Stalin's `crimes' that saved humanity

by Alfred Browne

My previous article on the achievements of Joseph Stalin – "Architect
of the workers' state" – received some criticism, summed up as "what
about the other side then?" In reply to one critic, I said I had
intended a response to the vilification, the coining of an adjective
"Stalinist" to describe all that is bad. In fencing terms I was
attempting not a parry but a riposte.
I have now been asked to attempt a parry, an answer to the "other
side". Answer to what? One friend listed "show trials of the 30s, purges,
famine used as a weapon of terror against peasantry, the gulag, the
doctors' plot etcetera, etcetera, etcetera". His etceteras might
include the pre-war German-Soviet "pact", the war with Finland and the
start of the "Cold War".
My friend is getting on but not old enough to remember how things
were in the 30s or earlier, the 20s, when a socialist state, the
horror of many doing well in capitalism, had moved from a worrying
idea to a reality. It was a threat to pockets, profits and prosperity
which must be fought against, all possible allies, no matter how vile,
to be welcomed.

IT WAS NOT SO BAD in the 20s, the aftermath of the First World War had
seen no more revolutions, a general strike in Britain had been put
down, and times were hard in the West but harder in Russia. Even so,
plots were invented on the activities of a Soviet trade mission here
to nourish the "Bolsheviks under the bed" alarm.

slump

By the 30s things had worsened in all ways. An economic slump, mass
unemployment, hunger marches in capitalist countries, increased the
fear of socialism. Fascism, as burgeoning idea in the 20s, had become
a powerful, growing movement taking on an anti-communist guise in the
sure belief that that would ensure its support by powerful but worried
people in politics, industry and the press – worried by thoughts of
socialism.
In the Soviet Union things had also changed. The 20s had been mainly
a period of recuperation after the trials of the civil war and
intervention; of recovery in industry and agriculture under Lenin's
New Economic Policy, a limited return to capitalist ideas.
There was though, a division of views among party leaders, an
ideological split simmering since those days of Stalin's youth in
Georgia, between socialists and Economists (or Mensheviks).
The Economists had believed a bourgeois revolution and capitalism must
precede a workers' revolution and socialism. Now they believed a
single workers', non-capitalist country by itself would not be able to
set up a thriving socialist economy. It would need the co-operation of
others.

planned

Foremost among these was Trotsky but there were many among the old
intellectuals of his way of thinking. Things came to a head with
Stalin's idea of planned, rapid industrialisation.
An immediate problem came from an action of the early days of the
revolution – the division of land among the whole peasantry.
Politically it succeeded; it got the peasants on the side of the
workers. Economically it was disastrous. At once there were problems
of getting food to feed the workers, by trade, taxation or
requisition. Drought brought a terrible famine in 1921, with 22
million people reported to be starving to death.
Lenin's New Economic Policy was an attempt to solve the problem, by a
relaxation of trading regulations and taxation and some encouragement
of entrepreneurs.
Despite criticism by some party leaders that NEP was a return to
capitalism, it was approved by a party congress at which Stalin spoke
in its favour, a congress that saw the beginning of the eclipse of
Trotsky.
The problem of the peasantry and the food supplies remained, dividing
the party into a rightist group for more leniency in taxation and
incentives, and a left for more coercion with collective amalgamation
of the farmland.

socialism

In 1924 Stalin first floated the idea of "socialism in one country",
the building of a socialist state without waiting for that revolution
in more advanced countries which had signally failed to appear, even
in defeated Germany.
Support was lacklustre at first but an article in January 1926, in
which he dealt with the main obstacles and the need to prepare for a
capitalist attack on an industrially weak Soviet Union, secured its
endorsement at a party congress of that year.
Later he argued that hopes should not be put in a world revolution
following the coming economic slump in the West, which he alone, among
world statesmen, correctly forecast. The slump came, brought hunger
marches but no revolution.
His most powerful argument for this policy had to wait until 1931
when there was discontent about the speed and pressures of the first
five-year plan, which had begun in 1928.
The history of old Russia, he told a workers' conference, was that it
was constantly beaten because of its backwardness, by Mongol Khans,
Turkish Beys, Swedish feudal lords, Polish-Lithuanian nobles,
Anglo-French capitalists and Japanese barons.

behind

"We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries, we must make up
this gap in 10 years," he said. "Either we do this or they crush us."
How right he was.
He had set up the planning system and trained the planners. But all
depended on getting agriculture to pay for the new industry, providing
workers and feeding them – and backing trade to pay for imported
machinery.
His answer to that was collectivisation and mechanisation, larger
more efficient farms with machinery to run them. Under NEP some
peasants had prospered, enlarging their holdings: the kulaks. Other
had become impoverished.
In bourgeois industrialisation poverty forced farm labourers to
become town workers. Would Russian farmers accept the general benefits
of socialist collectivisation outweighed any personal upsets? Could
they be urged? Should they be coerced?
There can be no doubt, with hindsight, that the benefits did outweigh
the upsets. All became richer. Not many saw and welcomed that future
though.
Coercion as well as, perhaps rather than, persuasion was needed for
the plan to go ahead.

excessive

It cannot be denied that coercion was excessive. Stalin had based his
plan on 20 per cent of farms, at the most, being collectivised by
1933, the end of the first five-year plan. By halfway the figure had
reached 60 per cent.
Richer peasants, kulaks, who had withheld produce need to feed the
towns, to build up their wealth had failed to pay their taxes, had
that wealth taken away and were sent to work in new industries.
Poorer peasants, reluctant to hand over their meagre possessions for
communal use, not comprehending their own benefits from it,
slaughtered livestock by the million.
In March 1923, Pravda, the party newspaper, printed an article by
Stalin: "Dizzy from success", a call for restraint on the excessive
zeal of party officials in forcible collectivisation. Entry into the
new farms must be voluntary.
Peasants seized on that. The proportion of farms collectivised fell
from 60 per cent to fewer than 25 per cent in two months. During the
summer Stalin fought for his policies, won over left and right at
party congress and collectivisation was resumed in the autumn.
No doubt, there was still resistance, still some coercion.
Collectivisation was made more acceptable by allowing farm members to
retain small personal holdings and to trade privately in produce from
them.
By mid 1931 over half the farmland had been collectivised; by 1934
over 90 per cent. The campaign was virtually over, despite another
drought year.

vital

Collectivisation made it easier to mechanise agriculture. The
slaughter of farm animals by their owners included the killing of
horses, half the total. Tractors became vital. In the first year of
the plan 30,000 tractors were handed over to farms – more than four
times the existing total.
By 1935 Stalin told the party congress that two million farmers had
been trained to drive tractors, as many in administration and 110,000
engineers and agronomists sent to the countryside.
There were improved veterinary and other services and irrigation
schemes. Later a gigantic planting of shelter belts of trees,
unequalled elsewhere in the world, transformed the agricultural
climate, making the 1921 type drought a thing of the past.
By the end of the decade grain production had risen by between 30 and
40 million tons a year, equal to an extra pound and a half every day
for every man, woman and child. That compares to a mere three to five
million tons a year which had been all that it was possible to raise
to feed the towns in the early 20s.
Industrially that first five-year plan had been an unquestioned
success. Output, which had barely reached pre-war levels by 1927,
exceeded it by 113 per cent four and a quarter years later. The only
areas where targets were not reached were coal and iron production and
there the future was assured by the opening up and linking of two vast
new mineral production areas in the Urals and western Siberia.
What about the trials and the purges to come?
That "make up the gap in 10 years or be crushed" policy was making
great demands on everyone, workers, peasants and administrators.
Inevitably there were mutterings and unrest, divisions at party
congresses.

debates

Always though, Stalin won the support of congress after full debates.
Always he was re-elected to positions of authority. In the time of
Lenin he had been the only member of all four main committees – "Who
else could do the job?" as Lenin asked.
In the years that followed he had been the only one continually
re-elected, whether the party line went to left or right. Debate and
election alone decided the course of things.
On 1 December 1934 a new factor emerged: assassination. Sergei Kirov,
a close comrade of Stalin since 1918, party leader in Leningrad since
1926, was shot in the back at his headquarters. His assassin was a
30-year-old party member, Nikolaev, who had been expelled but
readmitted.
The inquiry that followed identified a group opposed to the intensity
of industrialisation and its demands on people, some said to be
Nikolaev's accomplices.
After trials some were executed, some imprisoned and some deported to
work on Siberian projects.
There had been two previous efforts outside normal party practice to
slow the pace of, or abandon the reconstruction — which the party had
accepted, on Stalin's arguments as essential – but no action had been
taken against the principals.
Now this was to change. Active sabotage of reconstruction was
obviously criminal but so also became passive sabotage – attempts to
slow the pace, to abandon the catch-up-in-10-years policy. This was at
a time when Hitler was marching into the Rhineland, taking over
Austria, preparing the assault on Czechoslovakia and preaching a
"March to the east" crusade against Bolshevism.
Three trials took the stage, to worldwide publicity. Two of these
were groups of politicians: one left-wing group including Zinoviev
and Kamenev and one right-wing group including Bukharin, previous
Politburo associates of Stalin. The third trial was of army
commanders.

convicted

The politicians were convicted partly on their own confessions.
Controversy has raged on how genuine they were – but not so much at
the time. The Russian people, the diplomatic corps, including the
American ambassador and opinion abroad were convinced the verdicts
were correct.
As for the generals, whose contacts with German counterparts had gone
on since 1923 and the Treaty of Rapallo between the Soviet Union and a
then friendly Germany, their fellows accepted that a coup d'état had
been planned.
They were executed for what was accepted as treason. Others opposing
the national policy were sent to labour camps to work on industrial
projects. It is ironic that when these were introduced in the 20s for
the rehabilitation of prisoners by worthwhile work, at trade union
rates, rather than sewing mail bags or breaking rocks, there were
hailed by penologists as a great advance in prison reform.
How many suffered for other to benefit eventually by Stalin's
policies? How many benefited? Unfortunately there are no absolutes in
good and bad. All is comparative. All that can be hoped for in the
greater good of the greater number.
What are the arguments against Stalin's policies?

suffered

Who suffered? Large numbers are bandied around. Twenty million dead
say some veteran anti-Soviet writers, as many or more than would die
of natural causes in that decade, nearer half decade.
Surely some of those foreign observers would have noticed. Millions
in the gulag camps? Even Trotsky with his network of informants, put
it lower: thousands dead, tens of thousands imprisoned.
Who benefited? The Soviet people as a whole. Stalin and most of the
party believed that a change of policy, a slackening of the pace,
would be disastrous. History supports that. In the end it was a very
close run thing. That unparalleled increase in industrial strength
proved only just sufficient to ward off attack when it came.

benefited

Who benefited? Not just the Soviet people, the whole of Europe,
including us. In the summer of 1940 we like to say we stood alone. Not
quite alone because to the east of Germany stood what Hitler saw as
the one remaining obstacle to his mastery of Europe, despite that
supposed pact.
We were no menace in Hitler's eyes. The Soviet Union was. We had lost
an army at Dunkirk. Many soldiers escaped but their weapons were lost.
British troops would later hold the Germans at bay for a time in
Greece and drive their expeditionary force out of north Africa but it
would be four years before enough were replaced for Churchill to feel
like directly taking on part of the German Wehrmacht with American
assistance.

invasion

We who lived then thought invasion was inevitable in 1940. It did not
come. Hitler left Goering and Raeder, his Luftwaffe and navy chiefs to
play the threat of invasion while he worked out his real plans for the
Balkans and Russia.
So it can be argued, Stalin saved us in 1940.

more features about stalin here