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In 1926 agricultural production showed a welcome increase, but in 1927 it declined quite sharply. ¹⁸ The recurring problem of peasant production undermined Stalin’s faith in the free-market prescription of the New Economic Policy and, together with problems experienced in getting industry launched, built up momentum for a root-and-branch solution. This took shape in 1928—9. It involved the forced collectivization of peasant farming. Huge collective farms were the closest the Communists would go to replicating the highly productive great estates of the pre-revolutionary era without compromising their ideology. Peasants, including the richer ones, known as kulaks, whom Stolypin had encouraged, would no doubt object, but they would have to be suppressed. Collectives, with their economies of scale, would release a mass of surplus rural labour for industry, especially if industry could equip them with tractors and other farming machinery. The workless peasants would be directed to urban centres to serve as grist to the wheels of industry. Capital was essential, of course, and this was scarcer in Russia than it had ever been. What little surplus the budget could scrape up would have go to foreign companies willing to provide essential technical expertise in turbine construction and the like. The bulk of the capital would have to be found by squeezing resources out of the population at large, by forcing them to produce significantly more value than they consumed. They would be paid largely in promises.

Propaganda would stoke up enthusiasm, especially among the young, and raise peoples’ eyes above the bleak immediate prospects to a rosy future in which all needs would be met and grand projects realized. Force would also be needed, not only to coerce the peasants, but also to find labour for essential projects in unpleasant places — but opponents of the governments’ schemes and social misfits could be put to useful work for nothing.

As the programme was climbing into top gear, in February 1931, Stalin made a powerful speech invoking Russian patriotism. The old Russia, he said, had been beaten by the Mongols, defeated by the Turks and Swedes, occupied by the gentlemen of Poland-Lithuania, worsted by French and British capitalists and by the Japanese. They had done down Russia because Russia had been afflicted by backwardness —

military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political, industrial and agricultural backwardness. They beat… [us] because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. Such is the law of the exploiter — to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism …

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the developed countries. We must catch up that distance in ten years … Or we shall be crushed. ¹⁹

Retrospect credits Stalin with prescience. The Soviet Union was indeed to face a life-and-death crisis ten years later, but he had in mind the hostility of the world in general. He could hardly have foreseen the triumph of Hitler so early in 1931. Other, gentler, means to the desired end might well have worked, but force was quicker. Stalin was in a hurry.

Both the achievements and the costs of Stalin’s revolution are reflected in the census data. Painstaking research into the demographic history of Russia in the 1930s concludes that by 1937 the urban population had increased by 70 per cent, and by substantially more than that in the industrializing areas of Siberia. This reflected a strategic plan to shift the centre of economic gravity towards the east. On the other hand the rural population had shrunk by 3.4 million souls. ²⁰ The number of ethnic Russians rose, although even their numbers fell in 1933, as did the Tatar, Azerbaydzhani and Circassian populations. The Ukrainian and Kazakh populations fell more sharply. By 1937 there were 29 per cent fewer Kazakhs than there had been in 1926, and 15 per cent fewer Ukrainians. The Kazakh losses are attributed to collectivization and cross-frontier migration; the loss of 5 million Ukrainians is also blamed on collectivization, and to a dreadful famine of 1931-2 which was associated with it. ²¹

The massive mortality has been ascribed to genocide, but the charge is unfounded. ²² True, the regime disliked political nationalists, and in 1931 it shot a former premier of the puppet regime set up by the Germans in 1917 and then some Ukrainian Communists suspected of nationalist leanings. ²³But Ukrainians were by no means the only nationality to suffer, and it was not Ukrainians but kulaks and anyone who stood in its way whom the regime targeted. Nor was the famine as such man-made, as has been alleged. The regime had no interest in dead peasants and starving subjects. It wanted live and active workers. Rather than being deliberately induced, the famine was the consequence of mistaken policy, ruthlessly implemented.