Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (18 page)

Hitherto the workers were masters, but they are only a tiny minority … the peasants are legion …. The urban proletariat has been declining steadily for four years …. The immense peasant tide will end by engulfing everything …. The peasant will become master of Russia, since he represents numbers. And it will be terrible for our future.
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What had happened? The truth is, though Lenin understood very well how to create a despotism, he had no practical vision of the Utopia at all. Marx provided no clue. He described the capitalist
economy; he said nothing about the socialist economy. It would, Marx remarked vaguely, be organized by ‘society’. All he was sure about was that once ‘all elements of production’ were ‘in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class’, then ‘productive forces would reach their peak and the sources of wealth flow in full abundance’.
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Lenin had no ideas on this subject either. He deduced from Marx that ‘the state’ ought to run the industrial economy. Just as the ‘vanguard élite’ had to take the place of the proletariat in forcing through the revolution in an underdeveloped industrial economy, so too it would have to represent it in running ‘all elements of production’. And since Lenin believed in ultra-centralism in political matters, and had created a machine with precisely this end in view, so there must be central control in industry, with the party (i.e., himself and immediate associates) exercising it. This crude line of thought underlay the ‘April Theses’ and his two other wartime writings,
Will the Bolshevists Retain State Power?
and
State and Revolution.
It also prompted his decision, in December 1917, to create a body called Vesenkha (Supreme Council of National Economy) and, during the next dozen or so weeks, separate ministries to control the major industries, all of them staffed by bureaucrats.

Thus, almost haphazardly, did Soviet Russia acquire a centralized ‘planned’ economy of the type which she has maintained ever since and exported to a third of the world. As usual, Lenin thought entirely in terms of control; not of production. He thought that provided he got the system of control right (with the Politburo taking all the key decisions), the results would flow inevitably. He was wholly ignorant of the process whereby wealth is created. What he liked were figures: all his life he had an insatiable appetite for bluebooks. One sometimes suspects that inside Lenin there was a book-keeper of genius struggling to get out and bombard the world with ledgers. In all his remarks on economic matters once he achieved power, the phrase which occurs most frequently is ‘strict accounting and control’. To him, statistics were the evidence of success. So the new ministries, and the new state-owned factories, produced statistics in enormous quantities. The output of statistics became, and remains to this day, one of the most impressive characteristics of Soviet industry. But the output of goods was another matter.

The shape of the Soviet economy was also determined by another accidental factor, which gave Lenin a practical vision. This was the German war-production machine. One must remember that, during the formative period of the Leninist state, its first twelve months, Russia was first the negotiating partner, then the economic puppet, of Germany. By 1917, as we have seen, the Germans had seized upon
the state capitalist model of pre-war Russia and married it to their own state, now run by the military. They called it ‘war socialism’. It looked impressive; indeed in many ways it was impressive, and it certainly impressed Lenin. From then on his industrial ideas were all shaped by German practice. His first industrial supremo, the former Menshevik Larin, was also an enthusiastic exponent of German methods, which of course fitted in perfectly with Lenin’s notions of central control. He began to hire German experts, another example of the special relationship developing between the anti-democratic elements in both countries. When other Bolsheviks objected, Lenin replied with his pamphlet
On ‘Left’ Infantilism and the Petty Bourgeois Spirit:

Yes: learn from the Germans! History proceeds by zigzags and crooked paths. It happens that it is the Germans who now, side by side with bestial imperialism, embody the principle of discipline, of organization, of solid working together, on the basis of the most modern machinery, of strict accounting and control. And this is precisely what we lack.
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German ‘state capitalism’, he said, was a ‘step forward’ to socialism. History had played a ‘strange trick’. It had just given birth to ‘two separate halves of socialism, side by side, like two chickens in one shell’: political revolution in Russia, economic organization in Germany. Both were necessary to socialism. So the new Russia must study the ‘state capitalism of the Germans’ and ‘adopt it
with all possible strength
, not to spare
dictatorial
methods in order to hasten its adoption even more than Peter [the Great] hastened the adoption of westernism by barbarous Russia, not shrinking from barbarous weapons to fight barbarism.’
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So one might say that the man who really inspired Soviet economic planning was Ludendorff. His ‘war socialism’ certainly did not shrink from barbarism. It employed slave-labourers. In January 1918 Ludendorff broke a strike of 400,000 Berlin workers by drafting tens of thousands of them to the front in ‘labour battalions’. Many of his methods were later to be revived and intensified by the Nazis. It would be difficult to think of a more evil model for a workers’ state. Yet these were precisely the features of German ‘war socialism’ Lenin most valued. What the Germans had, what he wanted, was a docile labour force. He set about getting it. The first illusion he dispelled was that the workers’ Soviets which had taken over the factories were to run them. His trade union spokesman, Lozovsky, warned: ‘The workers in each enterprise should not get the impression that the enterprise belongs to them.’
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No fear of that with Lenin in control! ‘Such disturbers of discipline’, he said, ‘should be shot.’
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By January 1918, the Bolshevik regime had taken over the unions and
brought them into the government. They were weak anyway. The only strong one was the railwaymen’s, which put up some resistance and was not finally crushed till 1920–1. The other union leaders acquired jobs, offices, salaries and became tame government officials. As Zinoviev put it, the unions had become ‘organs of socialist power’ and ‘organs of the socialist state’, and for all workers ‘participation in the trade unions will be part of their duty to the state’. So the closed shop was universally imposed and in return union officials (who soon had to be party members under party discipline) worked closely with ministry bureaucrats and factory managers to ‘raise socialist production’. In short they became company unions of the most debased kind, the ‘company’ being the state. In this corporatist system their main task became ‘labour discipline’ and they found themselves acting as an industrial police-force.
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Such policing became necessary as Lenin applied his notion of ‘universal labour service’ on the analogy of military conscription.
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The seventh Party Congress demanded ‘the most energetic, unsparingly decisive, draconian measures to raise the self-discipline and discipline of workers’. From April 1918 the unions were set to work issuing ‘regulations’ to ‘fix norms of productivity’. Workers who rebelled were expelled from the union, with consequent loss of job and food-rations, on the lines of Lenin’s dictum ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’.
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Strikes became illegal. ‘No strikes can take place in Soviet Russia’, said the trade union confederation head, Tomsky, in January 1919, ‘let us put the dot on that “i”.’ Strike funds were confiscated and sent to promote strikes in ‘bourgeois countries’. In June 1919 ‘labour books’, modelled on the work-passes imposed on natives by various colonial governments, were introduced in the big towns. About the same time, the first organized labour camps came into existence: ‘undisciplined workers’, ‘hooligans’ and other disaffected or idle people could be sent there by the Cheka, revolutionary tribunals or Narkomtrud, the body responsible for general labour mobilization. From January 1920 anybody could be called up for compulsory
corvée:
road-making, building, carting etc. As a Narkomtrud spokesman put it: ‘We supplied labour according to plan, and consequently without taking account of individual peculiarities or qualifications or the wish of the worker to engage in this or that kind of work.’
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The provincial Chekas ran the camps, whose administration was in the hands of a special section of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the
NKVD.
There was a second tier of camps, with a harsher regime and ‘difficult and unpleasant’ work (i.e. in the Arctic), supposedly for counter-revolutionaries only, but soon full of ordinary workers.
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The end of the civil war did not end compulsory labour. Like all Lenin’s ‘emergency’ institutions, it became permanent. Indeed, the Third Army in the Urals promptly found itself transformed into ‘the First Revolutionary Army of Labour’ by a decree of 15 January 1920, and most of its ‘soldiers’ never saw their homes again. Trotsky exulted in what he called ‘the militarization of the working class’. Radek denounced ‘the bourgeois prejudice of “freedom of labour”’. The ninth Party Congress in 1920 ordered workers leaving their jobs to be branded as ‘labour deserters’ and punished by ‘confinement in a concentration camp’.
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The new anti-society was christened in a flourish of Leninist Newspeak: ‘We know slave-labour,’ Trotsky told the third Trade Union Congress, ‘we know serf-labour. We know the compulsory, regimented labour of the medieval guilds, we have known the hired wage-labour which the bourgeoisie calls “free”. We are now advancing towards a type of labour socially regulated on the basis of an economic plan which is obligatory for the whole country …. This is the foundation of socialism.’ Compulsory labour under capitalism, wrote Bukharin, was quite the reverse of compulsory labour under the dictatorship of the proletariat: the first was ‘the enslavement of the working class’, the second the ‘self-organization of the working class’.
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Both these men were later to be murdered by the same verbal fictions.

In fact, as we have seen, the working class was organizing itself back into the villages at an alarming rate. Lenin, like the Tsars and Kerensky before him, had somehow to gouge food out of the peasants. How to do it – by the market or by bayonets? First he tried bayonets. In 1917 he had incited the peasants to seize their land. In 1918 he tried to grab the land for the state. His ‘On the Socialization of the Land’ law of 19 February 1918 said the object of policy was ‘to develop the collective system of agriculture’ at ‘the expense of individual holdings’ in order to bring about ‘a socialist economy’.
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But in practice, as an official of Narkomzen, the state agriculture ministry, put it, ‘the land was simply seized by the local peasants’. They got 86 per cent of the confiscated land, and only 14 per cent went to the newly established state farms and communes. So for the autumn 1918 harvest, Lenin sent armed detachments of factory workers into the countryside to confiscate what food they could, and tried to encourage ‘committees of poor peasants’ to tyrannize over those he termed ‘kulaks and rich peasants’ who had ‘amassed enormous sums of money’.
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Later, Lenin grouped these devices together, into twenty-five-strong bands of ‘workers and poor peasants’, who got a cut of any food they managed to steal. But, said Tsuryupa, Commissar for Agriculture, as soon as they reached the country ‘they begin to break out and get drunk.’ Later still, Lenin
invented a new category of ‘middle peasants’, whom he tried to set against the ‘kulaks’. As these classes existed only in his own mind, and bore no relation to actual peasants in real villages, that tactic did not work either.

By the spring of 1921, when the Kronstadt sailors rose, Lenin’s whole economic policy, such at it was, lay in manifest ruins. Industry was producing practically nothing. There was no food in the towns. On Lenin’s own admission ‘tens and hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers’ were becoming bandits.
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About the only thing in plentiful supply was the paper rouble, which the printing presses poured out ceaselessly, and which had now fallen to little over 1 per cent of its November 1917 value. Some of the Bolsheviks tried to make a virtue of necessity and boasted that the inflation was deliberately created to smash the old regime of money. One described the presses of the state mint as ‘that machine-gun of the Commissariat of Finance pouring fire into the arse of the bourgeois system’. Zinoviev told the Getman Social Democrats, ‘We are moving towards the
complete abolition of money.’
In a sense this was true: paper money has never recovered its old significance in the Soviet Union. But the price has been permanent shortages in the shops.

In any case, the peasants would not look at Lenin’s paper rouble, and in May 1921 he threw in his hand. Plainly, if he did not get some food to the towns, his regime would collapse. He may have been short of genuine economic ideas, but he was never short of verbal ones. He now coined the phrase ‘New Economic Planning’,
NEP
was, in fact, surrender to the peasants and the return to a market system based on barter. The goon-squads were withdrawn, and the peasants were allowed to get what they could for their food. Small factories and workshops were allowed to start up again, outside the control of the state, to produce goods the peasants were willing to accept in exchange for grain. Unfortunately, the Bolshevik capitulation came too late to affect the 1921 sowing, and a dry summer brought famine, the first in Russian history to be substantially created by government policy. It affected, according to Kalinin, about 27 million people. As many as 3 million may have died in the winter of 1921–2. In desperation, the government turned to the American Relief Administration organized under Herbert Hoover. For the first time, Russia, hitherto one of the world’s greatest food-exporting countries, had to turn to American capitalist agriculture to save it from the disastrous consequences of its experiment in collectivism. Sixty years later, the same pattern was being repeated. The peasants had destroyed the Tsar and made Leninism possible. Lenin had failed to reward them, as he had promised. They exacted a price. It is still being paid.
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