Russia. A History полностью

Nevertheless by 1924 the national economy began a recovery of sorts. Industrial reconstruction proved deceptively rapid: restarting factories closed during the civil war caused a sharp rise in manufacturing output. Supply networks also began to function once again: the workers who had fled during the civil war and famine made their way back to the plants. As a result, the output of large-scale industry reached nearly half its pre-war scale in 1924 and 75 per cent a year later. Industrial exports rose to nine times what they had been at the beginning of the decade, even if still but a third of pre-war figures. Recovery was still more marked in agriculture: by 1924 the cultivation of arable land approached 1913 levels, and marketable output in agriculture increased 64 per cent between 1922 and 1925.

But this was recovery, not expansion of the pre-war base. And industry, in particular, soon reached a point of diminishing returns. Seven years of warfare, followed by new hardships in the early 1920s, had destroyed a significant portion of the industrial base. There had been virtually no renewal of the capital stock since before the First World War; what the Russian civil war had not destroyed was badly worn or outmoded. Restarts could increase output, but without significant new investment it could never reach the pre-war standard. But that was precisely the Bolsheviks’ charge: to create the industrial foundation for socialism. And trade and foreign investment, although up considerably after 1921, fell far short of underwriting a venture of such magnitude.

This was the context of the party debate over industrialization. All leading protagonists agreed that the transformation was necessary and that the peasantry would absorb the chief cost. But they disagreed on three main issues: (1) tempo; (2) whether short-term development would centre first in heavy or light industry; and, (3) the degree of peasant entrepreneurship the state would tolerate during the process. Simply put, all sides agreed that capital investment would be generated in agriculture and ‘pumped over’, as the communists phrased it, to the industrial sector. The left—Trotsky and the economist Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, joined later by Zinoviev and Kamenev—favoured the rapid development of heavy industry and the substitution of centralized planning for the market. The right—Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii—championed a gradual tempo, the development of consumer goods manufacturing, and above all an alliance (smychka) with the peasantry. In their view, a tax on peasant profits could generate the needed investment capital. Scholars frequently present Stalin’s position as simply opportunistic. In one popular scenario, he first cynically sides with the right; then, after the left was politically defeated in 1927, he shifts maliciously to a position even more radical than that of Trotsky–Preobrazhenskii in order to attack the right.

In reality, the politics was more subtle and complex. It began in 1924, when Preobrazhenskii addressed the Bolsheviks’ need to create the material pre-conditions for socialism in Russia. Marx had written that in the early stages of Western industrialization, entrepreneurs practised ‘primitive capitalist accumulation’ by denying workers the full value of their labour and by reinvesting a significant portion of the surplus profit. Preobrazhenskii called for something analogous in the USSR. Since, however, the majority of toilers were not factory workers, but peasants, Preobrazhenskii proposed a ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ by turning the terms of trade against the peasantry. By setting state prices for agricultural produce artificially low but artificially high for industrial goods, the state could create the analogue of profit to be reinvested. This position, with its hostility towards peasant prosperity and to market economics, signalled a fundamental attack on NEP.