Loser Stalin. Holodomor

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The Holodomor was not an accident. It was a consequence of the construction of an incompetent system of administrative implementation of industrialization. The peasants paid with their lives for Stalin’s failure as an “effective manager.”

If the adoption of the NEP was the last step taken by Lenin as head of the Soviet state, then Stalin, having established himself in power, began his activities with industrialization. We will not now discuss the question of how much the Soviet Union needed accelerated industrialization. For this article, let us accept the arguments of the great powers, according to which, without a strong military industry, we could not prepare for the coming war. The question, however, is how well Stalin prepared for it using the methods he adopted.

Rapid industrialization required the Soviet state to quickly accumulate resources. Firstly, people at the construction sites of the first five-year plans had to be provided with food (previously, they were peasants and barely fed themselves). Secondly, it was necessary to sell some goods abroad in order to import equipment for new factories with the proceeds. And then only grain could be sold. Consequently, forced industrialization meant a forced seizure of grain from the peasantry. And the more ambitious the plans for the development of Soviet industry were, the more products needed to be taken away from the peasants.

Since the men did not want to part with the fruits of their labor voluntarily, the security forces began to take away their harvest. And when it became clear that it was difficult to select what was well hidden, it was necessary to introduce in the villages such an organization of labor that it would be impossible to hide the grown bread at all.

This is how the transition from private farming to the collective farm system took place. On a collective farm headed by a representative of the authorities, you cannot hide anything from the authorities. Everything goes to the granaries of the homeland, while the worker gets only the harvest from his personal subsidiary plot and what the authorities leave for him out of the “kindness of his heart.”

It was because of the formation of such a system that the famine of 1932–1933 occurred, which claimed from 5 to 7 million peasant lives. The fact is that it was possible to confiscate as much grain as possible from the collective farms, but Stalin did not feel “kindness of soul” towards the peasants. From the regional and district party committees, from the chairmen of collective farms, he demanded the maximum delivery of grain to the state. And those, in order not to be fined, raked everything possible from the collective farm storage facilities. In such a system of power vertical there was no objective mechanism for limiting the madness of power. The Kremlin had no information about when the last peasant grain would be sold abroad and starvation would begin in the villages. The local bosses, of course, knew this, but they obediently followed the instructions of the higher authorities, on whom their personal well-being depended.

Historian Oleg Khlevnyuk accurately described the general logic of Stalin’s “effective management.” “It all started with the center (most often Stalin) putting forward the goals of the campaign and distributing specific tasks. Then the apparatus was mobilized to carry out the assigned tasks using extraordinary methods, which implied widespread “excesses.” As a result, the campaign was brought to the level of crisis, at the highest point of which the limits of retreat were determined - overcoming the “excesses.” The retreat was the task of a counter-campaign, a kind of way out of terror. At this stage, some perpetrators of terror were subjected to repression and turned into scapegoats.”

After the famine, the pace of industrialization had to be reduced and coordinated with the real amount of resources that the village could provide. But the losses incurred could no longer be compensated.

Firstly, the peasants who survived the disaster naturally did not experience any patriotic feelings towards the Soviet country, and this largely determined the defeats of the first year of the war, as well as the large number of people who collaborated with the Nazis. Secondly, as a result of collectivization and famine, the number of livestock sharply decreased, since peasants preferred to eat the meat that would otherwise be used for the needs of the first five-year plans. And it was naturally impossible to restore the livestock in the years remaining before the war.

Thus, the form in which the incompetent Soviet leadership began to prepare the USSR for a big war ultimately weakened the country. It is characteristic that during the Second World War the United States was able to provide such a large volume of military production on the basis of the market that, in addition to meeting its own needs, it was also able to supply Lend-Lease to Europe. It's no wonder America is still a superpower while we blame ourselves for why we aren't.