The Leader’s voice in his 1931 speech to the industrial officials and managers had confirmed that there would be no vacillation. The course of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation had been set and there would be no deviation from it. Leader, party and state were wholly determined to reach the plotted destination. Firmness and courage were required. But Stalin was confident. In a sentence that was quickly picked up by official propagandists he declared: ‘There are no fortresses that could not be stormed by Bolsheviks.’ Looking across the audience, he moved to the finale of his speech:35
We have carried out a series of the hardest tasks. We have overthrown capitalism. We have constructed large-scale socialist industry. We have turned the middle peasant on to the path of socialism. We’ve done the most important thing from the viewpoint of construction. There’s still a little left to do: to learn technology and to master science. And when we do that, we’ll have tempos which at present we daren’t even dream about.
And we’ll do that if we really want to!
Stalin was a bureaucrat, conspirator and killer and his politics were of a monstrous species. Yet he was also inspiring. Nobody listening to him on that occasion could fail to be impressed by his performance.
He was summoning his subordinates, in the republic and the provinces as well as in Moscow, to effect a gigantic political and economic transmutation. He knew that he could not know everything that went on. He was adept at getting thousands of officials to show the required zeal by setting out a general policy or handing down fixed delivery quotas. Many subordinates were appalled by the ‘excesses’. But many others — out of conviction, fear or ambition — co-operated eagerly. Once the project had been formulated in 1928–9, officialdom in all Soviet institutions competed with each other to obtain a share of the increased resources. They also aspired to the power and privileges dangled as a bait in front of them. The direction of policy had been made abundantly clear and they wanted to take advantage of the journey about to be embarked upon.36
His summons was successful. The First Five-Year Plan, scheduled to last to the end of 1933, was completed a year ahead of schedule. National income had nearly doubled since the tax-year 1927–8. Gross industrial output had risen by a remarkable 137 per cent. Within industry, the output of capital goods registered a still more impressive increase of 285 per cent. The total employed labour force had soared from 11.3 million under the New Economic Policy to 22.8 million. The figures have to be treated with caution. Stalin and his associates were never averse to claiming more for their achievements than they should have done; and indeed they themselves derived information from lower echelons of party and government which systematically misled them. Disruption was everywhere in the economy.37 Ukraine, south Russia and Kazakhstan were starving. The Gulag heaved with prisoners. Nevertheless the economic transformation was no fiction. The USSR under Stalin’s rule had been pointed decisively in the direction of becoming an industrial, urban society. This had been his great objective. His gamble was paying off for him, albeit not for his millions of victims. Magnitogorsk and the White Sea–Baltic Canal were constructed at the expense of the lives of Gulag convicts, Ukrainian peasants and even undernourished, overworked factory labourers.
Stalin had once paraded before the party as the paladin of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. As Party General Secretary he had ordered searches of the archives and exposed every disagreement between his enemies — Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin — and Lenin. Stalin himself had fallen out badly with Lenin in 1922–3. Yet when Trotski’s American supporter Max Eastman published documents on that dispute in 1925, Stalin got the Politburo to command Trotski to reject them as forgeries. Implicitly he was making the claim that he alone loyally tended the flame of Lenin’s memory.
