Members of Stalin’s group were identifying historic oppositional activity with current state treason. Veteran heroes of the communist party were being denounced as mercenary agents of Western interests. They were like rabbits rigid with fear as the fox approaches. Flight was anyway impossible. All they could hope for was that the rest of the Politburo would somehow restrain the General Secretary.29 But the political mood was not encouraging. Stalin had quietly returned to the assumption that the surest way of strengthening both his personal position and the buoyancy of economic development was to exert heavy pressure on Gosplan and the People’s Commissariats for raised industrial tempos. Anticipating opposition, he strove to exploit efforts made by individual workers to challenge the conventional methods of production. In the Don Basin the miner Alexei Stakhanov was reported as having hewed 102 tons of coal in a single six-hour stint in August 1935. This was fourteen times the norm set by the mine’s managers. Stalin took this as demonstration that passive resistance to the Second Five-Year Plan persisted. Stakhanov was summoned to Moscow and showered with honours and gifts. The Stakhanovite movement was spread to all sectors of the economy, even to farms and to the railways.
Stakhanovites could not break records without managers making special arrangements for them. Other workers were compelled to give auxiliary support. This disrupted the pattern of general production and output was negatively affected. Moreover, the Stakhanovites cut corners in their efforts. Broken machinery was often the result. Yet Stalin ignored the evidence. Scientific approaches to production were abandoned as the enthusiasm for getting workers to earn privileges by increased output prevailed.30
Things could have turned out badly for the specialists in the economy — the managers, foremen, engineers and planners — if ever the suspicion of them encouraged by the Stakhanovite movement had taken the penal form applied to former oppositionists. It was a close-run thing. Stalin in 1935 did not confine his persecuting passion to the dual repression of former party oppositionists and current suspect party members. He also turned his anger upon whole social categories of citizens. The NKVD was ordered to clear Leningrad of people who by virtue of their occupation or status before 1917 were deemed intrinsically hostile to the USSR. Aristocrats, landlords, businessmen and their families in their thousands were expelled to smaller towns and villages with just the minimum of personal possessions. Over eleven thousand individuals were deported by the end of March from Leningrad,31 and the policy was reproduced in the other large cities. The Politburo under Stalin’s leadership was beginning to purge the cities of alleged anti-Soviet elements in much the same way as it had done to the rural areas by means of dekulakisation from 1929.
Yet the current specialists, although they were harassed at work, were not strongly persecuted unless they visibly obstructed official measures. They benefited from the desire of individuals in Stalin’s entourage to hang on to them. Ordzhonikidze, People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry since 1932, protected his managers and planners not only because he thought they were being defamed but also because he recognised that he would not fulfil his institution’s quotas for the Five-Year Plan without their expertise.
The benefits of economic consolidation were anyway beginning to be demonstrated. Steel output in 1935 was over double the amount for 1932.32 The Second Five-Year Plan, like the First, was recurrently altered as it was being implemented. Among the inevitable modifications was an increase in the budget for armaments production after Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933 and the USSR had to assume that war with the Third Reich might soon occur.33 This obviously involved a deferment of achieving the goals set for consumer goods. But generally the Kremlin was satisfied with the progress being achieved. Although policy was made and announced in an atmosphere of crisis, Politburo members including Stalin gave no impression in their correspondence or discussions that they thought that there was serious active resistance to their purposes or that advances in economic development were not being made. The progress continued into 1936 and beyond. Gross industrial output in 1937, the final year of the Second Five-Year Plan, had increased by three fifths over output in 1932. Even agriculture began to recover from the traumas of collectivisation. Gross agricultural output rose by about a half in the same period.34
