Stalin's Children (5 page)

By the late summer of 1930, less than a year into the Five Year Plan, the fabric of the factory was in place - the walls, acres of glass roofs, chimneys, furnaces, roads, rails. A factory newspaper was set up, called
Temp,
or 'pace', to urge workers to greater productiveness, to up the pace. Bibikov was its editor-in-chief, writing regular articles and teaching courses for aspiring journalists from among the more literate workers. He also had some pieces published in
Izvestiya,
the great Moscow daily founded by Lenin himself. Lenina remembers him excitedly buying several copies at the newsstand on the morning that his pieces appeared. Sadly, most of the articles at the time were published with no by-line and much of the paper's archives of the period were destroyed in the war, so what Bibikov wrote is a mystery.

Alexander Grigoryevich Kashtanyer, who worked as an intern at
Temp
in 1931, wrote to Lyudmila in 1963 of what he remembered of Bibikov. 'At that time your father's name rang around the factory. I heard the speeches of Comrade Bibikov on the factory floor, at meetings, at the building sites. I remember they were strong, pugnacious speeches. The time was turbulent, and the very name of the paper reflected the thoughts of the tractor factory workers: come on, there's no time to waste, keep up the pace! You can be proud of your father; he was a true soldier of Lenin's guard. Carry a bright memory of him in your hearts!'

Pravda,
the Party's newspaper, published a story on the KhTZ in February 1966 (after Bibikov's official rehabilitation under Krushchev) which conjures the mood of its epic birth. 'I spent Sunday at the home of [the worker] Chernoivanenko, full of chat about the present day work of the factory,' writes the anonymous
Pravda
correspondent. 'But memory kept returning us to the thirties. What a time it was! The beginning of the epoch of industrialization in the USSR! We recalled the people of the KhTZ, how they were at that time. The sternlooking but supremely fair-minded director, Svistun, the Party mass-agitator Bibikov - he was a jolly and soulful comrade, who could inspire our young people to storm difficulties, whether it was glazing a roof in record time, or tarring the floors, or installing new machinery - not by an order but simply by the passion of his convictions. "They weren't just ordinary men," said Chernoivanenko in a hollow voice full of suppressed passion. "They were giants!" ,

To keep the project on schedule, Bibikov championed the seemingly paradoxical system of 'Socialist competition' essentially, races between different shifts of workers over who could do the most work. He also gave the workers heroes chosen from among themselves: 'Men, who by their example inspired the others to great deeds of labour and entered the history of the factory as real heroes. People of legends.'

The heroes created by Bibikov and the propaganda department of
Temp
were men like Dmitry Melnikov, who assembled an American 'Marion' fourteen-ton excavator in six days, not two weeks as the manufacturer's guide said. These and other prodigious deeds were publicized on
stengazety,
hand-stencilled wall newspapers posted around the works. Those who slacked, conversely, were denounced by their colleagues: 'I, concrete pourer of the Kuzmenko group, stood idle for three hours because of the incompetence of X,' read one public notice displayed on a
stengazeta
in late 1930. 'I demand that the hero-workers of our group are paid for these lost hours out of his pocket.'

But despite this cajoling, work had fallen behind as the thirteenth anniversary of the Revolution approached in October 1930 and the deadline for the factory's completion loomed. At the instigation of Bibikov's Party Committee, foremen organized 'storm nights' of labour, accompanied by a brass band, teams of workers racing each other.

The factory's workers and management quickly became obsessed with these competitions, in line with a national newspaper campaign which reported these miraculous (and increasingly bizarre) feats exhaustively. One of the leitmotifs of the endless
Pravda
coverage became wowing foreigners and confounding their forecasts. Not to be outdone, the KhTZ soon produced its own records:

'The [workers] also refuted the calculations of foreign experts of the productivity of the "Kaiser" cement mixer,' the KhTZ's history proudly records. 'Professor Zailiger, for instance, claimed that the machine could not produce more than 240 portions of concrete in one eight-hour shift. But the Communists of the Tractor Factory decided to exceed the norm.' Four hundred men come on the shift, heroically producing 250 mixtures. 'Foreign specialists and their theories are not a law to us,' foreman G.B. Marsunin boasted to the
Temp
correspondent.

The factory brass bands now played all night, every night, echoing in the machine hall and drowning the noise of the KhTZ's six Kaiser concrete mixers. The foremen rushed back and forth, inciting their men to work. Over the next few months new records were set at 360 mixtures, then at 452. An all-Union rally of concrete pourers met in Kharkov to celebrate the KhTZ's amazing records. The foreign concrete mixture specialist, the mysterious Professor Zailiger himself, came from Austria and watched in amazement - 'Yes, you work, it's a fact,'
Temp
records him as saying.

There were prodigies of bricklaying, too. Arkady Mikunis, a young enthusiast from the Komsomol, would stay behind after work to watch old hands lay bricks and read specialist bricklaying journals in his spare time; he quickly matched his teachers with their norm of 800 bricks per shift. On a specially organized 'storm night' Mikunis laid 4,700 bricks in a single shift; 'More,'
Temp
records proudly, 'than even America.' On a factory sponsored holiday in Kiev, he was invited to show the local bricklayers his skills and laid 6,800. Word spread through the bricklaying world and a German champion came from Hamburg to see for himself - after half a shift against Mikunis he gave up the competition. And still Mikunis didn't stop. His record rose to 11,780 bricks in one day, a somewhat improbable three times the previous world record. For his prodigious skills at speed bricklaying - apparently at the rate of a brick every four seconds for twelve straight hours Mikunis was awarded the Order of Lenin.

As if setting new records wasn't enough, Bibikov also instigated evening classes to 'raise the level of socialist consciousness' of the factory's workforce. By the spring of 1931 most of the workers, who a year before had been starving peasants digging clay, were taking voluntary evening classes to qualify as machinists and engineers. After the end of the shifts there was a crush to get to the canteen and wash before the classes began. A lucky 500 workers were even sent to Stalingrad and Leningrad to learn how to work new specialist machine tools installed in factories there. One of the many excuses Bibikov gave his long-suffering wife for his constant lateness was that he personally conducted classes in Marxist Leninism for an advanced group of foremen and managers, and mass meetings and lectures on political economy for the rank and file. One imagines lines of eager, and not-so-eager, listeners, looking up at the bald, animated figure at the lectern in his striped sailor's shirt, soaking up information as indiscriminately as sponges, Marx and Lenin slowly displacing the no less jealous old God of the Russias with whom they had grown up.

On 31 May 1931, the Politburo's industrial supremo Sergo Orzhonikidze was reverently shown around the nearly complete factory buildings. Orzhonikidze ordered the construction to be completed by 15 July, and the installation of the production lines to begin immediately afterwards. Unsurprisingly, given the unspoken penalties for failure, the job was done on time.

By 25 August 1931 the first trial tractors were coming off the assembly line. On 25 September the factory director sent a telegram to the Central Committee reporting that the KhTZ would be ready to start full production on 1 October as planned, just fifteen months after the ground had been broken.

Twenty thousand people assembled in the giant machine hall for the official opening. Demyan Bedny, the 'proletarian poet' whose pseudonym meant Demyan the Poor, was there to record the event in verse, as was a delegation of dignitaries from Moscow. A biplane flew over the site, scattering leaflets with a poem entitled 'Hail to the Giant of the Five Year Plan'. The foreign journalist with the yellow rubber boots was there too, 'just as sloppy, but less confident'. Varvara, the peasant girl whom he had scoffed at, had been to the factory school and was now a qualified steel-presser.

Grigori Ivanovich Petrovsky, head of the All-Ukraine Central Committee of the People's Economy, cut the ceremonial ribbon, walked inside the hall and rode out on a bright red tractor covered in carnations and driven by champion woman worker, Marusya Bugayeva, as the factory band played the 'Internationale'. It was followed by dozens of other tractors. One collective farm worker shouted, records the
Temp
special issue on the opening, 'Comrades - But it's a miracle!'

The Soviet satirical magazine
Krokodil
published the factory management's telegram verbatim: 'October First opening of Kharkov Tractor Factory invite editorial representative attend celebrations opening factory - Factory Director Svistun. Party Secretary Potapenko. Factory Committee Director Bibikov.' The magazine composed a special poem in honour of the event, 'To the Builders of the Kharkov Tractor Factory.'

To all, to all, the builder-heroes,
Participants of one of our great victories,
Who have worked on the building of the Kharkov Tractor
A Crocodile's flaming greeting!
The Crocodile, overwhehned with joy at the news,
Bows its jaws to you:
You fulfilled your task with Bolshevik honour,
Kharkov did not betray the pace . . .
A record! One year and three months!

But behind the universal jubilation, further catastrophe was unfolding in the countryside. The KhTZ's tractors came too late to make an impact on the 1931 harvest, which, after the ravages of collectivization, was disastrous. The projected 'grain factories' were producing little more than half of what the same countryside had yielded five years before. The peasants' only way to protest against the loss of their land and homes was to slaughter their animals and eat as much of their food supplies as they could before the commissars came. Eyewitnesses from the Red Cross reported seeing peasants 'drunk on food', their eyes stupefied by their mad, self-destructive gluttony, and the knowledge of its consequences.

Unsurprisingly, they worked unwillingly for the new state farms. Yet the state demanded grain not only to feed the cities but also to export for hard currency in order to buy foreign machinery for projects like the KhTZ. Soviet engineers were sent to the United States and Germany to buy steam hammers, sheet steel rolling machines and presses with trunkloads of Soviet gold, all earned from selling grain at Depression prices. The KhTZ's American steam hammer, which Bibikov was later accused of sabotaging, cost 40,000 rubles in gold, the equivalent of nearly a thousand tons of wheat, enough to feed a million people for three days.

In October 1931 the Soviet government requisitioned 7.7 million tons of a meagre total harvest of 18 million tons. Most went to feed the cities, strongholds of Soviet power, though two million tons was exported to the West. The result was one of the greatest famines of the century.

During the expropriations of 1929 and 1930 individual villages had starved if they resisted the commissars, who punitively confiscated all the food they could find. Now, as the winter of 1931 set in, hunger gripped the whole of the Ukraine and southern Russia. Millions of peasants became refugees, flocking to the cities, dying on the pavements of Kiev, Kharkov, Lvov and Odessa. Armed guards were posted on trains travelling through famine areas so they wouldn't be stormed. One of the most haunting images of the Russian century is a photograph of hollow-faced peasants caught selling dismembered children for meat on a market stall in the Ukraine.

The new vast fields of collective farms had watchtowers on the perimeter, like those of the Gulags, to watch for corn thieves. A law was introduced mandating a minimum of ten years of hard labour for stealing corn - one court in Kharkov sentenced 1,500 corn gatherers to death in a month. The towers were manned by young Pioneers, the Communist Children's League (for children aged ten to fifteen). Fourteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov became a national hero in 1930 when he denounced his own father to the authorities for not handing over kulak property to the local collective farm. The tale-telling Pavlik was subsequently, perhaps not unreasonably, murdered by his grandfather. The story of this young revolutionary martyr became front-page news in
Pravda
and prompted books and songs about his heroism.

'There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness,' wrote Boris Pasternak after a trip to the Ukraine. The young Hungarian Communist Arthur Koestler found the 'enormous land wrapped in silence'. The British socialist Malcolm Muggeridge took a train to Kiev, where he found the population starving. 'I mean starving in its absolute sense, not undernourished,' he wrote. Worse, Muggeridge found that the grain supplies that did exist were being given to army units brought in to keep starving peasants from revolting. Embittered, the idealistic Muggeridge left the Soviet Union, convinced he had witnessed 'one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.'

Even hardened revolutionaries like Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin were horrified. 'During the Revolution I saw things that I would not want even my enemies to see. Yet 1919 cannot be compared to what happened between 1930 and 1932,' Bukharin wrote shortly before he was shot in 1938 in the Purges. 'In 1919 we were fighting for our lives . . . but in the later period we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenceless men together with their wives and children.'