Lenin's tractor experiment - Wayra

Catch up and overtake

In the context of increasing the confrontation of Russia with the outside world, as a rule, issues of Russian backwardness in the world -wide competitive modernization race were always raised. So, already at the birth of the Soviet system and almost until its end it was extremely popular, the radical slogan “Catch up and overtake!”. His original fame, of course, is associated with the passionate statement of the Leninist article “The threatening catastrophe and how to deal with it”: “The revolution did the fact that in several months, Russia, in its political system, caught up with the advanced countries. But this is not enough. The war is inexorable, it raises a question with merciless sharpness: either to die, or to catch up with the advanced countries and overtake them also economically. ”

Throughout his article, Lenin also often remembers the living and revolutionary work of the masses - workers and peasants; Only now their work will still need to be steadily disciplined, centralized, controlled, then this new social system will overtake capitalism.

However, even long before the 1917 revolution and repeatedly, Lenin constantly insisted on the importance of control, discipline, centralization not only in the competition of countries among themselves, but also in the competition of public parties and classes. It is extremely characteristic, for example, this pair of Lenin’s disciplinary “catch up and overtake” calls to the party and workers at the beginning of the 20th century: “Here we approach the urgent issue of our movement, to its sick point - the organization. Improving the revolutionary organization and discipline, the improvement of conspiratorial technology is urgently necessary. It must be openly admit that in this regard, we lagged behind the old Russian revolutionary parties and should make every effort in order to catch up and overtake them ”; “Working printing must be developed and firmly done. This is needed for money. Only subject to constant and mass fees among workers, it will be possible to achieve a satisfactory setting of working newspapers in Russia with persistent work. In America there is one working newspaper (“call to the mind”), which has more than half a million subscribers. That Russian worker is bad, ”we would say, remaking one well -known saying, who does not hope to catch up and overtake his American counterpart.”

Western, and in particular American, left -wing intellectuals, as a rule, always followed radical experiments with sympathy and hope to overcome backwardness in Russia.

Peasant congress and hut of Uncle Tom

The American brothers Bolshevik-publicist Lenin journalist-socialist John Read, who was in Russia during the 1917 revolution, was a witness to the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks and the sooner civil war. In hot pursuit of 1917, John Reed published the book “Ten Days that shocked the world”. Until now, this composition remains one of the deepestly exciting reports about the October Revolution.

Behind the everyday life of the chronicle of the political intrigue of the “ten days”, we see that in the assessment of the deep dominant of the October Revolution: the work of the revolutionary democratic masses, discipline and party control, the opinion of the peasant majority-John Rid confirms the forecasts and intuition of Lenin, sometimes even with excessive American optimism.

For example, despite the cultural and political backwardness of the Russian revolutionary masses, he speaks especially positively about the natural socialist self -organization of the Russian workers: “Foreigners, and especially the Americans, often emphasize the“ ignorance ”of Russian workers. True, they lack the political experience of the Western peoples, but they went through an excellent school in their voluntary organizations. In 1917, Russian consumer societies (cooperatives) totaled over twelve million members, and the Soviets themselves are a wonderful expression of the organizational genius of Russian workers. ”

It is not by chance that John Reed devoted the last chapter of his book to the description of the peasant congress, which opened in Petrograd on the 10th day of the revolution. For, as Rid noted: “Ultimately, everything depended on the peasants. Although the peasants were politically poorly developed, they still had their own views, and in addition, they made up more than 80% of the Russian population. Among the peasantry, the Bolsheviks had relatively few followers, and a strong dictatorship of some industrial workers in Russia was impossible ... The traditional representative of the peasantry was a party of essays ... "

Reed gave the truthful chronicle of the work of the peasant congress. On its sidelines-in a tavern, located on the contrary of Smolny, the irony of the Russian-American workers' and peasant fate called the "uncle Tom’s hut", Reed observed stormy verbal skirmishes between the supporters of the Bolsheviks and their opponents who reproached the latter in the usurpation of the authorities.

Reid showed how even the more fierce struggle of the various currents of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks was for the voices of the peasant congress, how difficult it was at the congress to hold Lenin himself, whose performance was repeatedly interrupted by the noise of his indignant opponents.

But in the end, a compromise between the Bolsheviks and at least the left -wing Socialist Revolutionaries at the congress was achieved, and this meant that representatives of workers and representatives of the peasants agreed to create the coalition government of the upcoming radical political reforms.

The congress ended with the joyful performances of the leaders of the workers and peasants who assured each other in the union unity of revolutionary actions.

Here Reid grabs the passage of Trotsky in Smolny in his report: “Welcome, comrades peasants! You come here not as guests, but as the owners of this house in which the heart of the Russian revolution beats! .. From now on, the Russian land knows only one master - the union of workers, soldiers and peasants ... "

But Reed gives the words of the now unknown Stashkov, the venerable old peasant, who was elected to the Presidium of the Congress, who, in his speech, bowing to the meeting on all four sides, announced: “Congratulations, comrades, on the baptism of new Russian life and freedom!”

How many then hopes were expressed in the rapid revolutionary transformation of the surrounding Russian reality, which would catch up and distort the rational and democratic structure of the life of the most cultural countries of the Earth. However, critics of workers and peasant revolutionaries, on the contrary, predicted the rapid immersion of Russia into the abyss of political and economic troubles. Indeed, the radicalism of the left caused the desperate resistance of the right - a fierce civil war broke out.

From Northern Dakota to the collective farm of the Perm non -Chernozel

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks peered with Zorka Nadezhda and searched for their help and help in the phenomena of Western technical progress. Moreover, in the West, many left-wing radicals with sympathy and sympathy sought to help the new socio-economic development of Soviet Russia.

One of them, for example, was the American Harold Wair, a brilliant social manager of a communist sense who received the education of an agronomist at Pennsylvania University and in the 1910s participated in the organization of the labor movement of forest rooms and agricultural America. After the victory of the Bolshevik revolution, Ware became an activist of the Society of Friends of Soviet Russia. In 1920, he visited Russia and was shocked by the technical backwardness of its agriculture, devastation and hunger.

Wair offered Lenin a plan for providing American assistance in the mechanization of agriculture. The plan with enthusiasm was adopted by the leader of the world proletariat. Returning to America, Wair held a successful campaign to raise funds to create an agromichanized column. In the summer of 1922, a railway line of fifty wagons arrived in Russia, in which there were tractors, cars, an electric generator, a repair shop, hinged agricultural orus, tents, seeds, and medicines. And most importantly - a dozen qualified specialists from Northern Dakota: farmers, mechanic, agronomist, doctor. Involved by Wair in the Bolshevik experiment, they entered into a half -month contract with advice with payment only in the form of natural support.

It is not clear why Lenin did not find the lands closer and better for the Americans, except in the impassable outback of the Perm Non -Chernozel, ruined by the civil war.

On July 2, 1922, the Wayra team arrived at the Vereshchagino railway station, located a hundred kilometers from Toykino, where the Americans reached their off -road for two weeks.

Perm peasants were shocked by miracles: tractors, electricity and cinema. Friendly relations quickly arose between Americans and Russians. The competition of tractors with horses in favor of tractors, a movie about the successes of American farm mechanization, electrical household appliances, such as electric stoves, unequivocally campaigning Perm peasants for technological progress. The personal life of those who came. One of the American Italians married a Toykinsk peasant woman.

From Toykino, of course, exceptionally rainbow information about the prospects of the first American-Soviet state farm came to Moscow and America. Satisfied Lenin, in a letter to the Society of Friends of Soviet Russia in America, reported: “Dear comrades! I just checked the special survey of the Perm executive committee with a special survey of the extremely favorable information that was published in our newspapers, regarding the work of your society members ... in the Toykino state farm ... I enter the Presidium of the All -Russian Central Executive Committee on recognition of this Soviet economy with exemplary and on the provision of special and extraordinary assistance both in relation to the construction work and in the supply of gasoline, metal and other materials necessary for organizing a repair workshop ... "

In this blessed letter about the “exemplary economy”, only a strange mention of some kind of “special and extraordinary assistance” confuses. In fact, a protracted conflict on key organizational issues arose between the American detachment and the Perm Forem Executive Committee by that time. The “voracious” American technique required scarce fuel and lubricants, thereby delivering constant headache to the Perm curators of the Toykinsky state farm. In the provincial, they complained about the Americans that they were not plowing there and mercilessly consumed gasoline and lubricants. In turn, the Americans demanded the construction of the promised housing and the repair workshop. And for such investments, the Gubkom all the more did not have funds. Comrade Chikin, head of the state farm from the Soviet side, was between the American hammer and the Perm Health, at a meeting of the Perm Partyer noted the peculiarities of the local organizational confusion and an informal economy:

“At present, the detachment was in the Perm province without clan and the tribe, because the inter-shabporal was liquidated, and the workshop of working assistance, being the successor of the latter, refused the detachment and the detachment fell into the position of the Kizel-Coopey hired worker ... There is expensive fuel delivery, because it has to be transported from Art. Vereshchagino for 70 miles, and peasants mobilized on the fuel of fuel during transportation in every possible way are cast gasoline and diluted with water, which is harmful to the work of cars. ”

Autumn has come. The help promised by the Toykinsky detachment did not come, even after Lenin's indication. The Americans faced the problem of how to survive the upcoming Ural winter.

Harold Wair took cardinal measures in this situation. To begin with, he moved with his detachment a little south, to the Chelyabinsk region, where the conditions for work and life were better. And from the mid-1920s and, in fact, until the end of the first five-year plan, Waire took an active part in organizing several Soviet-American state farms in the south of Russia and the North Caucasus. He has accumulated the richest and most unique experience of communication with both ordinary people and with high -ranking officials of Soviet Russia.

A number of largest American agricultural manufacturers offered Wayir the place of their plenipotentiary in the USSR with a very decent salary. But the communist manager Wair responded to this kind of temptation. Wayr of the fall of 1929 contains the emotional-excellent explanation of the reasons for this decision: “I am offered to engage in Russian affairs in one large American company. This means enough money for a very, very prosperous life. Now my things are so that I can just survive, I can hardly send my children to a decent school. But to accept this position will mean to live with a sense of unfulfilled debt, an incomplete work, for which I am so lucky, I am the most suitable person to help in conducting an agricultural revolution from an individual economy to an industrial. I can help and will definitely help this quick transformation. Today in Russia we can help people save millions of dollars and millions of hours of slave human labor. If I went to this proposal, I would have ceased to be their friend and would turn only into the seller. No! I decided to stay as a fool that I was born, and continue the case I started. ” (Harry Wair in 1932 returned from the USSR to the USA, where he died in 1935 in a car disaster.)

Of course, the high -mechanized Tractor experiment of Lenin - Wayra was only a drop of technological progress in the ocean of rural backwardness of Russia, but this kind of undertakings did not be in vain, but continued to wake up the imagination and organizational will of the Soviets, striving to break out of the backwardness of the past and the devastation of the present.

By the end of the Civil War, it became clear that not separate demonstrative Soviet-American technocratic projects, but mass-mass market relations can begin to stabilize the national economy destroyed by the war and lay the foundation for its further sustainable development.