Again and again he reverted to tactical, temporary retreats such as had happened with ‘Dizzy with Success’. On holiday by the Black Sea in August 1931 he saw enough for himself to know that collectivisation had reduced ‘a series of districts in west Georgia
He barked out the case for driving the economic transformation at a frenetic pace in a speech to a conference of industrial officials and managers on 4 February 1931:31
To slacken the tempos would be to fall behind. And the backward get beaten. We don’t want to be beaten. No, that’s not what we want. The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish– lords. She was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: ‘You are wretched, you are abundant, you are mighty, you are powerless, Mother Russia.’
The language had an emotional intensity he had not used since Lenin’s funeral. The sonorous phrases hit home like a hammer. The patriotic appeal was unmistakable. The simple metaphor of ‘beating’, repeated again and again, conveyed the urgency of the struggle ahead.
Stalin warned his audience: ‘Such is the law of the exploiters: beat the backward and the weak. The wolf’s law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak — so you are in the wrong and therefore you can be beaten and enslaved.’32 The solution, he insisted, was irresistible:33
We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must close that gap in ten years. Either we do this or we’ll be crushed.
This is what our obligations before the workers and peasants of the USSR dictate to us.
He had no doubt about what could be achieved. At a May Day reception in 1933 he was to declare:34
If the Russians are armed with tanks, aircraft and a marine fleet, they’re invincible, invincible.
But they cannot advance badly armed in the absence of technology, and the whole history of old Russia is summed up in this.
