The Importance of Being Djucashvili
Wiles, Peter
The writer had the good fortune to be on March 6, 1963, at the Institute for the Advanced Contemplation of Human Af fairs in Fordograd. The annual self-criticism meeting in the...
...However many observers agreed with Stalin, I am bound to ask why economic growth in, say, 1929 under a continued NEP could not have been as great as in 1928 or 1927...
...tary technicalities, when you're supposed to be talking about Historical Explanations—I know as well as you do that the infantry wouldn't fight because it was made up of peasants who resented collectivization, and that it began to put up serious resistance only when the news filtered through to it that the Germans were killing their prisoners...
...Great nations are not subjected to great historical sequences of events at the whim of one man...
...Anyway, which would you rather do: starve for eight years and feast for one, or keep up an unspectacular progress throughout...
...V.F.: The trouble with all you people is that, whatever your personal views, you can only see Communist countries through Communist spectacles, and specifically through the spectacles of the particular Communist clique that is in power at the time...
...continued dependence on the USSR she cannot—and her im ports have shrunk...
...it is as if Soviet rule had begun in 1928...
...For the rest the parallelism is so exact as to be suspicious...
...Or rather they would have carried the official plan through: the First Five-Year Plan called for merely 13 per cent collectivization by 1932...
...Interruption in strong Albanian accent: "There is...
...If China is to be a great power she must establish her military prestige—and she has, in the Himalayas...
...When he prevented the German CP from forming an alliance with the Socialists, he dealt his own country a worse blow than collectivization...
...well, in the Second Five-Year Plan Stalin was also conciliatory to the people in order to purge the party...
...10 The official index of 115 in 1952 is 6% above that of 108 in 1937, allowing correctly for territorial change...
...The rate of growth in 1928-32 was about 9% (1928 prices) or 4%% (1937 prices), making no allowance for quality deterioration or livestock slaughter...
...Several, of course, are Sovietologists of this and that speciality...
...Trotsky, Stalin, New York, Harper, 1941, pp...
...H.D.: Then growth must have been all the more rapid in 1932-37, to reach the acknowledged levels of 1937...
...Moreover, the Yugoslav parallel surely won't stand up...
...There is an open and paid-up member of a Western Communist party, some are fellow-travelers, one is an orthodox Western economist specializing in the industrialization of Southeast Asia, another a professional historian whose "period" is Peter the Great...
...7 Abram Bergson, The Real National Income of Soviet Russia Since 1928, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1961...
...Why did his infantry surrender in hundreds of thousands, and what was it that finally made them fight...
...They did not requisition the seed grain or export grain during the subsequent famine...
...Peterburg and the Kolyma gold fields on the bones of slaves: on the contrary, it's counter-productive...
...v.F.: A weak government can't buck, but what about a strong one determined to do precisely that...
...I reject utterly all a priori claims of any particular discipline to monopolize a subject matter, or the right to give all explanations within a particular field...
...therefore he was the most disastrous of all possible leaders...
...Your statement leaves open extreme differences in the degree of general beastliness...
...But before we go on to your view that the misery was productive of something, I must quarrel with the notion that Russians can only be governed tyrannically, and would otherwise revolt...
...The annual self-criticism meeting in the Explana tion Division was slightly expanded in view of its decennial character, and a visitor unknown to me was permitted to help the self-criticism along by simply making criticism—after all, said the Fellows of the In stitute, it's supposed to be "criticism and self-criticism" anyway, isn't it...
...v.F.: Touch...
...Enver Hoxha, on sabbatical leave from Tirana...
...and this was decided upon after the grain crisis of 1927—which wasn't a crisis anyway—had been settled...
...Indeed one historian has: George Kennan.' 8 In my humble way I am quoting him —with a few extrapolations...
...13-15...
...11 Cf...
...Bergson, 7 for instance, compares the national incomes merely of 1928 and 1937...
...18 Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1961, Chap...
...And anyway Yugoslavia isn't Russia...
...Why not...
...it doesn't touch the question of the optimum of tyranny...
...Some of you are commendably free from that sort of cant, and never confuse what is with what ought to be...
...It would have been an inevitable consequence had it not happened first...
...v.F.: That stuff about collectivization being necessary to release Iabor for industry has no basis in fact or logic...
...Surely historians at least should rejoice in the particular explanation of the particular phenomenon...
...Bukharin spoke in this sense at the 17th CPSU Congress in 1934...
...I agree with every word you have just said, and can only reply that a lesser tyrant would surely have done just as well...
...16 John D. Littlepage and D. Bess, In Search of Soviet Gold, London, Harrap, 1939, Chap...
...I am thinking of the compulsory grain deliveries...
...Cf...
...I'm merely taking a different view on particular might-have-beens...
...The original sequence of events resulted from a single personality...
...v.F.: Then why didn't it...
...That is, he did so at a moment when the grain panic was truly over...
...H.D.: Lenin said it was growing all the time...
...There is no reason to suppose that this myth is confined to the academic mind...
...They did not drive the ablest peasants off the land...
...and my hypothetical lesser tyrant would have been able to skim off the same amount of capital, while everybody would have been happier...
...v.F.: Only if "economic developments" be taken to mean governmentimposed misery...
...Yet we know that the latter years of the NEP, even after the easy period of basic reconstruction, showed heavy and growing government investment, and rapid progress in industry, education and real wages...
...Your Western statisticians make no allowance for the decline in quality, in both manufacturing and building...
...What technical economic obstacles were there...
...Stalinism is very tough, and you need periods of relaxation...
...v.F.: Then there you are...
...v.F.: Only this: that they would all, if faced with the responsibility, have shrunk from the use of force, and therefore they would not have carried the plan through...
...The principal exponent of the Stalin-was-historically-necessary myth is Mao Tsetung...
...Secondly, as I've already tried to demonstrate, Stalin actually slowed up Soviet economic development...
...H.D.: You forget that the political power of the Soviet state was threatened by the kulaks...
...To say a thing was inevitable has no other meaning than to say that all the mighthavebeens have been seriously examined and proved impossible...
...What threat, concretely, did the kulaks pose in that year...
...and that she relaxed when she became richer, while poor China, which now seeks development, is Stalinist in turn...
...6 Nor in fact was any emergency measure needed in autumn 1927 to ensure the grain supply, nor did the measures taken actually ensure it...
...The plan involved the resettlement of peasants into large specially constructed "agro-cities," with apartment buildings instead of farmsteads, and a further reduction of household plots...
...and, three, peasants would have done an honest day's work...
...This was his reaction to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 (cf...
...I can see no important difference...
...But now with more assurance I tell you that China and Russia are subject to one law they can't buck and that in the Russian case this goes all the way back to Peter the Great...
...The curious thing is that as I revised my manuscript it didn't seem to matter much which of the Fellows had spoken which line...
...H.D.: A few kulaks are good: many are bad...
...11 Of course, it was different bits of the total that grew, but that seems to be the picture...
...Kirov was a leader in it, Trotsky called it inevitable, even from exile...
...x.D.: So we've caught you: you do reject the very foundation of the social sciences...
...6; Warren Nutter, The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1962, p. 348...
...H.n.: Well, none of us—er, excuse me, Mr...
...At this point coffee was brought in, and the meeting broke up.] 1 About in October 1926...
...Now indeed the Fellows this year are of the most various views...
...If Stalin himself saw this, why not Mao...
...Nay more, the astounding fact is that there is no expert Western calculation of national income growth in 1928-32, any more than there is one for the last years of the NEP...
...I have already pointed out one capital error of foreign policy and several of economics...
...H.D.: Cut the cackle and get back to my growth figures...
...Look at the NEP.3 There is not a single competent Western statistical study of the NEP in existence...
...Think of the growth of industry and towns and education...
...It leaves on the field of play infinitely more moderate people like Witte and Stolypin, somewhat more moderate people like Lenin, and innumerable mighthavebeens like Trotsky and Kirov and even Bukharin-Rykov-Tomsky...
...When Tito was a Stalinist he was either Stalin's obedient subordinate or trying to recover Stalin's good graces...
...The plans were shelved mainly because of the enormous construction costs entailed and probable peasant opposition...
...V.F.: That is mere dogma...
...the Communists may be in crime, but they are not in error...
...Was it, however big or small, greater than in 1927...
...You don't have to build St...
...The fact is that what happened happened, and even the most hard-boiled Western statisticians show an increase in growth after 1928...
...Why should he be your mentor in what was and was not avoidable...
...Why not...
...Indeed, you have yourself just exploded a myth: that Stalin didn't invest in agriculture...
...2 The agrogorod scheme was conceived in 1949, apparently with Stalin's approval, by Nikita Khrushchev...
...Thus the Albanians, if I may say so, chose it because they hate the Yugoslays, and persisted in their choice because geography protects them from coercion: the Czechs, Bulgars and East Germans flirted with Chinese Stalinism, but are unprotected by geography and are coming to heel...
...The people would have revolted against a milder leader—especially the Russian people, who were and remain fundamentally a band of disorderly and undisciplined peasants...
...Millions of deaths from starvation she can easily afford—and she has...
...yet there was force to many of his contentions, which I reproduce here as nearly verbatim as I can...
...As such, therefore, he will here be identified...
...9 Solomon M. Schwartz, Labor in the Soviet Union, New York, Praeger, 1951, Chap...
...Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1948, p. 569 and W. Reswick, I Dreamt Revolution, Chicago, Regnery, 1952, Chaps...
...12 It is certain that on the major issue of foreign policy Stalin alone was cynical enough and anti-Semitic enough and isolationist enough to favor Hitler...
...He has chosen to discard the merely criminal element, which is a further disproof of the view that that forms any necessary part in the syndrome...
...Also present were a high air force officer from a NATO country, of the "clobber-the-bastards-to-preserve-our-spiritualvalues" school, an elderly Russian emigre of violently monarchical views, and Mr...
...The law is that it's a hard world, and a potential great power will never become one if it remains economically underdeveloped, and to develop you have to have a tyrant...
...and that not only in 1928-32, the entity that Sovietologists have neglected to separate out, but again in 1937-40, which is a well known and well documented period...
...v.F.: OK, if the facts warrant it, I do just that...
...What I wanted to point out was that when the invasion came the country was ready for it, and only such a tyrant could have done it...
...To hold that Stalinism as a human phenomenon was without other real explanation than chance and individual personality is to reject the foundation of the social sciences...
...Now a Communist government is as strong as any the world has known: in particular it possesses in its ideology and its party an almost perfect incentive and an almost perfect executive instrument...
...Chinese history shows Mao turning the heat on and off as with a tap: first hot, with the Three Antis and the Five Antis and collectivization...
...a.D.: Well, you may have something there...
...H.D.: Because, of course, you can't buck the large technological and social tides of history...
...Most alternative leaders were Jews, and the one alternative Gentile, Kirov, is known to have opposed friendship with Hitler...
...As for your Yugoslavia, it went through a nasty Stalinist period in 1947-50, and China has been doing the same since the Hundred Flowers wilted in 1957...
...Abram Bergson, op...
...H.D.: But where would these arms have come from...
...The word "necessity" is ambiguous...
...H.D.: What lesser tyrant...
...I dispute the wisdom of even one per cent collectivization, but Stalin suddenly went off the rails in late 1929 13 and achieved 71 per cent by 1934...
...Take, for instance, the "tide" of an emergent managerial elite...
...So agricultural incomes would have been higher, indeed much higher...
...I am merely pointing out that they fell short of what Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky achieved...
...16 and 17...
...It is rather their extreme docility that impresses me...
...Why could a worker get no milk or meat any more...
...x.n.: If only because history and sociology and political theory and economics are serious subjects...
...They evidently couldn't have had both the guns and the morale...
...I might add that with the Hundred Flowers Mao hoped to use popular criticism to correct the party...
...In face of this record and of our ignorance, how can you say the misery of the First Five-Year Plan was necessary for further growth...
...Hoxha, few of us—would wish to deny that that was counter-productive, and the entirely avoidable product of Stalin's paranoid personality...
...6 Compare the famines of 1891 and 1932...
...v.F.: You see how when you really get down to cases, and substitute a few brass tacks for the passive acceptance of myth, I am rendered helpless...
...I think they are sometimes very stupid, just like other people...
...17 Cf...
...Do you think that what has happened since the Hundred Flowers has been good for China...
...And yet, you know, despite the naivete, if you will pardon the strong expression, of some of the work done at this Institute—and I include here my own—I still say that Stalin's regime was an inevitable consequence of rapid industrialization...
...376-382) and the probable medical murder of Frunze (in November 1925: Fischer, op., cit., p. 489...
...13 Cf., e.g., I. Deutscher, Stalin, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1949, pp...
...But then these parallels are only meant to be general guidelines...
...But: Yugoslav development and —dare I say it?—Cuban development are not at all the same...
...Many of these little countries—Bulgaria, Mongolia, North Vietnam, North Korea—may be dismissed as just areas that are only formally outside the boundaries of the two great poles of attraction...
...I personally, Heaven knows, have little sympathy for Communists, or communism...
...But if we don't press the analogy too far into details, it surely holds...
...v.F.: Well, at least you are a consistent "Stalinist...
...die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, the real is the rational, whatever happens—except possibly the Great Purge and the Doctors' Plot—is right...
...Why didn't agricultural production increase from 1937 to 1952 ? 10 If we may exonerate the kolkhoz from the 1932 famine" it's just a total absurdity to say it was necessary to feed people: it didn't feed people, while the NEP did...
...Johnson, "is seldom so innocently engaged as when he is making money...
...Moreover, the new industrial system led to the most notorious waste of labor, with people standing about waiting for raw materials, and so on...
...You have admitted that without collectivization the country would have been better prepared to fight, that the Ukrainian villages would not have welcomed the enemy with the traditional bread and salt, that all those troops and all that territory would not have been lost...
...H.D.: Well, of course—if you're going to get into mere chance mili...
...What you have now to explain is the astounding coincidence—as you must view it—that when the USSR was poor and needed building up she was Stalinist...
...Do you think Bukharin, whom you evidently favor so much, could have brought the country through the war...
...Not necessarily in others...
...Initially he seemed to be of the type that, following Professor Lord David Cecil, one might call a flat-brow, or, following the late Lord Berners, a dry blanket...
...The Second Five-Year Plan was indeed a remarkable period, because superficially the economy grew as fast as during the First FYP, but quality improved as well...
...You haven't even begun to prove the necessity of Stalinism...
...x.D.: I can only repeat: so great and decisive an event, largely repeating itself in another country, can't have been due to personal whim...
...4 Cf...
...nor do they deduct livestock slaughter as depreciation of capital...
...How could rich peasants pose a growing threat to such a society...
...It is true of course that Mao has done some things, such as pursue a forward foreign policy, which Stalin would certainly not have done, even with an atom bomb...
...Be specific...
...As to preparedness, I omit for fairness' sake the undeniable fact that Stalin was not tactically ready for war and rejected copious intelligence as to German intentions...
...V.F.: I agree that so much misery could only have been imposed by a very strong dictator, and must also have resulted in some kind of dictatorship...
...Meanwhile population rose 16...
...v.F.: Oh yes, well, your figures are simply wrong, that's all...
...Compared with other nations their history shows no specially high frequency of revolt and disorder, only a specially high frequency of tyranny...
...After he left, however, the Fellows agreed on their diagnosis: he was a vulgar factologist...
...They did not, by their policies, ensure the slaughter of half the livestock...
...Why was there rationing in the towns between 1929 and 1935...
...15 Now you know how paranoid Stalin was about security in border provinces: why do you think he did that...
...Any Soviet leader—I repeat, any Soviet leader—except Stalin would have used the German CP differently, and Hitler would never have taken power...
...And only a great tyrant could have done that...
...319-320...
...You have drawn a surprisingly impressive analogy...
...The 1927 harvest turned out to be quite normal, and the 1928 harvest, being a little bigger, actually permitted less forcible methods of requisition to be successful...
...The writer had the good fortune to be on March 6, 1963, at the Institute for the Advanced Contemplation of Human Af fairs in Fordograd...
...cit., p. 225...
...its repetition is due to the deliberate decision to imitate on the part of another single personality, or perhaps of a committee of personalities...
...But this leaves a simply enormous range of choices open to a strong government...
...x.D.: Don't interrupt...
...I, who say the thing was not inevitable, am neither more nor less guilty than you...
...two, there would have been less petty theft...
...In 1941 on the other hand, the USSR had, or shortly acquired, very powerful allies indeed...
...In both cases it is a wholly subjective choice...
...V.F.: And Bukharin said it wasn't...
...footnote 2. 12 Boris Nikolaewski, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, October 1956...
...Kirov had done so beforehand, but at the Congress itself he refrained, for the sake of unity...
...al chestnut...
...So did Buk harin...
...Yet Stalin bucked that trend very nicely, and so did Hitler...
...However, I grant you that there may well be an esoteric myth of the necessity of Stalinism among Communist elites, or at least among the Chinese Communist elite...
...You can't have that kind of industrialization without that kind of leader...
...The kolkhoz was necessary to ensure the food, not the labor, supply to the growing towns...
...Moreover, I say it wasn't, and it seems to me I am a better judge of that than any Marxist...
...H.D.: It is easy to apply hindsight to the 1927 harvest, and chase might-have-beens...
...But of course if such a myth has arisen, if Mao sees himself as a Chinese Stalin, later to be succeeded by a Chinese Khrushchev, then his attitude is in itself an adequate explanation for Chinese Stalinism, and the latter doesn't have to be any more objectively desirable or inevitable than Soviet Stalinism...
...Indeed as a social scientist myself I am bound to do so if the facts tell me to...
...It also fails to explain Mongolia...
...The view that Stalinism is necessary for poor Communist countries, on an Asiatic standard of living, brakes down when we look at Czechoslovakia and East Germany...
...What makes you think it would have been different under either of them...
...Why did white bread disappear from the towns...
...So I am far from denying that the Stalinist growth rates exceeded, say, the American...
...Moreover, you have to explain to me why Tito didn't fall when he decollectivized his agriculture in 1953—an action he took to remove political tensions and strengthen his regime...
...14 Forcible collectivization was quite clearly not a way out of the agricultural difficulties that Trotsky's industrialization policies entailed...
...v.F.: Well, here is a dissertation subject for someone...
...A man," said Dr...
...Besides, Stalin actually reduced the work week after I928.9 The labor supply story is rubbish, however often it's repeated...
...8 The 71/2% figure is in 1926-7 prices, and based mainly on Kontrolnye tsifry narodnovo kboziaistva SSSR na 1928-1929 god, Moscow, Gosplan, 1929...
...I also know no economics, and cannot judge that side of the case, but as a technical necessity of power these people had to be liquidated for the survival of the regime...
...It was the new command economy that caused the increase, so there must have been technical obstacles to growth by the old methods...
...The situation was structured for masochism, so they let his abuse run on...
...V.F.: Well, first, to repeat, most of these little countries are not just "areas," they have made—or tried to make—independent choices, and these do not conform to your rule...
...Of course we have here a little difference—Mao's idea of purging the party does not include torture, false confession and liquidation...
...The Discussion HISTORICAL DETERMINIST: Well, here we are again to discuss the annuReprinted with permission from Problems of Communism...
...W. Duranty, USSR, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1944, Chaps...
...H.D.: You are knocking down a straw man...
...For without collectivization, one, there would have been no livestock slaughter...
...H.D.: True, but that leaves the heart of the thesis untouched...
...I had originally identified their remarks by name...
...v.F.: That is so vague a statement I might agree with it...
...then cold, with Bandung and the Hundred Flowers...
...That Tito has not permitted kulaks is his own error...
...I had as a matter of fact long been puzzled by the rationale of the Great Purge...
...Even Trotsky condemned the use of force...
...My objection is to the necessity of Chinese Stalinism, not its existence...
...x.D.: I cannot dispute the probability of what you say on foreign policy...
...What makes you so sure that the new Soviet boarding schools will not indoctrinate the young with the party spirit, as they are meant to do...
...To err is human...
...Its leaders or leader operate secretly, and whatever they say is automatically above criticism...
...v.F.: On the contrary, Yugoslavia is, so to speak, Russia...
...And not only did he tax the grain...
...Besides, I bet you never said that until you read Khrushchev's Secret Speech...
...Moreover, in 1933 kulaks were deliberately tolerated along the Manchurian border of the Soviet Union...
...In fact all the small Communist countries have made a choice connected in one way or another with geography, and not with their stage of development...
...Yet, it was during this latter period, the autumn of 1928, that Stalin executed his final swing to the left...
...Alec Nove, "Was Stalin Really Necessary?," Encounter (London), April 1962...
...v.F.: In this case, or rather in these two cases, yes...
...I have therefore thought it politic to preserve the anonymity of these speakers, whom I have labeled collectively, Historical Determinist...
...As imaginative scientists, clever mechanics and willing subjects (look at the history of their church) they would seem to me to be an exceptionally easy people to govern and industrialize...
...Ed 3 New Economic Policy, practiced by the Soviet government 1921-28 with the aim of restoring the economy by making concessions to private enterprise in agriculture, trade, and industry...
...I except, for fairness' sake, such earlier intimations of Stalinism as the possible poisoning of Lenin (L...
...I deny utterly the necessity of that misery...
...5 Count Sergei Yulevich Witte (1849-1915), Russian Prime Minister in 1903-6...
...He was still a Bukharinite when he began to be a Stalinist.' H.D.: All right, don't quibble...
...As to an economic impasse, this is a loose and meaningless phrase...
...The visitor made a strange impression on me...
...I repeat, then: if Stalin had had a different father and mother, we wouldn't be sitting here today...
...even the party would have revolted...
...indeed a technical miscalculation—as you surely well know...
...And then in 1937 the Great Purge had begun...
...H.D.: He didn't allow actual kulaks: there's a very low upper limit to holdings...
...There have to be objective reasons...
...It just is not true that he starved agriculture of capital: on the contrary, he made it provide its own capital, by compelling accumulations in the "indivisible fund...
...Well, the kulaks were making money...
...V.F.: If this fantastic event was avoidable, why wasn't collectivization avoidable...
...v.F.: It is certainly necessary that there be no technical obstacle to the choice made...
...Moreover Witte had opposed the venture...
...v.F.: But in that war Russia had no allies, and even then her defeat was really only a naval one...
...It is rather the circumferential minorities who gave, and give, trouble to the government in Moscow [as in] their reaction to two of Stalin's major lunacies: collectivization and the agrogorod scheme.2 H.D.: Nonetheless you have admitted that such a dictator was necessary...
...through his kolkhoz system he could also force the peasant to save...
...Military morale is entirely on a par with tanks and guns in historical status, and it was not a matter of chance...
...But the other leaders, too, mostly favored collectivization...
...14 In his message to the CPSU Central Committee of March 20, 1930...
...This means that for good or for ill, and however much you niggle at this or that detail of the reasoning, each independent Communist regime needs its Stalin to establish it, liquidate its enemies and develop the economy...
...then hot again, with the Great Leap Forward and the communes...
...I think you are all taking an attitude I can only call a sort of intellectual trade unionism...
...But before we leave him, what makes you think there would have been a war...
...Just as Witte, so Stalin had to tax the peasant, and Stalin had a more efficient way...
...And that the insistence on technical and above all on part-time higher education, will not succeed in its objective—to prevent the emerging of a new consciousness among the younger educated generation and of a managerial elite that could dominate the party...
...What I should have said was that the compulsory deliveries were necessary as a source of taxation...
...H.D.: This may seem cynical, but I do...
...there have to be no objective impediments...
...You are always prating of brass tacks— name me a name...
...In particular their hostility or friendliness to communism seemed to be irrelevant...
...Stalin was a prerequisite, not so much an unavoidable consequence, of the economic developments...
...I don't even agree to your inclusion of North Vietnam there, since this country, though as poor as any, has still in fact not made its choice...
...Peter Wiles, "Die Macht in Vordergrund," (Soviet) Survey (London), April 1959...
...Now look carefully at that intermediate "cool" period: Is it your doctrine that it was an unfortunate aberration which harmed China, or what...
...16 The average annual rate of growth of per capita GNP in 1937-40 was 1...
...Some of you lacquer things over with a Hegelian morality...
...What about this famed strategic readiness...
...17 Or again, wouldn't you have said in 1953 that mass terror and show trials were impossible in the 20th century, that this was the Age of Reason...
...And incidentally, I question your inclusion of history among the -ologies...
...That is, we have here two rich countries whose leaders needed Stalinism for their own political survival, and a poor country that always follows in the Soviet wake anyhow...
...The latter was caused, not as is commonly supposed, by the collectivization of two years previously, but by Stalin's panicky requisition of the seed grain for military stock...
...v.F.: But they did not lay equal burdens...
...v.F.: I make no apology for chasing might-have-beens, since that is precisely what you yourself did in your opening statement...
...Without collectiv ization, no industrialization, you know...
...Why then should not the whim of one man be the principal determinant of history...
...Movement at the back of the room) And you will be hard put to it to extract any pattern explaining that choice...
...Now I am indeed afraid of their courage and their discipline, but not of their intellects...
...x.n.: No, I would compare it to the Soviet Second Five-Year Plan: when Stalin legalized the private plots and the one-cow-per-family and the kolkhoz market, developed light industry more rapidly than heavy, switched to the more agreeable foreign policy of the Popular Front, and substituted Socialist Realism for the mere assassination of literature that had preceded it...
...His interlocutors were sundry senior Fellows, all household names, of course, to the readers of this magazine...
...16 I therefore utterly deny the operation of any objective necessity, and now that the first shock of your analogy between the Hundred Flowers period and the Second Five-Year Plan has worn off, I admit the parallel gladly and turn it against you...
...Thereafter, of course, it will relax...
...Pause) The question is not rhetorical...
...Think of the machine tractor stations—they had begun before collectivization, and were actually servicing the kulaks...
...While we can't really be certain until this work is done, I present my own rough calculation: real national income grew at an annual rate of 71/2 per cent in 1926-28, and at rather less in 1928-32...
...VULGAR FACTOLOGIST: No, because the terror, lawlessness, the falsification, the application of extreme state measures against senior party opponents, all began twelve months before Stalin swung left...
...And here let me admit that I'm shifting my ground a little...
...In those intervening years people lived and died...
...but surely if he could buy internal peace at the expense of allowing individual peasants, Russia could have had internal peace at the expense of allowing kulaks...
...v.F.: No, nor had I Bukharin in mind: he would surely have lost out to someone, he was such a natural murderee...
...The ideology is very flexible and justifies any policy in the short run, many policies in the long...
...v.F.: Stalin didn't liquidate the regime's enemies, he liquidated his own...
...x.n.: Come, come, this is ridiculous...
...Indeed nearly every Communist regime is more or less free today to choose or not to choose Stalinism...
...Look at Witte, for instance: he was not tyrannical enough and the result was the Japanese victory of 1904...
...He is applying it, including the relaxation period...
...Victor Serge, Vie et wort de Trotsky, Paris, 1951, p. 221...
...n.n.: Yes, I might have made that error...
...In 1928 there had long been an over-supply of rural laborers flocking into the towns, and there wasn't even full employment in the towns until two years after collectivization...
...Why then should a Marxist analysis of Soviet politics in 1928, or indeed any other year, have been right...
...H.D.: Because they had come to an impasse: everybody, even Mensheviks and Monarchists, said so at the time.4 The kulaks had to be liquidated, the grain supply assured, and the walls of the "little stone house" of the Soviet economy broken through...
...Moreover there was nothing new in any of this: Peter the Great and Witte 5 also laid such burdens on the peasantry...
...You don't shoot the tractor-driver, if you're paying him...
...But you do all take the view that "the man on the spot knows best...
Vol. 11 • July 1964 • No. 3
