Gulag

With notable finesse, Stalin had also finished off his most important rival for power, Leon Trotsky. First he discredited Trotsky, then deported him to an island off the Turkish coast, and then used him to set a precedent. When Yakov Blyumkin, an OGPU agent and ardent Trotsky supporter, visited his hero in his Turkish exile—and returned with a message from Trotsky to his supporters—Stalin had Blyumkin sentenced and executed upon his return. By doing so, he established the state’s willingness to use the full force of its repressive organs not only against members of other socialist parties and the old regime but also against dissidents within the Bolshevik Party itself.¹³

However, in 1929, Stalin was not yet the dictator he would become by the end of the following decade. It is more accurate to say that in that year Stalin put in place the policies that would ultimately enshrine his own power and transform the Soviet economy and society beyond recognition at the same time. Western historians variously labeled these policies the “Revolution from Above” or the “Stalinist Revolution.” Stalin himself called them the “Great Turning Point.”

At the heart of Stalin’s revolution was a new program of extremely— almost hysterically—rapid industrialization. At that time, the Soviet Revolution had still not brought real material improvement to the lives of most people. On the contrary, the years of Revolution, civil war, and economic experimentation had led to greater impoverishment. Now Stalin, perhaps sensing the growing popular discontent with the Revolution, set out to change ordinary people’s living conditions—radically.

To that end, the Soviet government in 1929 approved a new “Five-Year Plan,” an economic program that called for a 20 percent annual increase in industrial output. Food rationing returned. For a time, the seven-day week—five days of work, two days of rest—was abandoned. Instead, workers rested in shifts, so as to prevent any factory from ever shutting down. On high-priority projects, thirty-hour shifts were not unknown, and some workers stayed on the job an average of 300 hours a month.¹⁴ The spirit of the age, imposed from above but enthusiastically adopted below, was a form of one-upmanship, in which factory owners and bureaucrats, workers and clerks, vied with one another to fulfill the plan, to overfulfill the plan, or at least to propose newer and faster ways of overfulfilling the plan. At the same time, no one was allowed to doubt the wisdom of the plan. This was true at the highest levels: Party leaders who doubted the worth of rushed industrialization did not remain long in office. It was also true at the lowest levels. One survivor of that era remembered marching around his kindergarten classroom, carrying a little banner and chanting:

Five in Four, Five in Four, Five in Four And not in five!

Alas, the meaning of this phrase—that the Five-Year Plan was to be completed in four years—escaped him entirely.¹⁵

As was to be the case with all major Soviet initiatives, the onset of mass industrialization created whole new categories of criminals. In 1926, the Soviet criminal code had been rewritten to include, among other things, an expanded definition of Article 58, which defined “counter-revolutionary” crimes. Formerly a mere paragraph or two, Article 58 now contained eighteen subsections—and the OGPU made use of them all, most notably to arrest technical specialists.¹⁶ Predictably, the high tempo of change could not be met. Primitive technology, applied too quickly, led to mistakes. Someone had to be blamed. Hence the arrests of the “wreckers” and the “saboteurs” whose evil aims were preventing the Soviet economy from living up to the propaganda. Some of the earliest show trials—the Shakhty trial of 1928, the Industrial Party trial of 1930—were in fact trials of engineers and technical intelligentsia. So too was the Metro-Vickers trial of 1933, which attracted a great deal of international attention because it included British citizens as well as Russians, all accused of “espionage and sabotage” on behalf of Great Britain.¹⁷

But there would be other sources of prisoners too. For in 1929, the Soviet regime also accelerated the process of forced collectivization in the countryside, a vast upheaval which was in some ways more profound than the Russian Revolution itself. Within an incredibly short period of time, rural commissars forced millions of peasants to give up their small landholdings and to join collective farms, often expelling them from land their families had tilled for centuries. The transformation permanently weakened Soviet agriculture, and created the conditions for the terrible, devastating famines in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1932 and 1934—famines that killed between six and seven million people.¹⁸ Collectivization also destroyed— forever—rural Russia’s sense of continuity with the past.