Gendarme of the Revolution: The Soviet Union in the Interregnum Era (1/3)

Gendarme of the Revolution: The Soviet Union in the Interregnum Era
Part 1 of 3: Collectivization and the Peasant Question ​

The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.

Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution

To build socialism in a country such as Russia is to discover how many things must first be built that are not socialism.

Nikolai Bukharin, internal party memorandum, 1926, declassified 1955​

Introductory Matter:Russia and the Problem of Socialist Construction

By the close of the First Revolutionary Era, the Soviet Union had emerged as the territorial and military bedrock of the revolutionary world, encompassing more than 16 percent of the world’s total land surface and numbering over 175 million inhabitants. Its polyglot peoples included the Polish workers and peasants of the Western Borderlands, the Azerbaijanis of the Caucasus, the Romanian-speaking peoples of Wallachia and Moldova, and the newly incorporated Mongol and Uyghur communities drawn into the Union from the western borderlands of China. The Soviet Federation’s sheer size and scale ensured that no IntRevMar congress could treat it as anything less than one of the indispensable powers of the revolutionary world, while its military power had nearly broken the back of the British Empire and earned it the lasting approbation of the socialists of Central Europe. It was, of course, the first state to have a workers’ revolution, and while German and Italian intellectuals occasionally suggested that this had been a “premature” transition to a proletarian society, among the broad masses its status as the “first revolutionary society” earned it tremendous prestige.

The conditions of the Soviet Union’s birth were very different from those of its European counterparts. These were capitalist societies with fairly well-developed working classes, thoroughly integrated into a capitalist world-market before the Great War. Germany had already gone through its Gründerzeit ; Italy’s was accelerated by the exigencies of wartime production. The Russian Empire, by contrast, had remained an overwhelmingly agrarian society, with market relations unevenly reaching into its more rural regions. Its industrial working class was concentrated in a few cities, and many of its members were themselves migrants to the growing metropolises, their entry into capitalist relations a rude disruption of the traditional rhythms of peasant life.

To the West, socialist states had the task of transforming modern industrial life; in the Soviet Union, the state was frequently tasked with constructing it wholesale. In the West, socialist states could operate through existing workers’ institutions; in the Soviet Union, these often had to be built up in tandem with state efforts. The Party, in short, did not merely govern the transition to socialism; it increasingly understood itself as the instrument through which the social preconditions of socialism would be created. This fact would determine almost everything about the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was also something more than a mere nation-state. While the smaller polities of Central and South-eastern Europe claimed to speak on behalf of a specific proletarian nation, Soviet leaders and journalists spoke the language of a new “Soviet” people, born from the traumas of total war, revolution, and civil conflict. The socialist republics in Germany, Italy, and France all strove to reappropriate their bourgeois inheritance; in the Soviet Union, by contrast, there was an often totalizing rejection of the old imperial-Russian past, even as Russian was employed as the lingua franca of the new Union. Russian ceased to be the official language of Russian supremacy and instead became the practical language of Soviet advancement. It fell once again to the Party, in dialogue and sometimes in conflict with the society it was mobilizing, to bring into existence a new civilization capable of binding together the disparate peoples of Eurasia.

By the end of the Interregnum Era, the Soviet Union had established itself as primum inter pares of the socialist bloc by cultivating a particular niche within the IntRevMar system. In the 1920s, it became the primary supplier of grain and other agricultural products to Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands; it was the labor of Ukrainian cooperatives and kolkhozy which fueled the German coal, steel, and capital goods machine. As the chemicals, synthetics, and early plastics industries took root, the Soviet Union’s vast reserves of oil, timber, cotton, manganese, and non-ferrous metals helped keep socialist exchange rates stable enough to bring European industry toward parity with America’s. Finally, as international tensions rose in the 1930s, the Soviet Union’s vast standing army became a guarantor of the security of the entire socialist bloc. More than one hundred thousand Soviet soldiers from across Eurasia served in rotating treaty formations in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria, a perpetual warning against Atlantic Union adventurism and a source of both leverage over and gratitude from other socialist nations. Once the Gendarme of Europe, by the eve of the Second Revolutionary Era, Russia had become the indispensable Gendarme of the Revolution.

Excerpts from “The Straight and Steady Path to Socialism”: Peasant Collectivization, Rural Development, and the Making of a Socialist Economy in The IntRevMar Journal of Soviet Society, Evsei Liberman (Moscow: 1968)

…What subsequent scholarship has termed the Soviet economic miracle of the 1930s, however contested that designation remains among historians of different traditions, was an important achievement of the Soviet state. Yet too many treatments of this phenomenon, particularly amongst non-IntRevMar scholars, have abstracted it from the concrete aims of Soviet leaders and the broader aspirations of Soviet society. The mechanisms and relative speed of consensual socialist accumulation were determined, first and foremost, by the imperative of building socialism.

Early debates in the Central Executive Council and Congress of Soviets centered around this question. But it turned out that what it took to “build socialism” itself admitted both national and internationalist answers. The former suggested an industrialization drive to rapidly expand the forces of production, create a larger proletarian class, and eliminate the demographic predominance of the peasantry, who would remain outside formal socialist relations of production so long as agriculture remained primarily organized by smallholders and the archaic commune. This would likely require a steep monetary tax on the peasantry to enforce their entry into a money economy in which they would trade with the state for industrial and consumer goods.

The “internationalist” answer instead foregrounded the Soviet obligation to international socialism. The revolution had toiled for two years in the hope that European workers would imitate Soviet workers; their hope fulfilled, many revolutionaries now believed that the task was to organize Soviet production and gear Soviet development for the purposes of integration in a larger international market. Grain, agricultural products, and raw materials would be necessary to fuel German, Italian, and Dutch recovery from the Great War. The internationalist course therefore suggested making no moves which would immediately disrupt agricultural production. Instead, the foreign exchange and clearing credits accumulated through agricultural exports could be employed to buy German tractors to increase yields and capital goods to begin a more limited industrialization drive. An in-kind tax on agricultural goods would be imposed, and peasants would be cajoled into collectivization through the Soviet government’s control of the trade in agricultural machinery. The internationalist plan, the so-called “straight and steady path to socialism”, was favored by a mixture of genuine left-internationalists such as Nikolai Bukharin as well as those who believed it to be a more stable path to socialism within the Soviet Union proper.

The Internationalists formally achieved victory with the issuing of the first Five-Year Plan, set out in 1924 as the First Revolutionary Era came to an end. Yet it was already a substantial reality in 1921, when Lenin and Luxemburg met in Konigsberg and agreed to re-negotiate the terms of the Treaty of Riga, in which imperial Germany imposed harsh and extractive demands on Soviet Russia. In fact, the amount of grain requested by Luxemburg’s diplomats remained largely unchanged, but the Soviets would now be given far greater access to German goods, turning a one-sided, exploitative relationship into a mutually beneficial one. The continuing trade created structural dependencies on each side, accelerating the depopulation of the German country-side and reducing the cost of key industrial goods within the Soviet Union. By 1924, the immediate industrialization envisioned by Trotsky and representatives of the trade unions would also have required a diplomatic breach with Germany. The language of proletarian solidarity could rightly be mobilized against them.

The First Five-Year Plan: Prelude to Collectivization?

The internationalist plan’s practical implementation required institutional innovations that neither its advocates nor its critics had fully anticipated at the time of its adoption. Chief among these was the marketing cooperative — an institutional form that emerged from the specific political conditions of the Soviet countryside rather than from any prior theoretical blueprint, and whose significance was only gradually recognized by the Soviet planning apparatus. Marketing cooperatives were the most significant body mediating between the peasantry and the state. They coordinated both the 20% in-kind tax and additional sales of grain, typically acting as the representatives of a single village. In turn, cooperatives received credit from the Soviet state and themselves offered credit and machinery rentals to individual peasant-producers. They were, importantly, densest in some of the most agriculturally fertile regions of the Soviet Union: the “Black earth belt” stretching from Ukraine to the Volga River, and the Siberian dairy-producing regions. In practice, most of the agricultural produce which secured Soviet foreign exchange reserves - and thus German, Italian, and Dutch capital goods and agricultural machinery - was collected with the assistance of the marketing cooperative.

The architecture of representative institutions in the new Soviet state granted the cooperatives a uniquely important role in the political organization of the peasantry. While “peasant soviets” were a reality of the new state, they were dominated by established party members and their delegates were intentionally minimized at the Congress of Soviets. The cooperative, with its elected leadership and twice yearly meetings open to the entire village, became the most active site of peasant politics. The Soviet government, desiring to incorporate the peasantry into socialist class relations, rightly perceived the cooperative to be a powerful instrument for the unification of the Soviet nation, and acted early on to influence its proceedings without, however, monopolizing control over individual volost bodies. The increasing importance of the marketing cooperative is registered in a series of discrete historical events: the first meeting of a regional, oblast-level cooperative union in Volgograd in 1923; the formation of similar unions in several Siberian divisions and Ukraine in 1924; and the formation of a national-level, cooperative congress in 1925, which was granted seats on Soviet planning commissions and permanent powers of consultation with the Commissariat of Agriculture a year later.

The formal recognition of the marketing cooperative as an integral element of the peasant economy was also an acknowledgement of the cooperative’s crucial role in ensuring stable grain procurement. In 1927, Sverdlov, against the advice of several skeptical left-wing members of the Central Executive Council, moved forward with a plan to mandate volost-level cooperatives for all villages with greater than 1,000 residents. Those to Sverdlov’s left argued that the cooperative, by preserving the smallholder’s relationship to his individual plot, merely institutionalized a transitional form that the party was now making permanent. Their concerns were not without foundation; the cooperative was indeed a form of socialist organization that left intact the essential features of peasant property relations. Sverdlov’s counter-argument, which ultimately prevailed, was that the cooperative’s very accommodation of peasant interests was the precondition for its political effectiveness, and that cooperatives themselves would serve as the basis for a more concerted collectivization drive in the future.

The cooperative mandate had two crucial effects. Firstly, it reduced the overweening power of the Ukrainian delegation in the cooperative congress, while expanding the presence of cooperatives more directly under the influence of the Soviet government. Secondly, it offered the Soviet state an opportunity to begin introducing more advanced, socialist forms into the heartlands of peasant backwardness inherited from the feudal era, such as Central Russia. Here, the cooperatives, typically controlled by peasants sympathetic to the Bolshevik party and the construction of socialism, were intended to displace the archaic commune, rationalizing its functions and winning over the peasants to socialism. This was not always a seamless process; more than a few villages required semi-permanent police deployments to ensure the safety of cooperative staff against recalcitrant villagers, but the services offered by the cooperative were in the end decisive.

The conclusion of the First Five-Year Plan in 1929 produced results whose significance has been disputed ever since. The moderate benchmarks set for industrial expansion and agricultural productivity were mostly reached. Tractor and fertilizer use more than doubled. Cooperative credit, rural infrastructure expansion, and improved veterinary services all contributed to an over 30% increase in exported grain. But the more ambitious target for a 40% increase in net agricultural yields was not met; increases in agricultural productivity instead led peasants to either work less or sell their farms, which now held higher value. Most worryingly, the rate of collectivization, which had increased slowly throughout 1924 and 1925, stagnated in the later years of the plan, with some regions seeing a complete stalling of total collectivization numbers. Few expected that voluntary collectivization, with the light and non-punitive incentives of the first five-year plan, would produce a mass transformation of the countryside. But the trend line pointed to a more troubling conclusion: that the marketing cooperative, rather than introducing socialist relations of production into the countryside, had in fact acted to entrench capitalist class relations.

These agricultural shortfalls coincided with new external pressures that sharpened their political significance considerably. German industrial capacity, having expanded rapidly under the socialist developmental model, had already shown signs of overcapacity, while Soviet industries in Leningrad, Moscow, and the Donetsk Basin had grown sufficiently that continuous capital goods imports were now a structural necessity rather than a developmental choice. More grain, delivered more reliably and in more standardized form, was what the German industrial planning apparatus increasingly required. The modest yield improvements of the First Five-Year Plan, adequate for an earlier moment, were becoming insufficient.

Leon Trotsky and left-wing Soviet economist Yevgeni Preobrazhensky made an incisive intervention in a series of articles published in Pravda in late 1929. In their view, the marketing cooperative performed a similar functional role to the welfare states of the Scandinavian sozialstaat, reinforcing market relations by means of an ostensibly social institution. By rationalizing petty commodity production, making smallholding more efficient, and giving middling peasants easier access to credit and machinery, it had softened class contradictions without meaningfully transforming them. Most worryingly, it had given birth to a peasant political sphere which was not subordinate to Soviet organs and which was frequently controlled by richer peasants.

It is worth briefly discussing Trotsky’s trajectory, since he played a key role in the coming transformation of the Soviet countryside. Trotsky himself was a part of the left-opposition during the Lenin years, but unlike Bukharin and his followers, he was not cleanly rehabilitated with the rise of Sverdlov. He worked his way back into politics more slowly by allying himself with the trade unionists of Petrograd, who had themselves won real institutional power in the struggles of 1921. From his position as both party secretary and chairman of the executive committee of Leningrad, he had the ability to propagate a different, ostensibly more proletarian vision for the Soviet countryside, which involved the mass mobilization of urban workers to assist in its collectivization. The 1929 five-year report strengthened Trotsky’s bid for leadership, and the support he won amongst working-class delegates to the 1930 Congress of Soviets was crucial to his appointment as Commissar of Labor, earning him a seat in the Council of People’s Commissars. His presence there would matter: the urban Soviet delegates who would eventually assist volost cooperatives in implementing the new incentive scheme were more numerous and more willing to apply pressure than the Sverdlov-Bukharin approach alone would have generated.

By the time the new Council of People’s Commissars had assembled, a new consensus was already emerging. Bukharin and Sverdlov both agreed that a renewed collectivization drive was necessary, though both were skeptical of some of Trotsky’s more maximalist methods. Sverdlov in particular saw the cooperative as the keystone to any future collectivization: it was the one institution with the capacity to cajole peasants into collective farms without significant disruption of grain exports. The Second Five-Year Plan therefore envisioned collectivization drives occurring first and foremost in less export-sensitive regions where the party held a firmer grip over the cooperative infrastructure. The logic was straightforward, if quietly revealing of the constraints under which Soviet agricultural policy operated: demonstrate the viability of collective organization in regions where disruption could be absorbed, and allow success to build the political and social momentum for extension elsewhere.

Most importantly, however, the Cooperative Congress would need to endorse the party line of preferential collectivization, a set of powerful material incentives designed to make the smallholder’s continued independence progressively less tenable. Collective farmers would be the first to receive cooperative credit, the first to receive machinery, the first to receive seeds, and would pay a lower in-kind tax to the state. All other farmers, however, would be subject to a significant hike in in-kind taxes to compensate for the increased agricultural productivity attributed — with some degree of justice — to the party’s own investments in machinery imports and rural infrastructure. Smallholders would be squeezed between the increased productivity of collective farms and more stringent credit and tax settlements.

Individual volost cooperatives, with the assistance and supervision of delegates from urban Soviets, would be tasked with coordinating the incentive scheme and extolling the benefits of collectivization. Volost cooperatives would also be rewarded with cheaper credit and privileged access to the latest machinery if rates of collectivization were higher in their districts at the end of the plan period. Conversely, village cooperatives with collectivization rates well below plan targets would be investigated for their compliance. The incentive structure therefore applied simultaneously to individual smallholders and to the cooperative bodies themselves, binding both into the logic of the drive.

The Second Five-Year Plan: Party Mobilization and Mass Collectivization

The Second Five-Year Plan posed a profound challenge for the leaders of the cooperative movement. On the one hand, the cooperative movement was being tasked with implementing one of the central goals of the Soviet state: the socialization of rural property relations and the winning-over of a mass peasant base to the Bolshevik government. This could conceivably be employed to win lasting leverage. On the other hand, the actual achievement of collectivization would pose sustained challenges for the long-term viability of cooperatives. Larger collective farms could perform many of the key functions of the cooperative, such as credit provision, machinery procurement, and, to a lesser extent, the collection of agricultural information. For some cooperative leaders, the movement was effectively being asked to liquidate itself. Yet open opposition to the powerful Soviet state, with its official police and army forces and trained core of party cadres, was also unimaginable. The more educated peasant leaders who ran regional cooperative unions recalled the grim days of 1919, when the red armies inflicted a devastating toll on the countryside following the revolt of the left-SR’s. By now, the upper crust of peasant society was too comfortable, too well-integrated into the Soviet system to contemplate open resistance to the construction of socialism.

The leaders of the all-union congress therefore chose cooperation, while insisting that their degree of real control over individual, village-level cooperatives was frequently more symbolic than substantive. Resistance in the national congress tended to manifest in the covert frustration of Soviet objectives rather than outright opposition, transmitted through the deliberate ambiguity of directives transmitted downward to regional cooperative unions, in statistical reporting practices that obscured as much as they revealed, in the strategic deployment of procedural complexity to slow the pace of drives in regions where congress leadership judged them premature. But the response of individual cooperatives captured by wealthy smallholders was far different. Here, considerable resistance was encountered even in regions not immediately subject to mass collectivization drives.

Vital to understanding the collectivization drive is the mobilization of urban Bolshevik cadres by the central government. The worker-activists served as pedagogues of socialism, traveling into the villages to convince the peasantry of the benefits of collective organization. The numbers involved in this propaganda drive are truly remarkable: over two million workers, all party members, from Moscow, Leningrad, Volgograd, Kyiv, and the small cities of the Don Basin and Siberia travelled into the countryside over the course of the Second Five-Year Plan. Yet the worker-activists were not simply pedagogues of socialism in the abstract. In regions where village cooperatives had been captured by prosperous smallholders, they were organizers of specific class alliances within specific village political structures, inveighing against wealthy peasants, mobilizing poor smallholders against the notables who had entrenched themselves in cooperative leadership, and forging the alliances necessary to gain control over recalcitrant volost bodies and prime them for participation in the drive. It was this combination of political organization and class mobilization, rather than simple administrative pressure, that accounts for the drive’s most significant successes. There were regrettable excesses, particularly in Western Ukraine and the Volga regions, to which we shall return. But the mobilization of the party reserve was also the source of both the drive’s greatest achievements in addition to its occassional irruption in violence, as the regional record makes plain.

Significant regional differences existed in the speed and seamlessness of the initial collectivization efforts. The drive in Central Russia proved to be a resounding success: from 1930 to 1935, the proportion of agricultural workers on collective farms rose more than threefold, from around 14% to over 45%. Some anthropologists have suggested that the archaic commune and the modern collective farm bore elective affinities which eased the transition, but such speculation is beyond the purview of this article. Regardless, there were more self-evident reasons for the success of collectivization in Central Russia. The peasantry there possessed no independent cooperative tradition and the cooperative’s party-led introduction in the 1920s had been accompanied by real and tangible benefits. Cooperative leaders consequently enjoyed genuine social authority within local communities which they could deploy to legitimate the drive. Worker-delegates, frequently hailing from Central Russia themselves, provided practical assistance with the consolidation of farm plots and employed their connections with city soviets to lobby for material support for the new collective farms. The conditions that made Central Russia so tractable — party-aligned cooperative leadership, a peasantry without strong traditions of institutional autonomy, worker-delegates embedded in local social networks — were, however, not replicated elsewhere. In Ukraine, the Volga regions, and Central Asia, the drive encountered a different social landscape entirely, with consequences that the historical record has not permitted us to ignore.

Ukraine presented the most politically sensitive case. It was not only the most important agricultural surplus region but also a growing center of food refining and processing industries, and it possessed the most socially embedded and historically rooted cooperative movement in the Soviet Union, including areas of Galicia only recently incorporated into the Soviet state. The Soviet leadership had already generated friction with more nationalist elements in the Ukrainian government by limiting the domains in which preference could be shown for titular nationalities, and the cooperative question reopened these tensions with considerable force.

The Regional Oblast had already issued independent directives, agreeing in principle with the goal of collectivization but calling for a process “consistent with Ukrainian national-agricultural traditions and led by Ukrainian peasants.” For the first several years of the collectivization drive, Ukraine was a site of fierce conflict, with the regional Ukrainian Bolshevik Party engaged in a sustained struggle with the cooperative union. The measures taken frequently exceeded the formal mandate given to party cadres: the record documents beatings, illegal seizures, coerced votes and temporary expulsions in local cooperatives, overly punitive tax assessments, and occasional deportations. Several incidents of mass violence in West and Central Ukrainian villages in 1933 — in which the extra-legal measures deployed by party cadres produced responses that the official apparatus could neither sanction nor contain — led to a temporary retrenchment of the collectivization offensive under pressure from Alexandra Kollontai, then head of both the powerful Komsomol youth leagueand Zhenotdel women’s organization. Collectivization would henceforth proceed at a slower pace in Ukraine, but the achievements were nonetheless significant. The need to secure the consent of the regional cooperative oblast eventually produced a unique institutional settlement: smaller, less concentrated collective farms, and an ongoing role for marketing cooperatives in the handling of credit, machinery procurement, record-keeping, and price setting with state purchasing agencies. That this settlement bore the imprint of genuine negotiation rather than administrative imposition was, in retrospect, the source of its durability.

Collectivization in the Volga region involved similar social upheaval but achieved a less ambiguous end-result. Here, the gap between wealthy and poorer farmers was most socially explosive, and targeted deportations of the kulak class most frequent. Yet despite its often conflictual nature, collectivization proceeded far more quickly than in Ukraine, rising from around 18% in 1930 to over 48% in 1935, one of the highest figures recorded within Russia proper. The class-mobilization strategy of the worker-activists found its most propitious conditions in the Volga: the sharp differentiation between kulak and poor peasant, more pronounced in this region than anywhere else in the Russian heartland, gave the urban delegates genuine social allies whose interests aligned straightforwardly with collective organization. Whether the outcome fully vindicated the methods employed is a question historians continue to debate; what is less debatable is that the cooperative’s transformation in the Volga, persisting less as an independent institution than as a regional social network linking together large collective farms, represented, at minimum, the completion of the task the cooperative had been designed to make possible.

Siberia presented the most peculiar example. Rates of collectivization were unusually high even at the drive’s outset, sitting at just under 30% in 1930. The dairy and livestock industries were particularly well-suited to collective organization, and the pre-existing cooperative movement, though strong, already existed in symbiosis with agricultural collectives rather than in tension with them. As a consequence, regional cooperatives were uniquely willing to transform themselves into instruments of collectivization. The Siberian Oblast Union eventually found itself functionally reconstituted into individual Dairy, Livestock, Rye, and Oat confederations, with collective farms opting to confederate into larger structures with limited functions such as agricultural research and credit provision, even as the state maintained individual purchasing relations with farms. The Siberian case was not simply a curiosity, however. It offered retrospective vindication of the internationalist plan’s developmental logic: where cooperative infrastructure had been built alongside collective organization rather than as a substitute for it, the transition proved most willing and the institutional outcomes most stable. The straight and steady path had, in Siberia at least, arrived at precisely the destination its architects envisioned.

The Third Five-Year Plan: Consumer-Driven Industrialization

In April 1935, the All-Union Soviet Congress met in Moscow and received the official reports on the Second Five-Year Plan. The All-Union Congress had played an important role in initiating and pushing forward the collectivization drive, and its delegates now awaited an accounting of what that drive had achieved. The overall, union-wide collectivization rate hovered at just under the 40% target. Other metrics of agricultural modernization, such as fertilizer usage, tractor density, and veterinary access, had exceeded their planned targets. But agricultural yields had remained almost completely stagnant. The cause, acknowledged only reluctantly in official assessments at the time, was the social disruption that large-scale economic reorganization had imposed on production: the very success of the collectivization drive had temporarily disrupted the productive rhythms it was ultimately designed to enhance. While the near-achievement of collectivization targets was met with relief, more than a few worker-delegates expressed frustration that the rationalization of agricultural production had appeared, at least for now, to retard rather than accelerate yields. Urban workers, who had been persuaded to defer their demands for industrial investment and expansion — first for the sake of agricultural modernization, then for the collectivization drive — now pressed for a more thoroughgoing industrialization drive. Leon Trotsky, the Chairman of the Executive Committee and one member of the new three-person troika that had assumed collective leadership following Sverdlov’s retirement, was well positioned to channel these demands. At the Congress, he employed his substantial procedural powers to open the floor to a formal debate on “industrial priorities”, placing the other members of the Council of People’s Commissars under significant pressure to respond.

The Third Five-Year Plan would place a far greater emphasis on industrial development. In accordance with the obligations of international socialist solidarity, the main focus was placed on light industry and consumer durables, ensuring a continued import market for German machinery and plant. A more modest capital goods drive was also included, the implications of which would only become apparent in later years. The timing proved propitious. As the collectivization drive eased, well-capitalized collective farms began to ramp up their output, steadily increasing the quantity of available grain. The improvement in agricultural supply placed more purchasing power in the hands of both industrial workers, who could now dedicate a larger portion of their budgets to manufactured consumer goods, and the growing class of collective farm members, whose wages rose with the improvement in farm productivity. The consumer-oriented industrialization drive, in other words, arrived precisely as new domestic demand was being generated to absorb it, a convergence that owed as much to the prior decade’s agricultural investment as to the plan itself.

Several additional developments contributed to the Third Five-Year Plan’s success. The investments in rural infrastructure made it considerably cheaper to transport consumer manufactures to outlying districts, opening markets that had previously been too costly to reach. New planning instruments eliminated redundancies that had plagued earlier coordination efforts. And the quality of the new generation of industrial managers, trained in party schools and institutes, many of them having benefited from the presence of German technical instructors, had markedly improved relative to their predecessors.

The combination of these factors produced what the international press, not always accurately, has termed the Soviet Economic Miracle: a more than two-fold increase in the purchasing power of the average Soviet urban worker over the decade beginning in 1935, and a seventy-five percent rise in total consumer goods production. A portion of this output was traded with the peripheral socialist states of the Balkans and Eastern Europe in exchange for specialty agricultural products previously absent from the lives of ordinary Soviet consumers. More significant still was what the expansion of tax revenues made possible: wider access to subsidized tertiary education, substantial expansions of medical care and worker cultural facilities, and the first genuinely comprehensive old-age security provisions in Soviet history. To the proletarian base of the Bolshevik Party, it appeared at last that the long-promised fruits of socialism had arrived.

However, the Third Five-Year Plan contained within its achievements the seeds of new complications. The capital goods drive, modest in its initial ambitions and justified within the plan primarily as a supplement to the consumer industrialization effort, had by the early 1940s produced a Soviet industrial capacity that generated machinery and technical equipment capable of substituting for German imports. This development was entirely consistent with the logic of Soviet developmental sovereignty, and its architects were not wrong to pursue it. But it generated anxieties and nascent contradictions within the IntRevMar trading system that the plan’s designers had not fully anticipated. Any more sustained attempt to replace german industrial imports might also imperil the system of regulated socialist exchange which permitted Central Europe to absorb huge quantities of Soviet grain and raw materials. The straight and steady path had arrived, in substantial measure, at the destination its architects had envisioned, but what lay beyond that destination was a question whose answer could only be properly shaped and planned at a transnational level.