3


Industrialization and Collectivization

Christopher Read, ed.


THE DRIVE TO INDUSTRIALIZE

For his many admirers and supporters over the decades industrialization was Stalin’s greatest
achievement. Without it the Soviet Union would have been powerless before the Hitlerite onslaught
and not only Soviet but European civilization would have been at risk. The negative features of the
process – its inefficiency and waste but above all the cruelties associated with it in the form of
collectivization, famine and the Gulag – were dismissed as ‘mistakes’ or, more significantly,
unavoidable costs justified by the ultimate victory. We will return to aspects of this debate in
later chapters, pausing only, for the moment, to comment that the argument presupposes that the
‘collateral damage’ of mass death somehow contributed to rather than endangered final success.

The fact that the Soviet leadership decided to embark on an industrialization programme is no
surprise. In the first place, it rose out of the logic of productionism. If Soviet Russia had to
become an advanced, wealthy country in order to create a basis for socialism, only industry could
lift it up. The process would strengthen the crucial proletariat (working class) and weaken the
private-property-loving peasantry who would also be attracted to socialism by the advantages of
large-scale collective farming and the availability of the modern technique and equipment that
modernization would bring. There were other practical imperatives, too. In the forefront of these
was the fundamental administrative issue facing any Russian government, tsarist, Soviet or
capitalist – defence of a sprawling territory with no natural borders. The urgency of the question
was heightened, in Bolshevik minds, by the history of foreign intervention in the revolutionary
wars of 1918-20. Germany, France, Britain, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Finland, Poland, Japan and the
United States had all sent in significant armed forces and controlled or helped themselves to
slices of territory of the former Russian Empire. Around the tenth anniversary of the revolution in
1927 the fear began to grow in Moscow that the capitalist world might awake from its post-world-war
hangover and make a renewed attempt to overthrow its upstart communist competitor. From the
mid-1920s military chiefs were warning the leadership of possible weakness and, with rising threats
from an unstable Germany to its west and a collapsing China, eyed hungrily by a resurgent Japan, in
the east, urgent action appeared to be needed.

The question, then, was not ‘should the USSR industrialize?’ since all the ideological, political,
economic and strategic indicators pointed in the same direction, rather it was one of ‘how should
the USSR industrialize?’ and that was a very different one. In the 1920s Soviet Russia was the site
of a vast and intriguing debate about just how one might go about such a challenging process.
Strange as it may seem, the economic sphere in Soviet Russia in the 1920s was rent by arguments
comparable to those we have just encountered in the realm of religious policy. As Peris mentioned
in his conclusion, the debate between what he terms ‘culturalists’ and ‘interventionists’ (in other
words, moderates and militants) ‘nearly parallels’ that of the ‘geneticists’ and ‘ideologists’ in
the economic sphere. Geneticists stood for gradual, step-by-step transformation of the economy,
teleologists for one big heave into socialism. Underneath these divisions lay the left/right split
in the party which persisted despite the expulsion of Trotsky and his exile in 1929. It was also
significant that, not least because of the shortage of qualified Bolsheviks, many of the leading
voices in this debate came from former Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and non-committed
experts like the Orthodox priest Pavel Florensky, a mathematical and scientific genius who worked
in the economic apparatus. Tragically, despite their honest and conscientious contribution to the
process, Stalin’s cultural revolution, aimed at tightening up ideological orthodoxy, and the search
for scapegoats to blame for problems made such people immensely vulnerable and by the late 1920s
and early 1930s many of them found themselves in the camps.

Nonetheless, in the mid 1920s the debate raged. On the one hand there was Bukharin and his
supporters. For them, the mixture of state domination of ‘the commanding heights’ of the economy –
large-scale industry, finance, taxation, transport, foreign trade – with limited restoration of the
market, especially for small-scale crafts and services and for peasant agriculture, was the route
chosen by Lenin for dynamic transformation to socialism. Though slow – Bukharin, ill-advisedly,
comparing the speed of transition to that of a peasant pony – it was sure. For the impatient party
militants, particularly veterans of the initial revolutionary struggles when they appeared to have
conquered the whole of the old Russian world, the pace was too slow. They pointed out that NEP
encouraged the growth of anti-socialist elements. In the forefront were petty traders, known as
Nepmen (though many were women), and supposedly wealthier peasants, known as kulaks about whom we
shall say more later. The critics of NEP had plenty of ammunition to throw at Bukharin. The
maintenance of the relationship was not easy and at rimes seemed to be diverting resources – the
wrong way in that state prices for grain had to be raised from time to time to stimulate peasants
to market more agricultural products. This drained resources the left wanted to gamble on a rush
for industrialization. Bukharin, also armed with the last injunction of Lenin, that the working
class should not attack the peasantry again as it had done through war, communism and the
requisitioning of grain, stood firm for his line.

However, encouraging peasants to ‘enrich themselves’ as Bukharin exhorted in 1925 did not excite
the militants. They were also discontented with the apparent lack of ambition of the leaders in
reconciling themselves to the fate of building ‘socialism in one country’ rather than the more
intoxicating goal of world revolution. Bukharin scoffed at such critics pointing, quite rightly, to
the decline of revolutionary potential around the globe as the instability of the post-war period
receded, for a while at least. The left, however, pressed for a more energetic policy. Obviously, a
key issue for industrialization was investment. Even socialism could not develop industry without
primary accumulation of resources. In Russia’s case, historically, there had been no spare capital
to use. Where centuries of foreign trade had prepared Britain and France for industrialization
Russia had always had a major shortage of capital. The tsarist regime had resorted to foreign loans
but substantial foreign involvement in the Soviet economy was precluded by Soviet ideological fear
of dependence on capitalism and capitalist reluctance to invest in its potential rival. In the
event, there was significant foreign involvement in the Soviet economy at various times. Lenin
himself had encouraged it saying that Soviet contracts would support capitalism in the way that a
rope supports a hanged man. Nonetheless, no one believed it to be desirable even if it might be
unavoidable. Looking for internal sources of capital the eyes of the left-wing economists, with
Preobrazhensky in the forefront, fell on the perceived enemy – the peasants. The NEP system
envisaged relatively gentle pressure on peasants both through taxation and through turning them
into a market for industrial products such as fertilizers and tractors. The left, however, took a
narrower view. In a much-quoted and much-misunderstood phrase, Preobrazhensky described peasants as
‘internal colonies’. What he meant was that, where imperialists accumulated from their overseas
possessions, Soviet Russia had to accumulate from its internal sources. While he was not advocating
a full-scale colonial war against the peasants he, and the left in general (whose political leader
was Trotsky) called for more energetic pressure to be applied to the peasantry so that great
industrial projects could proceed.

Curiously, the political defeat of the left as a party faction, in 1927, and the ensuing expulsion
of its leaders, Kamenev and Zinoviev as well as Trotsky, did not take the heat out of the debate.
Advocates of rapid industrialization were just as vociferous in 1928, perhaps more so, than in
1926.

Alongside this debate was a parallel discussion of planning. It was assumed that some form of state
planning would be needed to encourage the growth of industry. The logic was that socialism was
supposed to be an economic system based on reason rather than the arbitrariness of the market and
that planning was the instrument whereby reason would direct the economy. At the time, state
planning was coming into vogue not only in Soviet Russia but also in western Europe under the
influence of the experience of war economies, reconstruction and, later, financial instability.
However, it was in Russia that the debate was pursued most energetically. As Peris mentioned, there
were two schools here, ‘geneticists’ who believed in the gradual evolution of planning on an
initially modest scale, and ‘ideologists’ who wanted a short, sharp shock, to break through the
initial barriers of backwardness.

How did this complex of debates result in the process of industrialization as it unfolded? In the
first place, Stalin, though he had frequently shown signs of impatience with non-party specialists,
nepmen and kulaks, had not joined the left in denouncing NEP. In fact, ‘socialism in one country’
is a slogan inextricably associated with Stalin. Trotsky roundly denounced him for timidity. By
1929, however, industrialization was advancing at an even greater pace than that envisaged by
Preobrazhensky. The transformation had come about through several factors interacting with one
another. The ‘war scare’ of 1927 focused attention on the potential strategic weakness of the
country and thereby raised the stakes for industrialization. Second, NEP itself appeared to be in
trouble. Grain marketings in 1928 were insufficient and rationing had to be applied. The
Bukharinite solution of yet another substantial rise in grain prices was a step too far for an
increasing number of party members. Instead, experiments in forcing the pace of establishing
collective farms were tried out in the Urals and western Siberia. The Politburo, riven by division
between the Bukharinite right and the industrializing left, adopted the First Five-Year Plan in
1928, but it was only in 1929 that planning turned decisively in the direction of teleologists
rather than geneticists. At the April 1929 Central Committee Plenum Bukharin was defeated and a new
wave of rapid industrialization, collectivization and enforced cultural revolution began.

Ironically, however, the onslaught the country suffered from this triple whammy owed nothing to
planning in any real sense. Instead, it had the format of an effort to raise oneself out of a bog
by pulling on one’s own bootstraps. In Bukharin’s despairing words, the leadership were trying to
‘build today’s factories with tomorrow’s bricks’. Kurt Schultz’s article could not provide a better
example of this plus the already-mentioned Bolshevik determination that ‘there was no fortress the
Bolsheviks could not storm’. Far from being a carefully-planned and thought-through process the
First – Five-Year Plan years represented nothing so much as a military campaign, conducted by
raising and exhorting cadres to carry through policies in an endlessly improvised fashion.
Unrealizable targets were actually raised, making them even more remote, as the plan went on.
Eventually, as with its sister policies in the cultural and agricultural spheres, the result was
such chaos that the squads had to be reined in and a more modest regime of advance instituted.

However, a decisive breakthrough had taken place. While calculations today show the falsity of the
claims made at the time there can be no doubt that there were substantial advances. For example,
the labour force more than doubled. Production in key areas did make an upward surge. Large-scale,
often military-related, industries grew fastest. The overall urban population more or less doubled
from 16 per cent of the total population in the 1926 census to 33 per cent in the 1939 census.
Argument continues about the precise measurement of the advances but there is no doubt heavy
industry grew at a rapid pace. Schultz’s article shows how these processes appeared on the ground
in the key project of constructing a major car factory in Nizhnii-Novgorod (later called Gorky). In
particular it provides a vivid illustration of the chaos surrounding the effort and the extreme,
far-from-planned methods characteristic of Stalinist policies in operation.

Kurt S. Schultz: ‘Building the “Soviet Detroit”: the Construction of the Nizhnii-Novgorod
Automobile Factory, 1927-32’

Recent literature on interwar Soviet society is changing the way we view the ‘Revolution from
Above’. Instead of focusing on high politics, the authors of this literature have cast their
analytical nets more widely and have revealed a remarkably dynamic society that was anything but
clay in the hands of Kremlin potters.^1 The history of the massive automotive complex at
Nizhnii-Novgorod adds weight to the conclusions growing out of this scholarship and sheds light on
the origins and implementation of the larger plan to industrialize the Soviet economy; it shows in
microcosm the many problems that often bedevilled and sometimes defeated the grand designs dreamed
up in Moscow.

Like the First Five-Year Plan, the decision to build the Nizhnii-Novgorod automobile plant was
forged in the ideologically charged debates over economic development policy that sundered the
Communist party in the late 1920s.” These debates had barely been resolved when a relentless
campaign for faster tempos and greater results led to persistent bottlenecks at Nizhnii-Novgorod
and internecine strife between hard-pressed officials who were scrambling for scarce resources. To
overcome these problems, Moscow had to intervene in everyday decisions, assign priority to critical
projects, and reallocate materials in short supply. This intervention encountered resistance in
both the capital and the provinces, with results that often slowed progress, led to further
intrusions from the top, and dislocated other branches of the economy that were essential to the
smooth operation of high-priority projects. The history of Soviet ‘automobilization’ illustrates
the spiraling cycle of local improvisation, central intervention, and All-Union bureaucratic
warfare that characterized the First Five-Year Plan as a whole.


Central planners constantly modified plans for developing a domestic Soviet automotive industry
before finally approving the Nizhnii-Novgorod project in April 1929. Although the changes reflected
the fluid political situation in Moscow, they also resulted from the fractured Planning Commission
(Gosplan) and a more ambitious group of individuals in the Supreme Council of the National Economy
(Vesenkha) offered competing visions of industrial development.^3 Initial drafts of the five-year
plan, drawn up by Gosplan in 1926-7. made no provision for substantially augmenting the country’s
automotive capacity. Instead, existing facilities would be upgraded slightly to increase their
combined capacity to 10,000 vehicles during the entire quinquennium, and a modest number of imports
would supplement domestic production.

These projections brought a variety of complaints, but none as strenuous as N. Osinskii’s. Head of
the Central Statistical Administration in mid-1927, Osinskii was an old leftist who had opposed the
New Economic Policy and was now advocating a much more concerted industrialization effort. In a
series of articles he decried the ‘catastrophically backward’ state of Soviet automotive transport,
ridiculed Gosplan’s targets as ‘mere handicraft’, and demanded the construction of an automobile
plant capable of producing at least 100,000 vehicles annually. When critics claimed that existing
roadways, repair facilities, and mechanical expertise could not support such a large volume of
production, Osinskii countered by pointing to developments in the United States, where the
technical infrastructure had expanded along with production. He also reminded his critics of the
military implications of the automotive revolution. An underdeveloped automobile industry could not
meet the needs of Soviet military doctrine, he said, which envisioned massive mechanized and
motorized armies. Nor could sufficient vehicles be imported in the face of an economic blockade.
Should the Red Army have to use ‘the Russian peasant cart against the American or European
automobile,’ Osinskii warned, it would be ‘threatened with the heaviest losses, not to say
defeats’.

Osinskii’s dissatisfaction with the modest plan for the Soviet automobile industry reflected deeper
disagreements in high party circles – over strategies of industrial development, differences that
also penetrated the state’s economic planning and administrative agencies. In 1927, S. G.
Strumilin, S. D. Shein, I. A. Kalinnikov, and others on the right wing of the party tended to
dominate Gosplan’s subordinate committees and bureaus. They opposed overly optimistic industrial
plans, and their opposition squared with decisions that had been reached at the recent Fifteenth
Party Congress.^4 In other agencies, however, a more aggressive industrialization drive drew
support from key officials, including Valerian V. Kuibyshev, who had assumed the chairmanship of
Vesenkha on 5 August 1926. A protégé of Stalin, Kuibyshev promptly set his staff to work on a more
ambitious plan than the one Gosplan envisioned, and even this plan seemed inadequate by mid-1928,
when the Soviet Union’s economic difficulties pushed Stalin and his allies toward a more intensive
industrialization policy. As a result of this shift to the left, automobilization finally assumed
its place among the priorities of economic development.

As early as 1926, Soviet representatives in the United States had tried to interest automobile
manufacturers in building a plant on Soviet territory. These overtures did not interest the
Americans, who worried about Moscow’s ability to guarantee long-term, profitable operations. By
early 1928, however, Soviet economic policymakers had shifted their sights toward an agreement
under which a firm from the United States would provide technical assistance in constructing a
plant to be owned and operated by the Soviet government. With this goal in mind, officials of
Amtorg, the Soviet trading agency in New York, approached several automotive companies with a
project for building a Soviet factory capable of producing between 12,000 and 50,000 vehicles
annually. Later that year, when Osinskii travelled to the United States for talks with the Ford
Motor Company, the target had been raised to 100,000 vehicles. Henry Ford had his own reasons for
being interested in the Soviet offer and he soon countered with a proposal that came close to the
contract that Amtorg would sign with Ford in late May 1929. At this point, however, the Soviet
agency hesitated.

The delay apparently stemmed from a lack of unity in the top economic policymaking agencies in
Moscow, particularly in Vesenkha and the Council of Labour and Defence (STO). In early March 1929,
on the eve of the Sixteenth Party Conference that formally approved the ‘optimal’ variant of the
First Five-Year Plan, Vesenkha and the STO announced the government’s decision to build an
automobile plant that would turn out 100,000 vehicles a year. The announcement did not delight
everyone. Despite their support for a rapid industrialization drive, some left-wing elements in
Vesenkha worried that the automobile plant would divert resources from more important projects.

Opponents on the right went further, as became clear once the STO and Vesenkha created a new
agency, Avtostroi, to oversee the plant’s construction and organize production. These opponents
somehow managed to dominate the committee of experts that Avtostroi established to draft a plan for
the new enterprise. Within a week of the committee’s appointment Osinskii was warning that its
members, who were recruited from two of Vesenkha’s industrial design bureaus, neither believed in
the project nor wished for its success. His foreboding was confirmed at the end of the month, when
the committee presented a draft that fell far short of its instructions. The new plant got short
shrift in the draft, which called instead for expansion of the factories in Moscow and Iaroslavl’,
for the construction of a new plant to produce a limited number of heavy trucks, and for total
production by 1933 of not more than 39,000 vehicles.

The very appearance of the draft project, which amounted to the same kind of ‘handicraft’ approach
Osinskii had deplored two years earlier, points up the byzantine complexity of administrative
politics in 1928-9. By April 1929 both the STO and Vesenkha had opted for ‘mass-production’ over
‘handicraft’, while the party and state’s highest bodies were about to sanction an industrial
development plan that the right considered impossibly optimistic. Despite the leftward swing in
party politics and Kuibyshev’s position at the head of Vesenkha, advocates of a modest
automobilization effort had managed to secure a draft project reflecting their position. Clearly
the opponents of all-out industrialization, if not numerous, still occupied key positions in the
planning apparatus.^7

By the time Vesenkha’s presidium met on 2 April to discuss the draft, however, Kuibyshev, Osinskii
and their allies had outmanoeuvered and defeated their opponents. Some members of the presidium
still supported a modest production effort in the belief that the Soviet economy could not produce
or absorb a large number of vehicles. The Commissariat of Internal Affairs, for example, estimated
the total transport needs of all cooperative economic organizations at roughly 4000 cars and
trucks. But more powerful authorities scoffed at this estimate. Ekonomicheskaia zhizn (Economic
Life) denounced the committee’s report as ‘utterly worthless’. Osinskii, who by now sat on the
presidia of both Gosplan and Vesenkha, condemned the ‘extraordinary caution’ of the experts.
Kuibyshev and I. A. Khalepskii, chief of the Military-Technical Administration, felt the same way.
Led by Osinskii, they persuaded the presidium to reject the draft.

The presidium also briefly discussed the type of vehicle to produce and where to locate the new
factory. A few members favoured Chevrolet designs, whereas Kuibyshev, Osinskii, and Khalepskii
argued that Ford’s models were less expensive and better suited to Soviet road conditions. Since a
Soviet delegation had reopened talks with Ford in February, – a decision probably had been reached
on this matter before the presidium gave its formal approval. Much the same can be said of
Vesenkha’s decision to build the plant on the outskirts of Nizhnii-Novgorod, a city of 258,000 and
the administrative centre of the overwhelmingly agricultural Nizhegorodskii krai. Although the
presidium considered Moscow, among other Soviet cities, it voted to go ahead with a plant at
Nizhnii-Novgorod, stating merely that labour was cheaper there and more readily available.
Vesenkha’s design bureaus were given one month to draft a new plan for a plant that would produce
100,000 vehicles based on the Ford Model A car and Model AA truck.

The presidium’s meeting of 2 April 1929 was yet another step toward the triumph of such men as
Kuibyshev, Osinskii, and other allies of Stalin, all of whom pushed their designs for rapid
industrialization with single-minded determination. By mid-1929 the advocates of an all-out effort
were in control of at least the top economic policymaking positions, while such right-wing figures
as Nikolai Bukharin and Mikhail Tomskii were losing their formal positions of power and influence.
This shift almost certainly explains Vesenkha’s actions of early 1929. It had reopened discussions
with Ford in February, well before any formal decision had been made, and had decided in April to
build the automobile factory and to use Ford designs, even though no agreement with the company had
been reached. Whether Kuibyshev was confident of the outcome or already had reached a decision
cannot be determined; in any event, he was vindicated on 29 May 1929, when his protégé, Vesenkha
Deputy Chairman Valerii I. Mezhlauk, signed a contract with Ford that closely followed the lines of
the company’s 1928 proposal.

Although the details of this contract have been discussed elsewhere, certain provisions merit our
attention. At a cost of $30,000,000, Avtostroi would purchase the components of 74,000 automobiles
and trucks, which over four years would be shipped to the USSR for assembly in a reconditioned
factory. It would also acquire the designs for both the Model A and Model AA, as well as those for
all equipment used in their production, and would send fifty workers a year to study production
methods in Ford plants. These arrangements would ‘speed the automobilization of the country’,
Osinskii concluded, but ultimate success also depended on overcoming a host of obstacles. Avtostroi
had to mobilize the labour, equipment and raw materials needed to construct the plant, which was
scheduled to begin operations on 1 January 1932. It also had to train supervisory, technical and
production personnel who would keep the plant running smoothly. Even then, the success of its
operations at Nizhnii-Novgorod depended to a large extent on the creation or expansion of a host of
related industries that would support the automotive complex.

Party officials in Nizhnii-Novgorod did not need such tutelage from the centre to set construction
in motion. Once Vesenkha named Nizhnii-Novgorod as the site of the automobile factory, the local
organizational committee established a subcommittee and technical bureau to assist the construction
effort. It also instructed local planning bureaus, economic councils and construction, supply, and
production enterprises to cooperate fully with Avtostroi’s officials. If necessary, they were to
‘re-examine their five-year plans – particularly the current year’s plan’ – to ensure that
Avtostroi received the necessary raw materials and manufactured goods.

At the national level, meanwhile, Gosplan and Vesenkha tried to coordinate the activities of plants
and the administrative agencies whose participation was essential for constructing the new factory.
In early June 1929, Gosplan convened an interagency committee to determine construction and
production schedules. The first order of business was to reequip the factory near Nizhnii-Novgorod
where Ford components would be assembled. This work was to be completed by 1 April 1930, so that
the supply of cars and trucks could begin well before the main production plant was brought on
line. The final specifications for the main plant were to be ready for approval no later than 1
October of the current year. In the meantime, constituent organizations of the inter-agency
committee were to devise plans for supplying the automobile factory with the products for which
they were responsible, be they raw materials, semifinished goods or cadres of engineers,
technicians and workers.

The June interagency meeting was the first of what would become an expanding series of conferences,
all issuing a flood of directives all designed to rectify the disorganization and delay that
rapidly overtook the project. Vesenkha did manage to secure factory blueprints in short order, but
only because it parcelled out that task to Austin and Company, an engineering firm from Cleveland,
Ohio. Confusion surrounded every other aspect of construction. Vesenkha contributed to this
situation in mid-June, when the presidium approved Osinskii’s proposal to increase the plant’s
annual production target to 130,000. Of more immediate concern, however, were the transportation
bottlenecks that impeded the flow of supplies to the construction site and the wilful
obstructionism of officials in agencies and factories that were supposed to be cooperating with
Avtostroi. In the months ahead, Vesenkha, the STO and even the Central Committee in Moscow would
issue decree after decree in the hope of bringing order to the chaotic situation, only to find
their efforts thwarted at every turn by administrative agencies in Moscow and industrial
enterprises in the provinces, all of which had their own interests to protect.

By early 1930 these agencies, which supposedly were ‘subordinate’ to Vesenkha, were actually
fighting each other for control of operations at the plant and the resources being funnelled into
it. The first sign of trouble came at a meeting convened in mid-January 1930 by the Ail-Union
Automobile and Tractor Association (VATO), the agency responsible for production in this branch of
the economy. Summoned by VATO to report on progress at Nizhnii-Novgorod, spokesmen for Avtostroi
and Metallostroi, the trust chosen by Vesenkha to build the factory, engaged instead in an ‘animal
fight’, trading insults and ‘petty accusations’. Having previously received rosy reports of
progress, VATO now discovered that ‘bureaucratic foul-ups’ had nearly brought construction to a
standstill. Although the supply schedule called for two hundred railway cars to arrive at the site
each day, wrangling between Avtostroi, Metallostroi and other national and local agencies had cut
the flow to an average of twenty cars.

VATO laid the blame for these problems squarely on Metallostroi, which had refused to comply with a
‘categorical order’ to provide Avtostroi with a variety of construction materials. Avtostroi had
calculated the costs of its supplies and was unwilling to pay more. Metallostroi had other ideas
and demanded that Avtostroi buy a larger amount of goods at prices that would help Metallostroi
meet its production and distribution targets. Without intervention from Moscow, Metallostroi would
have been in an impregnable position because, like other supply and production entities, it was
barraged with more orders than it could possibly fulfil. The abolition of capitalist market
relations notwithstanding, Metallostroi enjoyed a seller’s market, which under ‘socialism’ allowed
it to act ‘like a feudal prince’; as long as its own plan was fulfilled it could ‘treat the needs
of its consumers with the arrogance of a baron’.

The alarming situation prompted VATO to dispatch a delegation to Nizhnii-Novgorod to correct the
situation. Soon thereafter, construction materials and other equipment began to flow a bit more
evenly, although problems ahead would still force officials to improvise solutions to keep
construction on schedule. In late March, for example, when a shortage of bricks threatened to halt
all activity at the site, the party’s local executive committee simply requisitioned 48 million
bricks from a nearby silicate plant. This hand-to-mouth supply system attended every aspect of
construction at the ‘Soviet Detroit’. Lumber, gravel, cement, and steel beams often went straight
from railroad boxcars into the plant’s assembly shops, foundries, coke ovens and blast furnaces.
Quite frequently, however, they languished in the rail yard because Avtostroi never received more
than half of the locomotives and trucks needed for internal transport. As a result, Avtostroi had
to rely on the most primitive means of transport, and even this was ‘catastrophically reduced by
the low supply norms of oats for horses’.

Throughout the summer of 1930, Vesenkha and the STO complained ceaselessly about the haphazard work
at Nizhnii-Novgorod, and these complaints, combined with occasional direct intervention from
Moscow, finally resulted in an increased work tempo and new reports of progress. Vesenkha
maintained the pressure, however, attributing most of the progress to ‘happy circumstance’ and
accusing both Avtostroi and Metallostroi of showing more interest in ‘taking vengeance’ upon each
other than in fulfilling their obligations. Formal affidavits [akty] became ‘the most popular form
of communication between the two organizations’. Avtostroi even assigned its contingent of American
advisers to work on them. According to Boris Agapov, a correspondent for Za industrializatsiiu (For
Industrialization), Avtostroi wanted to eliminate Metallostroi from any role at the construction
site and therefore launched a campaign ‘to discredit the enemy’. To be sure, Agapov noted,
Metallostroi had ‘broken all records with regard to total disorder’, but Avtostroi was also guilty
of contributing to the chaos. He demanded an ‘immediate resolution’ of bureaucractic ‘squabbling’,
lest the situation be reduced to the point where ‘one will build a wall, and the other will tear it
down’.

In late August the presidium of Vesenkha intervened once again, relieving Metallostroi of its
obligations and granting Avtostroi total control of the site. The presidium then instructed the
Victors’ to reorganize the administrative apparatus at the construction site and ‘liquidate all
stoppages’ by 10 September. Vesenkha also convened yet another conference of administrative and
technical personnel for ‘exchanging experience’ and outlining the steps necessary to complete
construction on time. To add force to the reorganization, in early September the Central Committee
in Moscow decreed that the factory’s party organizations should assume greater responsibilities at
the plant. To ensure the implementation of this directive, the Central Committee transferred
thirty-nine party, trade union and Komsomol officials to the factory site on a permanent basis.

The injection of party stalwarts, coupled with a minor purge of the party apparatus at the factory
and the naming of Sergo Ordzhonikidze as the new chairman of Vesenkha, brought only a momentary
burst of activity. By early 1931, Agapov was warning again of an impending crisis that would delay
production even if the plant were completed on time. Apparently, neither Avtostroi nor Stal’, a
trust that manufactured steel products, had made plans to provide Nizhnii-Novgorod with the
speciality steels that were needed for various parts. Avtostroi had let the months slip by,
‘waiting for something to turn up’; Stal’ had delayed its planning until September 1930, only then
to discover that none of its factories could supply the steel that Avtostroi required. Both
agencies, Agapov complained, had been ‘secretly cherishing hopes of importing steel’.

The chairman of VATO, M. S. Mikhailov, tried to refute these charges by admitting that shops
already completed were not yet equipped but insisting, contrary to Agapov’s reports, that the
biggest task remaining was to finish construction, which was ‘only 30 percent complete’. One can
hardly imagine a worse line of defence. Not surprisingly, Za industriali-zatsiiu launched a
full-scale assault on Mikhailov and VATO’s administrative apparatus. Vesenkha, meanwhile, sent
still another commission to investigate conditions at Nizhnii-Novgorod and summoned Avtostroi’s
chief of construction, the secretary of the party committee at the plant and the editor of the
factory’s newspaper to explain the situation. Their reports, and the commission’s findings, drew an
unsettling picture of serious delays in building and equipping the main shops. Much work had been
accomplished, but Vesenkha was not satisfied with partial progress. It was more interested in
learning why the heating plant was behind schedule, when the ventilation and sewage systems would
be installed and whether VATO and Avtostroi would ever reach agreement with a variety of factories
and trusts for the provision of ball bearings, starters, rubber, glass and other critical
commodities.

In mid-February 1931, Vesenkha responded to the chaos by again reorganizing the chain of command at
the factory, while the STO issued a detailed decree covering virtually every outstanding question
of supply and future production. The decree gave VATO and Avtostroi until 1 April to calculate the
total cost of bringing the factory on line and spelled out the obligations of every enterprise and
bureau involved in construction. Although this was Moscow’s strongest intervention to date, little
came of it. A month later, Za industrializatsiiu reported that the STO decree remained ‘suspended
in the stifling air of bureaucracy’. VATO and Avtostroi were putting their final estimate together
‘at a snail’s pace’. In early March, officials from the trusts and factories responsible for
supplying the automobile plant gathered to clarify delivery schedules and costs, but agreed to
nothing. To be sure, an official of Vesenkha’s Electro-Technical Association gleefully observed
that with the STO decree in hand it was now possible to ‘grab some people by the throat and get
everything we need for production’. What he wanted, however, was 400,000 gold rubles to import
machinery the association was supposed to produce itself.

In retrospect, it is amazing that Avtostroi completed even the most critical shops and assembly
lines by the 1 November deadline. In a report of late March, Vesenkha’s inspection commission cited
as the greatest barriers to progress the same factories, trusts and industrial combines criticized
months before. Decrees from the Central Committee in late April and from Vesenkha in late May
intoned a familiar refrain of unfulfilled plans and obligations on the part of the same
organizations. –

In late August, despite insistent demands from Moscow, Vesenkha’s inspectorate had to admit that
all of the presidium’s decrees since March ‘were being fulfilled extremely unsatisfactorily’.

Reports of ongoing transport problems and ‘innumerable losses’ resounded in the press throughout
the summer, complaints that were not addressed until late September and October. The mobilization
of party cadres for work at Nizhnii-Novgorod played a role in this transformation, although the
decisive event occurred on 10 September, when Ordzhonikidze and his deputy, Lazar Kaganovich,
descended from Moscow to rectify the situation. Work proceeded furiously after their departure, and
the main shops of the huge industrial enterprise were completed, for the most part, by the first of
November. Avtostroi had only to install the remaining complement of sophisticated machinery and
fill out its work force, whereupon the factory would be ready to start production.

Meeting these requirements, however, often depended on constant intervention from higher
authorities in Moscow, particularly Vesenkha, and in some cases even this intervention was not
enough to guarantee progress. As we have seen, the contract between Amtorg and Ford provided
Vesenkha with drawings and specifications for all equipment related to the manufacture of Model A
cars and Model AA trucks. Avtostroi received these designs, but the USSR’s underdeveloped machine
tool industry, Vesenkha’s desire to begin production as quickly as possible and a general
proclivity to take the easy route of imports all guaranteed that Avtostroi and its suppliers would
rely heavily on foreign companies for equipping the automotive plant. The chief administrators in
Vesenkha routinely fought this tendency; the drastic decline in Soviet export earnings in the wake
of global depression led them to redouble their efforts. But the general policy of reducing Soviet
imports did not always apply to Nizhnii-Novgorod.

Moscow attached a great deal of political and economic significance to the automobile factory. As
one of the ‘projects of first importance’ it had to be brought on line ‘no matter what the cost’,
ensuring that Avtostroi would receive whatever it needed, ‘even if it be to the temporary
disadvantage of other enterprises’. Such priority status, however, did not always provide a magical
solution to the problems that occasionally blocked progress. Placing an order for American
machinery did not guarantee that Amtorg’s representatives would act promptly, avoid dickering over
prices or make proper shipping arrangements. Nor could it overcome the effects of the Soviet
Union’s inadequate port facilities and overburdened railways, which delayed shipments to the
factory, or of the overworked, hapless administrators at Nizhnii-Novgorod, who often lost track of
equipment once it arrived. Officials of VATO and Avtostroi constantly complained about these
problems and constantly turned to higher authorities in Vesenkha, whose timely intervention and
generous funding usually sufficed to resolve them.

On the labour front, however, the shortages were too extreme and the interests too diverse to
permit desperate officials the luxury of complying with orders from Moscow. Although Avtostroi sent
at least 230 workers and engineers to study at Ford’s plants in the United States, this number made
up only a fraction of the skilled workers required at Nizhnii-Novgorod, and some of those trained
in the United States actually were assigned to other plants under VATO’s control. Like every other
industrial enterprise of the time, in other words, Avtostroi had to struggle against an enervating
shortage of skilled workers and fantastic rates of turnover in the labour force.

Although problems on the labour front grew out of the increasing demand for workers of every
description, VATO and Avtostroi followed policies that made a bad situation worse. As late as
October 1930 neither agency had bothered to determine how many workers the automobile factory would
need. Earlier in the summer, Avtostroi had simply estimated its requirements at 13,200. That figure
then jumped to almost 16,000, fell to 14,000 by the start of the new year, and finally settled at
12,700. In fact, VATO was willing to cannibalize the cadres of its other plants; along with
Avtostroi, it simply assumed that the automobile plant’s priority status would allow it to steal
from other organizations when the need arose. In early January 1931, VATO announced that it ‘hoped’
to satisfy Avtostroi’s current needs by transferring 600 skilled workers from its AMO plant in
Moscow. The news astonished that factory’s director, who knew that only 280 workers at his plant
had the skills that VATO required. Once VATO began to search beyond its own confines, it had to
contend with hundreds of other bureaus and enterprises that also needed workers and often were
willing to defy Moscow’s orders to release personnel to Avtostroi.

As part of its response to the STO’s decree of late February 1931, Vesenkha ordered twelve of its
subordinate organizations to transfer 1080 workers and engineers to the automotive complex. More
than a month passed before even one organization complied with the decree. The others stonewalled,
sending Avtostroi’s emissaries out to the provinces to talk to the directors of their subordinate
plants, who usually claimed that only their superiors in Moscow could release workers. Some plant
directors were frank. One declared that ‘without a formal reprimand’ for not complying with the
decree, he ‘would not even talk about it’. Another proclaimed that ‘there are no people and we will
not release any’ and then invited his guest to ‘write a report to Vesenkha’. Only a few directors
were willing to hand over the requisite personnel: the boss at Metallist, for example, demanded
3710 rubles for each worker; the one at Dvigatel’ Revoliutsii generously limited his price to 600
rubles.

Avtostroi demurred, and wisely so, because these costly workers surely would not have stayed long
at Nizhnii-Novgorod, where the dreadful living conditions led to a fantastic labour turnover. In
early January 1931, Agapov reported that more than half of the skilled workers thus far acquired
had ‘disappeared from the field of view’ or ‘dispersed to other enterprises’. Although Avtostroi
was scheduled to receive fifty additional specialists that month, it had ‘absolutely no idea where
to put them’. Indeed, the plans so far drawn up would provide housing for no more than two-thirds
of the projected work force. Making matters worse, the units constructed fell far short of the
number originally targeted and were in such ‘catastrophic condition’ that workers ‘ran from the
construction site’.^ 9


Despite more than two years of mishaps, delays and obstruction, Avtostroi somehow achieved enough
at Nizhnii-Novgorod to begin operations on 1 January 1932 and wheel out the first complement of
Soviet-produced trucks. Within a few months, however, the main assembly line had to be shut down
because of a lack of parts from other shops within the complex and a dearth of supplies from
ancillary industries, problems that would continue to plague production well after the plant came
fully back on line. Thereafter output steadily increased, but the facility at Nizhnii-Novgorod
never lived up to Osinskii’s dreams. By the end of the First Five-Year Plan the Soviet Union was
producing only 23,900 vehicles, some 15,000 less than the defeated advocates of the ‘handicraft’
approach had envisioned. Not until 1937 would the entire Soviet automotive industry produce the
130,000 units that had earlier been expected from Nizhnii-Novgorod alone.

The failure to achieve planned results was a direct consequence of the political decision to demand
progress on every economic front at once, which in turn created an environment deadly to the
rational pursuit of plans. By setting an overly ambitious industrial agenda, Moscow threw the
national economy into turmoil as administrators at the centre and managers in the field fought
strenuously to secure the resources needed to meet their individual responsibilities. Waste,
inefficiency and bureaucratic arbitrariness rapidly overtook the economy, forcing top policymakers
to intervene constantly in the administrative process to ensure that certain priorities would be
observed.

The ordeal at Nizhnii-Novgorod, however, reveals the limits of such intervention and the lack of
Moscow’s control over the execution of its policies. Even after Vesenkha squelched the attempt to
block automobilization and gave Avtostroi priority status, it could not force such subsidiary
bodies as Metallostroi and Stal’ to obey directives that conflicted with other tasks. Nor could
Vesenkha, the STO or even the Central Committee bring individual managers to heel when their
directives threatened the interests of enterprises enjoying the protection of powerful agencies in
Moscow. Only through constant intervention and the reallocation of resources directly under its
control was Vesenkha able to guarantee that Avtostroi would achieve the minimum desirable results.

At Nizhnii-Novgorod, as throughout the national economy, improvisation replaced planning. Although
acknowledging the suzerainty of Moscow, bureaucracies at the centre and in the field, not to
mention the enterprises they controlled, took on all of the characteristics of sovereign,
independent states. Under conditions of extreme scarcity and severe competition for resources, they
alternately negotiated or warred over the men, money and matériel necessary to complete their tasks
and increase their power. Such was the reality of the First Five-Year Plan in the field of
automobilization.


NOTES

[Reorganized and renumbered from the original.]


I would like to thank the Ohio State University graduate school and the Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations for fellowships that assisted my research; the history department at
Ohio State for awarding an earlier version of this essay the Eugene Roseboom Prize for best
graduate seminar paper of 1987; and the Slavic Review’s anonymous referees for valuable criticisms.
Mary C. Brennan and William K. Wolf merit a special note of gratitude for their advice and
patience.

1.      The literature is too large to cite comprehensively, but for convenient summaries see
Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘New Perspectives on Stalinism’, and the responses to it in Russian Review, 45
(October 1986): 357-413; and the ensuing debate in ibid. 46 (October 1987): 375-431.

2.      Here, too, the literature is vast. The works most useful for this study include Alexander
Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960);
E. H. Carr and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929 (New York: Macmillan,
1971) vol. 1; Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the
Modern Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974); and Kendall E. Bailes,
Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia,
1917-1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).

3.  Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development since 1917, 2nd rev. edn (New York: International
Publishers, 1966) 230-41; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy 1: 843-74, 982.

4.  E. A. Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia: The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ and Peasants’
Inspectorate, 1920-34 (London: Macmillan 1987) 138.

5.      Ibid. See also S. G. Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies eds., Materials for a Balance of the
Soviet National Economy, 1918-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) chapter 3.

6.  Allan Nevins and Frank E. Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933 (New York: Scribner,
1957) appendix 1.

7.      Both Gosplan and Vesenkha had been purged of their ‘more cautious planners’ in October 1928
(see Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia, 174).

8.      Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, appendix 1.

9.      Americans who worked in the USSR during the First Five-Year Plan agreed that the tremendous
turnover in labour was prompted by the search for food and better living conditions.



THE ASSAULT ON THE PEASANTRY

Lenin, in his last testament to the party, had stressed the alliance (smychkd) between the workers
and peasants. It was imperative, in Lenin’s opinion, that the workers – meaning of course the party
and state – should not antagonize the peasantry as had been the case during war communism. Lenin
had learned the lesson that the peasants still had the power to frustrate the long-term aims of the
party. However, in 1929 Stalin unleashed an all-out assault on the peasantry. Like
industrialization, the policy was built on central government agencies, enforcement squads and
central exhortation. Volunteer groups of young party activists and sympathisers were recruited and
sent into the countryside to build a collectivist co-operative agriculture. In the guise of a mass
movement of peasants, within months vast tracts of the country were reported to have been
successfully collectivized. As with industry, the targets were stepped up and, in autumn, the
slogan ‘Liquidate the kulaks as a class’ was proclaimed. Officially, a great class struggle was
sweeping the rural areas, aided and abetted by the volunteers but supposedly led by poor peasants.
However, the idea of collectivization as a class struggle between peasants was a complete fiction.
The communal peasantry stood together, by and large, in defence of their villages and communes.
Rather, in the name of ‘total collectivization’ (sploshnaia kollektivizatsiia), a veritable war was
unleashed on the peasants. Long before Soviet archives were opened we had extraordinary direct
testimony to the events from documents captured by the Germans as they invaded Smolensk. In turn,
Germany, too, was invaded and the documents found their way to the United States. In a remarkable
compilation Merle Fainsod, in Smolensk under Soviet Rule, portrayed collectivization from original
records. The collectivization squads often got out of control. Fainsod quoted reports of
confiscation of the clothes people were actually wearing, and of food being ‘confiscated’ straight
from the oven (with leftovers being used to smear icons). Not surprisingly, the peasants resisted
the crudely enacted policy. Many of them slaughtered livestock rather than hand it over to the new
collective farms. In many places peasants resorted to as much force as they could muster. While it
was not enough to challenge the Red Army in a military sense it did precipitate a political crisis.
Army chiefs warned Stalin that they would not be responsible for the actions of their troops if
they were called upon to engage in bloody repression of the peasants. Like most policies of the
period collectivization was pursued to the point of chaos. In any case, the winter months had,
cunningly, been chosen for the assault so that actual agrarian production would be least affected.
Continual deepening of the crisis into early 1930 threatened the spring sowing which was crucial to
the harvest. Some sort of order had to be restored.

In a move of colossal cynicism, Stalin, having exhorted the collectivization squads to work full
out, now cut the ground from under their feet. In a short sharp article entitled ‘Dizzy with
Success’, published in the party newspaper Pravda on 2 March 1930, the excesses of the process were
blamed on the grass roots activists themselves. In so doing, Stalin diverted blame from the central
authorities. Within weeks the supposed 50 per cent of farms which had been collectivized fell to a
quarter. A calmer pace of collectivization ensued and it was only in 1936 that virtually every farm
had been collectivized. The costs of the process had been enormous. A figure of a million ‘kulak’
families driven out has become generally accepted. Many of this number were killed defending their
property or died en route to their places of exile and imprisonment. Livestock numbers appear to
have fallen catastrophically. Only in 1938 were the production levels of 1928 once more attained.
Soviet agriculture appeared to have lost a decade of growth.

However, the largest single cost was the loss of life in the famine of 1932-3 which was engendered
by the disruption of the countryside. The famine has always been one of the most controversial
episodes in Soviet history. While it was happening, the authorities tried to hide it from Soviet
citizens, the foreign press and, perhaps most important, from foreign, especially Japanese,
intelligence which would welcome such clear signs of Russian weakness and possibly seek to take
advantage of it. A number of western journalists, including Malcolm Muggeridge, succeeded in
getting news of the famine out into the world’s press. However, radical papers denied the existence
of mass famine. In more recent times, two issues have dominated discussion – the numbers involved
and the reasons for it. On the former question, a number of around five million deaths – mostly of
the weakest groups of the very old and the very young – is the current best guess, making the
famine the most costly episode in the 1930s in terms of loss of life, more so even than the purges.
On the second issue, motivation, an attempt was made in 1986 by Robert Conquest to argue that it
was deliberately inflicted, primarily to quell the rising fires of Ukrainian nationalism. Pointing
largely to circumstantial evidence, notably the closing of the Ukrainian border at the height of
the famine supposedly to prevent relief supplies from getting through, the argument was put
forward. It succeeded in reaching a wide audience with extracts from Conquest’s book being
serialized in broadsheet newspapers.

The scholarly community was less impressed. For many who studied the question carefully Conquest’s
thesis fell at the first hurdle. The famine spread far beyond the Ukraine, having severe effects in
South Russia and other parts of the Caucasus. The article by Davies, Tauger and Wheatcroft poses a
much more direct challenge. Using newly-released figures for grain stocks and grain production,
many of them from papers which the leadership themselves saw, the authors show that the Soviet
Union was not withholding vast reserve stocks which might have alleviated the famine. Given the
need for a strategic reserve in case of war – a possibility heightened by the Japanese invasion of
Manchuria in 1931 – there was not enough to feed the peasants. Rather than a deliberate
terror-famine the authors uncover a more plausible but almost equally chilling story of
incompetence and bungling. Believing, as they had done in 1918 and 1919, that peasants were holding
back hidden reserves (‘hoarding’ in Soviet terminology), grain squads were encouraged to fulfil
very high quotas of appropriation. When the truth dawned on the authorities, in mid-winter 1932/3,
much of the requisitioned grain had been disposed of, including sale abroad for machinery needed
for the plan. As a result there was insufficient grain to save the peasants who, far from hoarding
reserves, had lost practically everything down to the last grain. Never again were such inflated
requisition targets imposed.

Overall, the verdict on collectivization has been universally damning. It led to famine, shortages
and the ‘crippling’ of Soviet agriculture, this last, in Cold War times especially, tending to mean
that Soviet agricultural production remained much lower than American. This was true but the
geographical and climatic conditions were vastly different making it difficult to engage in crude,
direct comparison. Nonetheless, Soviet agriculture remained a major weakness and, whatever meaning
one may wish to attribute to it, the process was not imposed on the East European satellites even
at the height of Sovietization in the late 1940s. Even so, while it is no justification either of
the policy or, even more markedly, of the methods by which it was implemented, collectivization did
mark a historic turning point. For the first time in its history, the centre of gravity of Russian
society was no longer to be found in the countryside. While it was only around 1962 that the
majority of the Soviet population was declared to be urban-dwelling, from 1929 onwards the
peasantry, until then not only the majority of all Russians from the beginning of their history but
also the bedrock of all previous Russian societies, was broken. Its traditional institutions,
notably the commune which had enjoyed a golden age in the 1917-28 period, were broken up.

Also, it should not be overlooked that collectivization freed the city from the threat of famine.
In 1919, Petrograd and other cities had seen mass starvation. After collectivization a stable and
growing level of state grain procurement was secured. Only with this security could urbanization
proceed. Similarly, the secure grain appropriation system enabled the USSR to fight more
successfully in the 1941-5 period than its tsarist predecessor. Finally, the mass expulsion of
peasants from land created a large, drifting, labour force which was quickly sucked into new
industrial projects like the Dnepr dam, the Nizhnii Novgorod automobile plant and the massive
Soviet Pittsburgh, Magnitogorsk, under construction in the Urals.

As well as being a disaster, collectivization was also a historic turning point in Russia’s
evolution, perhaps more so even than the revolution of 1917 itself. Stalin had made a decisive turn
towards industry and modernization. In so doing, he had well and truly shredded the smychka. What
would Lenin have said? Since Lenin’s assumption was that the peasants could not be defeated he
would have had to go along with the fact that, despite disregarding Lenin’s solemn advice, Stalin
had succeeded. Lenin’s defeat by the peasants had become Stalin’s victory over them.


R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger and S. G. Wheatcroft ‘Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-3’

Most western and all Soviet studies of the Stalinist economy have ignored the role played by the
stockpiling of grain in the agricultural crisis of the early 1930s. Thus in his major work on
Stalinist agriculture published in 1949, Naum Jasny frankly admitted that data were insufficient to
reach a conclusion, merely noting that ‘stocks from former years probably declined during 1932’.^ 1
Baykov, Dobb, Volin and Nove said nothing about grain stocks. At the time, western commentators did
pay some attention to the possibility that the stockpiling of grain exacerbated the famine. In
autumn 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, and in spring 1932 British diplomats reported that Karl Radek
had told them that, owing to the threat of war in the far east, enough grain had been stored to
supply the army for one year. In February 1933 the notorious but shrewd journalist Walter Duranty
wrote in The New York Times of ‘the unexpected additional demand for grain necessitated by the Far
Eastern war danger last winter’.^ 4 Since the food and fodder grain consumed by the Red Army in one
year amounted to about 800,000 tons,^5 this would have been enough to provide a rather modest
annual bread ration for several million people. A stockpile of this size was, of course, less
important than the 4.79 million tons exported from the 1931 harvest or even than the 1.61 million
tons exported from the 1932 harvest (see Table 4, below). But was such a military stock accumulated
in those years?

Enlightenment had to await the opening of the Russian archives. The impact of the first revelations
about grain stocks has been dramatic. On the basis of a preliminary, unpublished typescript by the
eminent Russian historian V. P. Danilov, Robert Conquest has announced that the archives have
revealed that in the famine year of 1932-3 Stalin was holding immense grain stocks, the existence
of which was previously completely unknown. He wrote in Slavic Review ‘there were 4.53 million tons
of grain in various reserves – the Neprikosvennyi Fond and the special Gosudarstvennyi Fond,
neither (he [Danilov] points out) justified by any danger to the country, and readily available to
prevent the real danger – mass death by famine.’^6 Addressing a wider public in The Times Literary
Supplement Conquest further explained: ‘even apart from the fact that the 1.8 million tons of grain
exported would have been enough to have prevented the famine, there were in addition two secret
grain reserves between them holding 4.53 million tons more, which were not released to the starving
peasantry’.^7 Grain stocks of 4.53 million tons would certainly have been enough to feed millions
of peasants in 1932-3. One ton of grain provided a good bread ration for three persons for a year,
so 4.53 million tons would have provided bread for some 13-14 million persons for a year.

In view of the importance of grain stocks to understanding the famine, we have searched Russian
archives for evidence of Soviet planned and actual grain stocks in the early 1930s. Our main
sources were the Politburo protocols, including the osobye papki (‘special files’, the highest
secrecy level), and the papers of the agricultural collections committee Komzag, of the committee
on commodity funds and of Sovnarkom. The Sovnarkom records include telegrams and correspondence of
V. Kuibyshev, who was head of Gosplan, head of Komzag and the committee on reserves, and one of the
deputy chairs of Sovnarkom at that time. We have not obtained access to the Politburo working
papers in the Presidential Archive, to the files of the committee on reserves or to the relevant
files in military archives. But we have found enough information to be confident that this very
high figure for grain stocks is wrong and that Stalin did not have under his control huge amounts
of grain which could easily have been used to eliminate the famine.

The definition of ‘grain stocks’ is a complicated business. The literature divides them into two
main categories: ‘invisible stocks’ (nevidimye zapasy) and Visible stocks’ (vidimye zapasy}. The
former are those held by peasants (and in the 1930s by collective and state farms) for food, seed,
fodder and emergencies. Peasant carry-over is very difficult to assess; the official estimate for 1
July 1926 was 7.21 million tons, while a careful independent estimate amounted to only 4.19 million
tons.^ 8 These calculations were of some politico-economic importance: the central political
authorities believed and sought to demonstrate that peasants and collective farms were concealing
substantial stocks; peasants and collective farms sought to minimize knowledge of their stocks.
During the grim winter of 1932-3, the authorities seized the seed stocks of collective farms on the
pretext or belief that concealed grain stocks were available to them. In the archives widely
varying estimates of invisible stocks for the early 1930s may be found; not surprisingly, they show
a general decline in the course of 1931-3 and an increase in following years. The ‘visible stocks’
rather than the invisible stocks will be our main concern in this article. These were those which
had passed from producers to traders, to state and other collection agencies and to subsequent
grain-consuming organizations, plus stocks in transit.

Soviet statistical agencies estimated the total of all visible stocks on 1 July 1929 at 1.76
million tons, of which there were:


held by state and cooperative collection agencies                  0.912

held by consuming organizations (including industry)         0.331

miscellaneous                                                                            0.141

in transport system                                                                   0.376


The figure in Table 1 for 1 July 1929, 781,000 tons, is a revised official estimate by Komzag of
the figure given above for state and cooperative collection agencies, 912,000 tons. It thus
excludes grain held by consuming organizations and in the transport system. This was that part of
the visible stocks which the state had more or less readily at its disposal for distribution to the
population, for export and for other uses. These stocks were generally known in the statistics as
‘availability with the planning organizations’; we shall refer to them here as ‘planners’ stocks’.
Planners’ stocks were further divided into ‘commercially available’ and ‘various funds’ (see Table
2). The ‘funds’ were those parts of the planners’ stocks which were set aside for special purposes,
sometimes in special stores, sometimes merely notionally. As we shall show, the funds included both
the ‘untouchable fund’ (Neprikosnovennyi fond’ or ‘Nepfond’) and the ‘mobilization fund’, also
known as the ‘state fund’ (Mobfond’, ‘gosudarstvennyi fond’ or ‘gosfond’). ‘Commercially available’
was something of a misnomer: it referred to stocks held by grain-collection and related agencies
which could be passed on to consumers in accordance with an approved plan of utilization.




Table 1 Published figures for grain stocks, 1928-33 (thousand tons of ‘planners’ stocks’ in grain
equivalent)                                                         .

                                                               Of this ‘various
funds’                       .

1 July 1928                                          486

1 August 1928                                    367

1 December 1928                             1745

1 January 1929                                  1531

1 July 1929                                          781

1 August 1929                                    724

1 January 1930                                  7838

1 July 1930                                        2084                 1379

1 August 1930                                  1462

1 December 1930                             9791

1 January 1931                                  8278

1 July 1931                                        2332                 1114

1 August 1931                                  2026

1 December 1931                             9264

1 January 1932                                  9095                 2033

1 July 1932                                        1360                   635

1 August 1932                                  1012

1 January 1933                                  8499                 3034

1 July 1933                                        1997                 1141

10 July 1933                                      1654                   944
.


These figures do not include grain in transit in the transport system (v puti) or the grain held by
grain-consuming organizations.


Grain stocks naturally varied considerably during the course of the agricultural year, reaching a
peak immediately after a harvest and falling to their lowest levels just before the next harvest.
Harvesting and the grain collections began in the south in early July but in many other areas not
until August. Normally the 1 July figure was given as the minimum level of stocks; but this was not
quite accurate. During July grain available from the new harvest in the month as a whole is less
than grain consumed and stocks continue to fall until the last days of the month. 1 August would be
a better date for assessing minimum stocks but data for that date are not always available. Thus,
quite apart from the need for a permanent grain reserve, a major problem for the central
authorities was the need for ‘transitional stocks’ (usually known as perekhodiashchie ostatki) to
enable continuous supply at the end of one agricultural year and the beginning of the next. Ever
larger transitional stocks were needed from 1928 onwards, with the attenuation of the grain market
and the dependence of larger numbers of people on state supplies (including many peasants in
grain-deficit areas). From 1930 onwards state allocations of grain for internal purposes only (food
rations, army, industry, etc. but excluding exports) amounted to some 1.35-1.5 million tons a
month. Moreover, areas requiring supplies were often thousands of kilometres from the main
grain-producing areas; and once available, the grain had to be processed and delivered.


Table 2 Published figures for grain stocks, by type of grain, 1 July 1932 and 1 July 1933 (thousand
tons of planners’ stocks in grain equivalent)

.
      .

                         1 July 1932                             1 July 1933
   .

                              Commercial                Various                       Commercial
Various

                              stocks          funds       Total        stocks          funds
Total

Rye and rye flour  193              351           544           273              507        780

Wheat and wheat    246              125           371           248              369        617

flour

Total main food     439              476           915           521              876        1397

grains

Fodder and minor 286              159           445           335              265        600

grains

Total                      725              635           1360         856              1141
1997


In the course of establishing a state grain monopoly in the mid-1920s, the Soviet authorities did
not succeed in building up a state grain reserve. In December 1927 the directives for the Five-Year
Plan approved by the XV Party Congress stressed the importance of the accumulation of stocks in
kind and foreign currency reserves during the course of the plan. The accumulation of stocks of all
kinds would achieve ‘the necessary insurance against large vacillations in the conjuncture of the
international market, and against a potential partial or general economic and financial blockade,
against a bad harvest within the country, and against a direct armed attack’. But a Soviet grain
handbook published in 1932 noted that ‘all attempts to create a large grain reserve did not have
positive results’, even though ‘the difficulties experienced in 1927/28 and 1928/29 revealed the
categorical necessity of creating such a reserve’. According to Soviet data, on 1 July 1929 the
total amount held in the state grain fund (gosfond), including the remnants of the centralized
milling levy from the previous harvest amounted to only 69,000 tons.


The 1929 harvest and the 1929/30 agricultural year

On 27 June 1929 the Politburo adopted a much-increased plan for grain collection from the 1929
harvest, resolving:


In accordance with the resolution of the XV Congress on the formation of a grain fund, it is
considered necessary to create an untouchable stock amounting to 100 million poods [1.638 million
tons] of food grains... It is considered that the untouchable stock may not be expended by anyone
in any circumstances without special permission from the Politburo and Sovnarkom of the USSR.^9


Two months later, on 29 August 1929, Stalin wrote to Molotov, praising the success of the first
stage of grain collection from the 1929 harvest and emphasizing the importance of reserve stocks,
that ‘we must and can accumulate 100 mln poods [1.638 million tons] of untouchable stocks
[neprikosnovennye zapasy], if we are really Bolsheviks and not empty chatterers.’ By the beginning
of December, 13.5 million tons of grain had been collected, well over twice as much as on that date
in any previous year; and the first drive for the collectivization of agriculture was rapidly
accelerating. Stalin, jubilant and jovial, again wrote to Molotov: Greetings to Molotshtein! ...
The grain collections progress. Today we decided to increase the untouchable fund of food grains to
120 million foods [1.966 million tons]. We will raise the rations in industrial towns such as
Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kharkov, etc.’


Table 3 Reserve grain funds by fund, type of grain and organization:

archival data, 1 July 1932 (thousand tons in grain equivalent)           .

                                                                         Gossort-       Fond

                                             Gosfond   Nepfond   fond^d        MKe       Total

Zagotzerno^a                            138          159          –             13            310

Sayuzmuka^b                           124          141          –              –            266

Soyuzkrupa^c                             78            –            –              –
78

Total                                    340          301          2.6           13            656

     Of which,

Rye and rye flour                 137          214          1.6           13            366

Wheat and wheat flour         40           87           0.5            0             128

Fodder and minor grains   163            –            0.5            –            163


Source: these figures, dated 1 September 1932, are given in RGAE, f. 8040, op. 3, d. 40 on both II.
129-30 and 148-50. Here total planners’ stocks are given as 1.386 million tons. This is somewhat
larger than the revised figure published in 1934 of 1.360 million tons, of which 635 thousand tons
was ‘various funds’ (see Tables 1 and 2 above). It should be noted that Nepfond and Gosfond both
unambiguously appear as component elements in the total grain stocks of 1.38S million tons.

Notes: Discrepancies in the total are due to rounding.

^a State corporation responsible for grain collections.

^b State corporation responsible for converting grain into flour.

^c State corporation responsible for groats.

^d State fund of high-quality seeds.

^e Special fund of Moscow party committee.


The grain handbook of 1932 noted that the establishment of a grain reserve ‘was posed as a central
and top-priority task for the grain campaign of 1929/30’. The main statistical journal, reporting
record grain stocks accumulated by 1 January 1930, noted that ‘a fundamental difference between the
stocks of the current year and the stocks of the previous year is the formation of a special fund,
not used for current needs, while in past years grain was used entirely for meeting current
requirements.’ The journal described this ‘untouchable fund’ as ‘having an insurance function in
case of a bad harvest or any other extraordinary needs’.

Although grain collections from the 1929 harvest were extremely large, they had both to supply
grain to many consumers who had previously obtained it on the peasant market and to provide for
increase export. Planners’ stocks increased by 1.3 million tons between 1 July 1929 and 1 July
1930, reaching 2.084 million tons. The Politburo deemed it possible to allocate only 786,000 tons
of this to the Nepfond on 1 July 1930; but explained that this amount was to be ‘absolutely
untouchable’.^11


The 1930 harvest and the 1930/31 agricultural year

The harvest of 1930 was surprisingly good: collections were 38 per cent higher than in the previous
year and more than twice as much as in 1928/29 (see Table 4). Planners’ stocks on the peak date of
1 January 1931 were even higher than on 1 January 1930 (see Table 1); on that basis the Politburo
concluded on 7 January that Nepfond could amount to 150 million poods (2.457 million tons) and
that, in addition, the ‘mobilization fund’ (Mobfond) could amount to 50 million poods (.819 million
tons)  –  3.276 million tons in all.^12 Mobfond was later described by Kuibyshev as intended to
provide adequate grain (and other commodities), amounting to 1 1/2 – 2 months’ supply, to cover
delays in supplies during mobilization and to make some provision for the largest industrial and
political centres. But, although planners’ stocks had increased to 2.332 million tons on 1 July
1931 and remained as high as 2.026 million tons on 1 August 1931 (see Table 1), they were far below
the level of reserve stocks proposed by the Politburo on 7 January 1931.


Table 4 State grain collections, 1928/29-1932/33 (including milling levy; in thousand tons)
                                                                         .

                                                                                      of which,

                                                                                      used for
export   .

1 July 1928-30 June 1929                 10790^1                  -184^2

1 July 1 929-30 June 1 930               16081 ^1                1343^2

1 July 1930-30 June 1931                 22139^1                 5832^2

1 July 1931-30 June 1932                 22839                  4786

1 July 1932-30 June 1933                 18513                  1607                  .

^1              See Robert W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: the Collectivisation of Soviet
Agriculture, 1929-1930 (Cambridge, 1980) 429.

^2              Ibid., 432.



The 1931 harvest and the 1931/32 agricultural year

Unlike the 1930 harvest, the 1931 harvest was poor (and much worse than the Soviet political
authorities believed). Nevertheless, grain collections in the agricultural year 1931/32 slightly
exceeded the 1930/31 level (see Table 4) and the authorities continued their efforts to accumulate
substantial reserve stocks. Their aims were now somewhat less ambitious: in October 1931 the
Politburo decided that Nepfond and Mobfond together should total 150 million foods (2.457 million
tons), as compared with the 200 million poods specified to the Politburo decision of 7 January
1931. But it also decided to consolidate central control over the reserves: both the ‘grain Nepfond
and the grain-fodder Mobfond’ were to be transferred from Narkomsnab (the People’s Commissariat for
Supplies) to the committee on reserves – a powerful organization, whose chair was Kuibyshev and
whose vice-chair, Iagoda, was head of the OGPU. The Politburo intended that ‘warehouses and
personnel’ should also be transferred to the committee on reserves; but at this time they
apparently remained in the grain collection and processing network. Use of grain deemed to be part
of Nepfond or Mobfond required permission of the committee on reserves or even the Politburo.
Sovnarkom further decreed that all 2.457 million tons were to be transferred to the committee on
reserves by 1 December 1931, together with large stocks of other foodstuffs, consumer goods and
metals. By 1 January 1932, the grain set aside in ‘various funds’, nearly all of which was Nepfond
and Mobfond, amounted to 2.033 million tons (see Table 1): the plan for the reserve funds had been
largely achieved.

But this apparent triumph was short-lived. The demand for grain relentlessly increased. Grain
exports in the agricultural year 1931/32 were one million tons less than in 1930/31;
simultaneously, however, state grain allocations within the USSR increased (see Table 4). The
increase in internal utilization in 1931/32 was part of a process which had been proceeding
relentlessly since 1929, resulting from a substantial increase in the number of industrial and
building workers and their dependants; a growing necessity to supply grain for seed and food to
collective farmers and others in areas where harvests had been low and grain collections too high;
an increase in the use of grain to feed sections of the population, including cotton-growers and
timber-cutters who had previously obtained their grain from the market, and to feed exiled kulaks
and others; an increased consumption of grain by industry. The total amount of grain allocated by
the state for internal use increased from 8.400 million tons in 1928/29 to 16.309 million tons in
1931/32; in 1931/32 alone the increase amounted to 2.477 million tons. The pressure on stocks was
relentless.

Despite demand, the Politburo endeavoured to reduce the rate of issue of grain. In March 1932 it
agreed to drastic cuts in the bread ration for consumers on the lower-priority ration Lists 2 and
3. Many requests for additional rations, even from high-priority industries, were refused. These
reductions and the irregular delivery of bread and other food supplies led to famine in the towns
in spring 1932. Among the urban population of the lower Volga region the death rate more than
doubled between January and July 1932; among the urban population of the Kiev region it increased
by 70 per cent; and even in Moscow the death rate rose by one-third.

But the severe measures of March 1932 failed to reduce to the level of the available grain food
allocations to which the state was committed. On 23 May 1932, an alarmed Kuibyshev prepared a
memorandum concerning the grain situation for the Politburo in which he outlined the additional
measures needed if an uninterrupted grain supply to the main industrial centres was to be
maintained until the new harvest; his proposals even included the reduction of the bread ration for
workers on the Special List and List 1. The draft memorandum preserved in the Kuibyshev papers
includes his handwritten note in blue crayon:


With a full sense of responsibility I want to emphasize that last year we had 88.8 million poods,
[1.45 million tons] [of food grains] on 1 July, and that in the current year there will be only
57.7 million poods [0.945 million tons].


What does this mean?


It means that we can cope with the supply of bread only by an exceptional level

of extremely thorough organization.


Another handwritten sentence, crossed out, reads, ‘I ask you to give to the committee on reserves
dictatorial powers until the new harvest’.

The Politburo did not accept Kuibyshev’s proposal to reduce rations for the Special List and List
1; but on 25 May it decided that it was necessary before 1 July to collect the outstanding 14
million poods (229,000 tons) of grain from the remains of the 1931 harvest, to add more barley to
the food grains and to transfer various grain stocks from one part of the country to another. It
also reduced the allocation to the military by about 16 per cent, and called for the acceleration
of the import of grain from Persia and its immediate transfer to the far east. In spite of all
these measures, it was estimated that planners’ stocks of food grains (excluding fodder) would
decline from 2.01 million tons on 10 May to 0.886 million tons on 1 July. For the difficult months
of July and August 1932 when the new harvest was beginning to come in, the Politburo also resolved
that all grain collected from the new harvest would be used solely to supply industrial centres and
the army.

In the outcome, planners’ stocks on 1 July 1932 were as low as the Politburo had anticipated in
May: food grains amounted to 915 thousand tons and all grains to 1.36 million tons – 1 million tons
less than on 1 July 1931 and even less than on 1 July 1930. Nepfond and Mobfond, intended to total
2.457 million tons and reaching about 2 million tons on January 1932, amounted to only 0.641
million tons on 1 July (see Tables 2 and 3). The demand for grain had impelled the Politburo to use
up most of its ‘untouchable’ fund. On 1 July total stocks of food grain amounted to about one
month’s supply: in Ukraine, the lower Volga and north Caucasus less than a month’s supply was
available. Following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the authorities had utterly failed to
build up grain stocks in east Siberia and the far east: total stocks of food and fodder grains in
these two regions amounted to at most 190,000 tons on 1 July;^15 the 1 million tons of military
stocks that Radek reported to the British was apparently sheer bluff.


The 1932 harvest and the 1932/33 agricultural year

In May 1932, in preparing its plans for the forthcoming harvest, the Politburo somewhat reduced the
grain collection plan below the previous year’s level and sought to fill the gap by permitting
trade in grain at market prices once collection quotas had been met. But the sharp decrease in
grain stocks below the 1931 level had greatly alarmed the authorities. In spite of the reduced
collection planned in May, on 16 July 1932 the Politburo again sought to set aside substantial
stocks in Nepfond and Mobfond from the new harvest. It resolved that in 1932/33 Gosfond (state
fund, another name for Mobfond) would amount to 55 million poods (0.901 million tons) and Nepfond
to 120 million poods (1.966 million tons), 2.867 million tons in total. On 9 December 1932 the
Politburo approved a reduced plan for grain utilization in 1932/33 by which Gosfond and Nepfond
would still total 2.867 million tons on 1 July 1933; together with transitional stocks, all
planners’ stocks would amount to 3.699 million tons on 1 July, as compared with 1.36 million tons
on the same date of 1932 (see note 5). Thus the authorities certainly planned to hold very
substantial stocks at the end of the 1932/33 agricultural year (if not the 4.53 million tons
claimed by Robert Conquest). And on 1 January 1933, with total stocks at their seasonal peak, as
much as 3.034 million tons were attributed to Various funds’ (the main components of which were
Gosfond and Nepfond) (see Table 1).

The grain utilization plan for 1932/33 was built on illusion. While grain exports were again
reduced, this time by 3 million tons below the previous year’s level, grain collections declined by
over 4 million tons (see Table 4). The net decline in grain available for internal use amounted to
more than 1 million tons (see Table 4, collections minus export in 1932/ 33 versus 1931/32), and
this placed an immense strain on resources, quite incompatible with the decision to allocate 2.339
million additional tons to planners’ stocks on 1 July 1933 as compared with 1 July 1932. Moreover,
the grain balance of 9 December 1932 had assumed that no grain should be allocated to the
countryside for seed and food, apart from earmarked allocations to cotton growing and other
specialized areas. In the course of the first six month of 1933, the Politburo reluctantly, little
by little, released between 1.99 million and 2.2 million tons in seed, food and fodder, primarily
as allocations or ‘loans’ to areas which had been stripped of grain by the state collectors earlier
in the year. While neither large enough nor timely enough to prevent the devastating famine, these
allocations did use up most of Nepfond and Gosfond which had been set aside at the beginning the
year.

In spring 1933, as in the previous year, leading grain officials addressed a series of urgent
memoranda to the Politburo warning of shortages. In March a memorandum from Chernov to Stalin,
Kaganovich, Molotov and Kuibyshev pointed out that receipts of food grain might be 0.5-0.6 million
tons less than in the grain utilization plan of 9 December 1932, while expenditure might be 0.5
million tons more; the shortfall in oats and barley might amount to a further half million tons.^16
A memorandum from Kleiner to Kuibyshev, prepared in February or March, concluded that on 1 July
1933 Nepfond would be 0.256 million tons less than planned on December 9. Two or three months
later, on 17 May, a telegram from Kleiner to Stalin and Kuibyshev makes it clear that the situation
had drastically deteriorated: ‘surpluses in the Nepfond are almost exhausted’. To provide seed,
food and fodder the Politburo had agreed to release 69 million poods (1.13 million tons) from the
committee on reserves, so that only 100 million poods (1.638 million tons) remained in all its
reserves; Kleiner asked for conditional permission to use a further 15 million poods (0.246 million
tons) from funds of the committee on reserves.^17

Within a few weeks the situation had apparently deteriorated still further. On 4 June 1933, Chernov
sent a memorandum to Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotov and Kuibyshev, setting out the results of the 1
May inventory of the remaining grain (ostatki) in the USSR. Chernov estimated that, as a result of
commitments made in May and June, all planners’ stocks would total 84.7 million poods (1.392
million tons) on 1 July 1933, including food grains amounting to 63.8 million poods (1.045 million
tons), a slightly larger amount than on 1 July 1932. In several places the memorandum referred to
this estimate as the ‘transitional remainder including funds’ (perekhodiashchii ostatok vkliuchaia
fondy).^ 18

In practice, the level of grain stocks was apparently somewhat greater than Chernov and the other
officials anticipated. When Chernov submitted the grain plans for the following year, 1933/34, to
Stalin Kaganovich and Molotov on 4 July 1933, he stated, as he had a month previously, that the
total transitional stock, including fondy, on 1 July 1933 was 1.392 million tons (including 1.045
million tons of food grains). But the grain utilization plan for 1933/34 approved a month later by
the Politburo recorded the ‘availability’ of all grains on 1 July, including fondy, as 1.825
million tons (including 1.386 million tons of food grains). The final official figure published in
the grain yearbook was 1.997 million tons (including 1.397 million tons of food grains) (see Tables
1 and 2). We have not yet found any satisfactory explanation of the discrepancy between these three
sets of figures.

The planners’ stocks available on 1 July 1933 certainly included enough grain to save the lives of
many peasants. But they amounted not to 4.53 million tons but to less than 2 million tons, smaller
than the stocks available on the same date three years previously. The alternative figures for 1
July 1933, including the published figure (1.997 million tons), certainly include both Gosfond and
Nepfond. Robert Conquest’s confusion about the level of stocks may be due to a somewhat ambiguous
passage in Chernov’s memorandum dated 4 July 1933, submitting the draft grain plans for 1933/34 to
the Politburo. He proposed that in 1933/34 Nepfond should be ‘120 million poods [1.966 million
tons], the same level as last year’, while Gosfond should be ‘significantly increased to 72 million
poods [1.179 million tons] instead of the 55 million poods [0.901 million tons] of last year’.
According to this draft, then, both fondy together would amount to 3.145 million tons. But
Chernov’s tables and the figures approved by the Politburo make it clear that ‘the same level as
last year’ did not mean the actual reserve stock in July 1933 but instead the stock planned in July
1932.^19 In 1933/34 Nepfond and Gosfond had to be built up from existing planners’ stocks. Thus the
plan approved by the Politburo on 7 August 1933 fixed total grain stocks on 1 July 1934 at 3.941
million tons, including a total Gosfond and Nepfond of 2.776 million tons; the Politburo compared
this with the total stocks on 1 July 1933 of only 1.825 million tons.^20

The failure to establish reserve stocks at planned levels also meant that the efforts to build up
grain stocks in the far east had again been unsuccessful. According to the published data, total
planners’ stocks in east Siberia and the far east amounted to only 0.147 million tons on 1 July
1932, increasing to 0.269 million tons on 1 July 1933; some additional stocks, not included in
these figures, were held by the army itself. But the serious effort to build up grain stocks in the
far east began not after the 1931 harvest, as Radek and Duranty claimed at the time, or even after
the 1932 harvest, but only during and after the 1933 harvest. It was not until July 1933 that
Chernov received an urgent commission from Stalin to create a ‘special defence fund’ of 70 million
poods (1.147 million tons) in east Siberia and the far east. This grain stock would require
extensive new grain stores, since those of Mobfond in the far east and east Siberia had a capacity
of only 0.143 million tons.

How reliable were these data on grain stocks? After the civil war, during which local authorities
underestimated the level of stocks, the Soviet authorities were anxious to obtain accurate and
timely figures. In the early 1920s a comprehensive system was established, by which monthly
estimates of grain stocks by local statistical departments were supplemented by quarterly on-site
inventories. Statistical departments telegraphed regular ‘short summaries’ to the centre two weeks
after each survey, followed by more detailed (and more accurate) reports sent through the mail. The
same system was used in 1930-4. In 1928 A. Mikhailovskii, at that time the principal authority on
grain statistics, claimed that the figures for the USSR which were assembled centrally from these
data were ‘quite reliable’. The data on grain stocks for 1932-3 were also, in our opinion, ‘quite
reliable’. This is not to say that they should be accepted uncritically. The discrepancy between
the lowest and highest figures for all planners’ stocks on 1 July 1933 – 1.397 million and 1.997
million tons – dramatically illustrates this point. If the later and higher figure is correct, the
additional 0.6 million tons of grain could have saved many lives. But this figure does not appear
in any of the records we have used until some weeks after the end of the agricultural year and it
was evidently not known to the Politburo before July 1933.

There were no private inventories of grain stocks kept for Stalin and his immediate entourage,
separate from those regularly assembled by the normal state agencies; the figures in the top-secret
files of Sovnarkom, of Kuibyshev’s secretariat and in the special files (osobye papki) of the
Politburo all coincide. These figures also agree – somewhat to our surprise – with the figures for
grain stocks published in the unclassified small-circulation Ezhegodnik khlebooborota (Grain
Collection Annual).^21

But the relationship between public and secret statistics in the USSR was complicated. While they
were identical for grain stocks, the exaggeration in the published figures for the grain harvests
is well known. And our research shows that those responsible for planning and recording grain
allocations did not contradict – even in private – the distorted official harvest figures; they
therefore included in the grain balances a large residual item so that consumption could be brought
in line with the alleged harvests.^22 And in the extreme case of the defence budget for 1931-4, the
large increases in these years were concealed by the deliberate decision of the Politburo to
publish falsified figures. The true figures appeared only in documents classified as top-secret and
were more than treble the size of the published figures.” The complicated relations between
archival and published data can only be established by investigating each case on its merits.

We therefore conclude:

1.        All planners’ stocks – the two secret grain reserves, Nepfond and Mobfond or Gosfond,
together with ‘transitional stocks’ held by grain organizations – amounted on 1 July 1933 to less
than 2 million tons (1.997 million tons, according to the highest official figure). Persistent
efforts of Stalin and the Politburo to establish firm and inviolable grain reserves (in addition to
‘transitional stocks’) amounting to 2 or 3 million tons or more were almost completely
unsuccessful. In both January-June 1932 and January – June 1933 the Politburo had to allow
‘untouchable’ grain stocks set aside at the beginning of each year to be used to meet food and
fodder crises. On 1 July 1933 the total amount of grain set aside in reserve grain stocks (fondy)
amounted not to 4.53 million tons as Conquest claimed but to only 1.141 million. It is not
surprising that after several years during which the Politburo had failed to establish inviolable
grain stocks, Kuibyshev in early 1933 recommended a ‘flexible approach’ to Nepfond and Mobfond,
denied that they were separate reserves and even claimed that the flexible use of the two fondy.
had enabled uninterrupted grain supply in spring and summer 1932.

2.        We do not know the amount of grain which was held by grain-consuming organizations,
notably the Red Army, but we suspect that these ‘consumers’ stocks’ would not change the picture
substantially.

These findings do not, of course, free Stalin from responsibility for the famine. It is difficult,
perhaps impossible, to assess the extent to which it would have been possible for Stalin to use
part of the grain stocks available in spring 1933 to feed starving peasants. The state was a
monopoly supplier of grain to urban areas and the army; if the reserves of this monopoly supply
system – which amounted to four-six weeks’ supply – were to have been drained, mass starvation,
epidemics and unrest in the towns could have resulted. Nevertheless, it seems certain that if
Stalin had risked lower levels of these reserves in spring and summer 1933, hundreds of thousands –
perhaps millions – of lives could have been saved. In the slightly longer term, if he had been open
about the famine, some international help would certainly have alleviated the disaster. And if he
had been more far-sighted, the agricultural crisis of 1932-3 could have been mitigated and perhaps
even avoided altogether. But Stalin was not hoarding immense grain reserves in these years. On the
contrary, he had failed to reach the levels he had been imperatively demanding since 1929.


NOTES

[Reorganized and renumbered from the original.]


The authors are most grateful to Oleg Khlevnyuk for his assistance in research for this article.

1.      Naum Jasny, The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR: Plans and Performance (Stanford, 1949)
757.

2.  See Alexander Baykov, The Development of the Soviet Economic System (New York, 1947); Maurice
Dobb, Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (London, 1948); Lazar Volin, A Century of Russian
Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev (Cambridge, 1970); Alec Nove, An Economic History of
the USSR (Harmondsworth, 1969).

3.  Jonatham Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1930-33: The Impact of the Depression (New York, 1983)
84.

4.  Walter Duranty, Duranty Reports Russia (New York, 1934) 342.

5.      This figure, for the agricultural year 1932/33, includes the OGPU (secret police) armies.
In this paper our discussion takes place in terms of the agricultural year, which ran from harvest
to harvest, 1 July-30 June.

6.  Slavic Review 53, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 318.

7.  TLS, 11 February 1994. In The New York Review of Books, 23 September 1993, he drew attention
more briefly to ‘the figures on the millions of tons of available grain reserves’ which
demonstrated that ‘the famine of 1933 was deliberately carried out by terror’.

8.      See S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘Grain Production and Utilisadon in Russia and the USSR before
Collectivisation’, PhD. thesis (CREES, University of Birmingham, 1980) 561-65.

9.      The resolution added that the Council of Labour and Defence should report to the Politburo
on the size of additional mobfond (mobilization fund) of food grains.

10.     Total visible stocks amounted to 11.756 million tons on 1 January 1930, as compared with
only 3.780 million on 1 January 1929. Of these, ‘planners’ stocks’ amounted to 7.838 million tons
(see Table 1).

11.     Note that by 1 August 1930 planners’ stocks had fallen to 1.462 million tons (see Table 1).

12.     These figures apparently included fodder grains as well as food grains.

13. We have been unable to ascertain whether mobfond is the same as the ‘military stocks’ (voennyi
zapas) of 25 million poods (0.410 million tons) referred to in the protocols of the Politburo for
13 April 1930.

14.      In these years the part of the population which received rations was divided into four
main groups or lists (spiski), depending on state priorities. In order of priority these were the
special list (osobyi spisok), and Lists 1, 2 and 3.

15.      The later published figure was 147,000 tons.

16.      Chernov was the principal person concerned with the practical details of grain collection
and allocation.

17.      The memorandum referred to food grains only. I. M. Kleiner was appointed deputy chair of
the committee for agricultural collections (Komzag) on 5 March 1933.

18.      Chernov complained that the situation was made more difficult by the plan to supply before
1 July an additional 6.1 million poods (100,000 tons) of food and fodder grain to the military and
4 million poods (66,000 tons) to the far east; he insisted that it was impossible to supply the
additional fodder to the far east.

19.      The mythical 4.53 million toms was evidently obtained by adding together the planned (and
non-existent) Nepfond and Gosfond (1.966 + 1.179 million tons) and the expected total stocks on 1
July 1933 (1.392 million tons)! In view of the importance of this memorandum, all three of us have
independently checked it and all the other documents in the file in which it appears; nowhere is
there any evidence of the existence of a stock of 4.53 million tons on 1 July 1933.

20.  Chernov’s proposal to increase Gosfond to 72 million poods was not taken up by the Politburo.

21.  These published figures are in some respects more detailed and regular than those in the
archives and we have therefore used them in our tables.

22.  The grain balances for these years will be discussed in R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, The
Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 (forthcoming).

23.  See R. W. Davies, ‘Soviet Military Expenditure, 1929-33: A Reconsideration’, Europe-Asia
Studies 45 (1993): 577-608.


In: Read, Christopher, Ed. The Stalin Years. 66-101