3. Instead of an anticipated 5.426 billion gold rubles of revenue from all exports (grain, timber, oil) over the course of the Five-Year Plan, the Soviets managed to bring in 3.283 billion. Industry was short 1.873 million rubles, including 832 million just in 1932. The Soviets ran out of convertible currency even for purchases of foreign military technology. Kondrashin et al., Golod v SSSR, I/i: 46 (citing RGAE, f. 1562, op. 329, d. 4, l. 2–4). A key source of foreign currency revenue were the shops designed for “trade with foreigners” (Torgsin), which in fact placed no restrictions on who could enter and buy and sell: around 80 percent of their trade involved Soviet inhabitants. In 1933, during the worst of the famine, Torgsin stores had their best year, expanding deeply across the countryside to sell flour, cooking oil, and sugar for the population’s valuables. That year, family-heirloom revenue exceeded foreign grain sale revenues. After 1933, with the population’s closets tapped out, Torgsin revenues declined. Still, sales from 1932 until the shops were closed in early 1936 totaled 287.2 million, which paid for imports for Magnitorgorsk worth 44 million rubles; Gorky Auto Plant, 42.3 million; Stalingrad Tractor, 25 million rubles; Stalin Auto factory, 27.9 million rubles; Cheliabinsk Tractor, 23 million; Kharkov Tractor, 15.3 million; and Uralmash, 15 million. Aizenberg, Valiutnaia sistema SSSR, 65; Osokina, Zoloto dlia industrializatsii.
4. Robert Allen argues that per capita consumption, after falling in the early 1930s, increased significantly, being perhaps a fifth higher in 1937 than a decade earlier, but he has rightly been taken to task separately by Davies and Ellman. Allen, Farm to Factory, 147–50, 185–6; R. W. Davies (http://eh.net/book_reviews/farm-to-factory-a-reinterpre tation-of-the-soviet-industrial-revolution); Ellman, “Soviet Industrialization.”
5. Millar, “Mass Collectivization”; Barsov, Baslans stoimostnykh obmenov; Ellman, “Agricultural Surplus”; Davies et al., Economic Transformation, 11–3. See also Barsov, “NEP i vyravnivanie ekonomicheskikh otnoshenii,” 93–102. Even a Stalinist publication, with exaggerated figures, admitted that industrial exports constituted the primary source of export revenues during the Five-Year Plan (2 billion of 3.5 billion gold rubles total). From 1932, all Soviet exports declined in physical terms, not just in revenue, but agricultural exports declined faster than industrial ones. Ginzburg, Vneshniaia torgovlia SSSR, 67, 72. Prices changed favorably toward agriculture, when one takes into consideration more than grain and the legalized markets for selling “surpluses.”
6. E. H. Carr, writing in the wake of the Soviet Union’s World War II victory, concluded that Stalin’s collectivization and industrialization “were imposed by the objective situation which Soviet Russia in the later 1920s had to face.” Well, yes, if Bolshevik monopoly and anticapitalism were to be retained. There are multiple ways to modernize, but not multiple ways to modernize without the rule of law, political pluralism, private property, and the market. Carr, “Stalin Victorious.” In later years, Carr’s position shifted slightly. Davies, Introduction to Russian Revolution, xxxiv–xxxv; Nove, “The Peasants,” at 389. See also Gnedin, Vykhod iz labirinta, 54.
7. As Alec Nove pointed out, something is a necessity, although not inevitable, if it follows logically from the objective circumstances and the values of the decision maker(s). Nove, “Was Stalin Really Necessary?” reprinted in Nove, Was Stalin Really Necessary?, 17–39; Grossman, Review. See also Millar and Nove, “Debate on Collectivization”; and Brown and Cairncross, “Alec Nove.” The otherwise trenchant Millar incorrectly averred that collectivization was “an unmitigated policy disaster,” failing to distinguish between economic and political outcome. See Swianiewicz, Forced Labor, 91.
8. Maksimenkov, Sumbur, 52. Another scholar has asserted that Stalin spent as much time on culture as foreign policy and military affairs. Gromov, Stalin, 6. On formalization of Stalin’s role in culture, see Khlevniuk, Stalinskoe politbiuro, 112–3 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 113 d. 818, l. 10), 141, 143; Khlevniuk, Politbiuro, 67, 112.
9. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 218.
10. Trotsky supported establishment of a non-party literary journal to focus and multiply their efforts in favorable directions, and proposed that the censorship organ, Glavlit, compile a register of artists, in order to track them. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 36–7 (APRF, f. 3, op. 34, d. 185, l. 8–10: June 30, 1922).
