The Great Terror

Even admitting the basic validity of the crash programs, the Party had not by 1930 had time to prepare adequate technical and managerial staffs or to educate the workers and peasants. Hence, everything had to be handled on the basis of myth and coercion rather than rationality and cooperation. The new proletariat was “alienated” even more thoroughly than the old. In October 1930, the first decree was issued forbidding the free movement of labor, followed two months later by one that forbade factories to employ people who had left their previous place of work without permission. At the same time, unemployment relief was abolished on the grounds that “there was no more unemployment.” In January 1931 came the first law introducing prison sentences for violation of labor discipline—confined for the time being to railwaymen. February brought the compulsory Labor Books for all industrial and transport workers. In March, punitive measures against negligence were announced, followed by a decree holding workers responsible for damage done to instruments or materials. Preferential rations for “shock brigades” were introduced, and in 1932 the then very short food supplies were put under the direct control of the factory managers through the introduction of a kind of truck-system for allocation by results. July 1932 saw the abrogation of Article 37 of the 1922 Labor Code, under which the transfer of a worker from one enterprise to another could be effected only with his consent. On 7 August 1932 the death penalty was introduced for theft of State or collective property—a law which was immediately applied on a large scale. From November 1932, a single day’s unauthorized absence from work became punishable by instant dismissal. Finally, on 27 December 1932, came the reintroduction of the internal passport, denounced by Lenin as one of the worst stigmata of Tsarist backwardness and despotism.

The trade union system became simply an appendage of the State. Tomsky’s view that “it is impossible simultaneously to manage production on a commercial basis and to express and defend the workers’ economic interests” and that “first wages must be raised, and only then can we expect a rise in productivity” were publicly rejected at the IXth Trade Union Congress in April 1932, and his successor Shvernik put forward instead, as “the trade unions’ most important task,” the mass introduction of “piecework on the basis of … norms”—that is, the rigid payment-by-result which was to be the instrument of sweating the worker over the following decades.

However, the workers did not, on the whole, die. Industrial advances were made. The system of coercion, which became institutionalized at a less desperate level, worked in the sense that industry grew. It is clear that other methods could have produced much greater advance at far less human cost. But there were tangible results, and the Party could feel that the policy had proved successful.

Stalin’s other evident political objective had also been attained. In the struggle with the people, there was no room for neutrality. Loyalty could be called for from the Party membership on a war basis. He could demand absolute solidarity and use all rigor in stamping out weakness. The atmosphere of civil war resembled that of the foreign wars which autocrats have launched, throughout history, to enable them to silence the voices of criticism, to eliminate waverers. It was, once again, a question of “My party right or wrong.” The oppositionists made no move. The Menshevik Abramovitch is not being unfair when he says, “The famine evoked no reaction on the part of Trotsky, who found time and space to write of the ‘dreadful persecution’ of his own partisans in Russia and to denounce Stalin for the latter’s falsification of Trotsky’s biography. The ‘proletarian humanist’ Bukharin and the tempestuous Rykov likewise remained silent.”⁵³

Bukharin was, however, beginning to understand that “rapid socialization,” involving as it was bound to so much ruthlessness, dehumanized the ruling party. During the Revolution, he said privately, he had seen

things that I would not want even my enemies to see. Yet 1919 cannot even be compared with what happened between 1930 and 1932. In 1919 we were fighting for our lives. We executed people, but we also risked our lives in the process. In the later period, however, we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenseless men, together with their wives and children.⁵⁴