Soviet Union: party-state, central planning and terror (1922–1953)

Background

The Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd in November 1917 and won the civil war of 1918–1921 against a range of opponents. By 1921 other parties had been suppressed and the Tenth Party Congress banned organised factions inside the Communist Party itself, the same congress that faced the Kronstadt rising of sailors demanding free soviets. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded by treaty in December 1922 as a federation of Soviet republics. Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921–1928) restored private trade and peasant farming under a state that kept the "commanding heights" of industry, banking and foreign trade. After Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the party since 1922, used the party apparatus to defeat Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and finally Bukharin. From 1928–29 he abandoned NEP for forced industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture.

How it was governed

• Party over state. Formally, sovereignty lay with elected soviets (councils) and, from 1936, with a Supreme Soviet chosen by universal suffrage. In practice every candidate was approved by the party and elections had one candidate per seat. Real decisions were taken by the party's Politburo and Secretariat and transmitted down a hierarchy of party committees that shadowed every ministry, enterprise and region.
• Nomenklatura. From the 1920s the party kept lists of important posts and of people eligible to fill them, and appointments to those posts required approval by the relevant party committee. Graeme Gill shows how this control over careers, built in the party's central apparatus in the 1920s, gave the general secretary a loyal network of regional secretaries and became the backbone of the Stalinist system.
• Personal dictatorship. By the mid-1930s collective leadership had given way to Stalin's personal power. Politburo meetings became irregular; decisions were often taken by Stalin with a small circle, and members of the leadership were themselves arrested and shot.
• Security police. The Cheka (1917), later the OGPU and from 1934 the NKVD, combined political policing, extrajudicial tribunals and the administration of labour camps.

Economy: planning by Gosplan

The State Planning Commission (Gosplan), set up in 1921, drafted the five-year plans from 1928 and the annual and quarterly plans that set output targets, allocated materials and fixed prices. Paul Gregory and Mark Harrison, surveying research in the opened archives, show that the system was less a coherent plan than a hierarchy of bargaining: the dictator set priorities and investment drives, ministries and enterprises hid capacity and lobbied for resources, and shortages, informal markets and corruption filled the gaps. Output of steel, coal, machinery and armaments grew very fast in the 1930s; consumption, housing and agriculture lagged. Robert Allen argues that output targets and soft budget constraints did speed industrial growth compared with what NEP would have achieved, while collectivisation contributed little; other economists stress the human cost and the waste.

Repression and rights

The documented record, much of it from Soviet archives opened after 1991, includes:

• Collectivisation and deportation. Peasant households labelled "kulaks" were expropriated; in 1930–31 alone roughly 1.8 million people were deported as "special settlers".
• Famine. The famines of 1930–1933, which hit Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus and the Volga hardest, followed grain procurements that the state kept enforcing. R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft estimate excess deaths at probably 5.5–6.5 million. Whether the Ukrainian famine was a genocide (the Holodomor) remains a scholarly and political dispute; that the state's policies caused mass death is not.
• The Great Terror. In 1937–38 the NKVD carried out mass operations against "former kulaks", "anti-Soviet elements" and national minorities, with quotas set from Moscow. NKVD statistics published by J. Arch Getty, Gábor Rittersporn and Viktor Zemskov record 681,692 death sentences in those two years.
• The Gulag. The camp administration created in 1930 held about 1.9 million prisoners in camps and labour colonies in January 1941 and about 2.5 million in the early 1950s; the records count more than a million deaths in the camps between 1934 and 1953, excluding colonies and deaths soon after release. Michael Ellman discusses why such records undercount.
• Deportation of peoples. During and after the Second World War whole nationalities, including Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks and Crimean Tatars, were deported to Central Asia and Siberia.

Outcomes

The USSR became an industrial and military great power, defeated Nazi Germany at the cost of tens of millions of lives, extended literacy and basic schooling to most of the population, and built a welfare state of guaranteed employment, free health care and education. It did so with chronic shortages, low consumption, a collectivised agriculture that remained a weak point for decades, and repression on a scale that killed millions.

Debates

• Did terror serve the plan? Archival research shows that forced labour was costly and inefficient; Khlevniuk argues the Gulag was driven primarily by political goals, with economic use a secondary rationale.
• Was the system planned at all? Gregory and Harrison describe a "dictator's" economy of bargaining and informal adjustment, not a single coherent plan.
• Counterfactual growth. Allen's comparison suggests faster industrial growth than under NEP; critics question the counterfactual and the omission of welfare costs.

Lessons for institution design

• Formal elections and federalism can be hollow. The constitution described soviets, a federation and universal suffrage; the party's monopoly over nomination and careers made them decorative.
• Control of appointments is control of the state. The nomenklatura shows how a personnel system can be the decisive power.
• Without independent feedback, errors compound. Procurement continued into famine because no free press, courts or elected bodies could stop it.

Further reading

• Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (CUP, 1990)
• Paul Gregory and Mark Harrison, "Allocation under Dictatorship", Journal of Economic Literature (2005)
• R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger (Palgrave, 2004)
• Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag (Yale, 2004)