar of Stalin’s reputation. His second wife committed suicide (?), probably because of the knowledge that his brutal policies had caused the famine. • Thompson,p.266, talks about Stalin’s two “cold-blooded” policies during the Famine: • 1. he continued to export grain – this grain could have saved countless lives

41. 2. he and the Soviet govt. suppressed news of the famine and they turned down offers of foreign relief on the falsehood that no problem existed. (The American Relief Administration / Herbert Hoover had helped Russia during the Famine of 1920-1 which Lenin admitted to) • “In famine stricken areas the peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, grass, anything they could find. Incidents of cannibalism were not uncommon.” Tucker.

42. “Let it be said simply that Stalin’s Revolution from Above / against the Peasants, was one of our violent century’s most monstrous crimes against humanity.” (Tucker) • Much of the tragedy was not revealed until thede-Stalinization of the 1950s revealed his crimes: in the 1980s Soviet historian Dmitri Volkogonov, produced his biography on Stalin, confirming the suspicions long held by the West about his brutality

43. Results of Collectivization: Summary • Short term chaos in agriculture, decline in food production in the short term. • Severe brutality and loss of life, human catastrophe: brutality inflicted on peasantry – killed, exiled, sent to labor camps or gulags: famine caused by exporting food needed for Soviet people. 

44. Eventual Success in food production took many years to materialize. Not until 1937 did grain production reach the pre-collectivization amount, and then began to surpass these figures. Total agricultural productivity did not reach 1913 levels until 1939. Livestock figures did not reach the pre-collectivization levels until 1950

45. Success in terms of complementing industry: now that state controlled food production, more food was made available for sale abroad, thus bringing in the necessary capital to pay for industrial machinery and raw materials. And the peasants who were driven off their land became industrial workers after moving to the cities. • Political Success: Party and therefore Stalin’s political control over the peasant and rural USSR increased. To a Party which distrusted the growth of peasant collectivization was politically justifiable. Politically the state was strengthened and the countryside came under its control.

46. Was Collectivization the only option? • Lynch: There is broad agreement among economic analysts that a policy of state taxation of an un-collectivized peasantry would have produced a much higher level of investment capital, while avoiding the social dislocation and misery of Stalin’s measures. (policy of the Right: Lenin’s NEP) • Would persuasion and incentives not have worked? Coercion bred resistance which provoked greater force culminating in civil violence and the virtual breakdown of the agricultural economy. Collectivization was in many ways counterproductive. Thompson p.262

47. But Collectivization satisfied Stalin’s needs: Domination of Party, over Peasants, final stage of Communism, satisfied his ego and legacy.. • Stalin achieved his goals: he wasn’t concerned about the costs • His Goals • Economic • Ideological • Political • Personal

48. Questions • Just on Stalin’s Economic Policies (Success and Failure, or, To what extent did he fulfill his promises) • or • Compare and Contrast his policies with Castro’s