Communists need not regard the shift from a centrally planned socialist economy to a socialist-oriented market economy by China and Vietnam as a retreat from the path of socialist development. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to look at the timing of the abandonment of market relations in agriculture, industry, and trade within the process of socialist development. I will focus here primarily on agriculture in the Soviet Union.

It should not be surprising that those inspired by the spirit of revolutionary Marxism should be eager to realize their dream of a communist society as quickly as possible. In May 1918, Lenin called for a slowdown in the process of nationalization then in full force. To the call of the Left Communists that “the systematic use of the means of production is conceivable only if a most determined policy of socialisation is pursued,” Lenin replied:

Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by “determination” alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability. (1974a, 334)

Lenin noted that the socioeconomic structures of the Russian economy consisted of patriarchal elements (mainly natural – that is, subsistence – peasant farming), small commodity production (including the majority of peasants selling their grain), private capitalism, state capitalism, and socialism (335–36). Lenin later (in 1921) described the essence of state capitalism as an economic relationship between the Soviet government and a capitalist under which

the latter is provided with certain things: raw materials, mines, oilfields, minerals, or ... even a special factory. The socialist state gives the capitalist its means of production such as factories, mines and materials. The capitalist operates as a contractor leasing socialist means of production, making a profit on his capital and delivering a part of his output to the socialist market. (1973, 296–97)

Soon the civil war forced a switch in economic organization to what became known as “war communism.” In 1921, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), under which market relations were restored and requisition (that is, seizure) of grain from the peasants was replaced by a tax in kind. The peasants were then allowed to market any surplus that remained after the tax. While he saw NEP as a short-term measure, he made no predictions regarding its duration. Earlier, in 1918, after first projecting the utilization of state capitalism for socialist development, he reminded his Left Communist critics that

the teachers of socialism spoke of a whole period of transition from capitalism to socialism and emphasised the “prolonged birth-pangs” of the new society. And this new society is again an abstraction which can come into being only by passing through a series of varied, imperfect and concrete attempts to create this or that socialist state. (1974a, 341)

Although the land was nationalized, the peasant families retained the right to work it and own their means of production and the right to retain or market agricultural products after paying a tax in kind. Moreover, the wealthier peasants (kulaks) continued to employ restricted amounts of peasant labor. Because the peasants constituted the majority of the population, Lenin continually stressed that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the direction of policy by the proletariat in alliance with the middle and poor peasants (1973).

After Lenin’s death, the CPSU, under Stalin’s leadership, pursued Lenin’s moderate course of implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat in the framework of this alliance. It successfully resisted the demands of the Left Opposition, led initially by Trotsky, later joined by Zinoviev, for large-scale expropriation of grain from the peasants to provide resources for rapid industrialization and for greater material support for revolutionary movements abroad on the grounds that it was impossible to build socialism in one country.

The Central Committee continued the tradition established by Lenin that those taking a position strongly opposed by the majority should continue to retain positions of responsibility as long as they were willing to implement Party policies. In July 1927, Stalin placed the question of the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev on the agenda of a Central Committee meeting, but lacked the votes and settled for a warning (McNeal 1988, 104). He raised the question again in October in view of their continued factional activity. Trotsky and Zinoviev were then removed from the Central Committee, but not from Party membership (105). In November, Stalin claimed that reliable evidence showed the opposition had been planning a coup during the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, but called it off because the Party was ready to deal with it. The Trotskyites and Zinovievites did, however, organize their own street demonstrations on 7 November, with their own slogans (History 1939, 285). On 14 November, the Central Committee expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Party; Kamenov and other members of the opposition were expelled from the Central Committee. In November or early December, the Politburo rejected Stalin’s subsequent call for their arrest (McNeal 1989, 105–6).

The Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 again overwhelmingly rejected the position of the Left Opposition. Seventy-five leading members of the opposition (including Kamenov) were expelled from the Party. The next day, the Zinoviev group, but not Trotsky and his supporters, submitted a statement in which they acknowledged their violation of Party discipline and the incorrectness of their views. The Congress required individual statements for reinstatement, after which six months time must pass to ensure that they were conforming to pledges of compliance with Party policy (Popov 1934, 327–28).

The Politburo remained accountable to the Central Committee. Strong disagreements were tolerated without personal recrimination. Within the Party, Stalin’s emerging tendency to physical repression of opposition was constrained by the Politburo. There were limits to this constraint, however; Trotsky and many of his supporters who did not request readmission were deported to Kazakhstan and other regions of the USSR. Trotsky continued from afar his efforts to maintain an organized opposition and was expelled from the USSR in 1929.

The Fifteenth Party Congress took two major steps intended to form the basis for socialist development of the economy: acceleration of collectivization of agriculture and the introduction of a five-year plan for economic development in a framework of centralized economic planning. Although the rationale for both these measures needs further discussion, I limit myself here to the collectivization of agriculture.

The Russian peasants wanted the land nationalized so that it would not be taken away from them as it had been under the overthrown feudal-landlord system. They did not, however, want it to be converted into state farms on which they would be employed as wage workers as an agricultural proletariat. They wanted family land-use rights along with the right to inheritance.

The land socialization law of 19 February 1918, although granting use of agricultural land to “individual families and persons,” also prescribed:

the development of collective farming as more advantageous from the point of view of economy of labour and produce, at the expense of individual farming, with a view to transition to socialist farming (Article 11, paragraph e). (cited by Lenin [1974c, 308])

Lenin exercised extreme caution on the question, preferring to use the term cooperatives rather than collective farming:

The NEP is an advance, because it is adjustable to the level of the most ordinary peasant and does not demand anything higher of him. But it will take a whole historical epoch to get the entire population into the work of the co-operatives through NEP. At best we can achieve this in one or two decades. Nevertheless, it will be a distinct historical epoch, and without this historical epoch, without universal literacy, without a proper degree of efficiency, without training the population sufficiently to acquire the habit of book-reading, and without the material basis for this, without a certain sufficiency to safeguard against, say, bad harvests, famine, etc. – without this we shall not achieve our object. (1974b, 470)

The Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925 set socialist industrialization as the focus for the next stage of socialist construction. The next three years saw the beginning of many major construction projects, including the world’s largest hydroelectric dam (on the Dnieper River), the Turkistan-Siberian Railway, the Stalingrad Tractor Works, and ZIS automobile works.

By 1926–27, the main indicators for Soviet agricultural production exceeded the prewar level. The standard of living of the peasantry greatly improved. Despite the overall gain in agricultural production, the gross yield of grain was 91 percent of the prewar level, while the market share of the grain was a mere 37 percent of the prewar figure (History 1939, 256). Despite the growth of industrial production, the growing peasant demand for textiles, shoes, agricultural tools, and other products could not be satisfied because the industrial investments were tilted in favor of heavy industry and toward building up the national industrial infrastructure (electrification, transport, etc.). At the end of 1927, the manufacture of consumer goods was only 1 to 2 percent higher than the previous year, while the after-tax peasant income from the sale of grain sold to the state was up by 31 percent (Medvedev 1989, 216). The well-to-do peasants accumulated a great deal of currency, but the goods they wished to buy were not available. These principal producers of marketable grain—the kulaks and richer middle peasants—had no need to accumulate more banknotes and either stored their grain to wait for higher prices or reduced the acreage of sown grain. The poorer peasants preferred to increase their own personal consumption in face of the lack of products to buy. As a result, there was not enough grain to feed the urban population and for export abroad to provide foreign currency for importing machinery needed for industrialization.

In December 1927, in his report to the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin declared that the way out

is to turn the small and scattered peasant farms into large united farms based on the common cultivation of the soil, to introduce collective cultivation of the soil on the basis of a new and higher technique. The way out is to unite the small and dwarf peasant farms gradually but surely, not by pressure, but by example and persuasion, into large farms based on common, co-operative, collective cultivation of the soil with the use of agricultural machines and tractors and scientific methods of intensive agriculture. There is no other way out. (History 1939, 288)

Was this really the only way out for an agricultural economy that still lacked the means for mechanization? Toward the end of the 1970s, Vietnam, concerned about the slow growth of agricultural production in the absence of mechanized agriculture, gave its peasants, then organized into collective farms, the right to return to family farming. The peasants overwhelmingly chose this option (Marquit 2002). In 1981, China reorganized its agriculture from collective farming in the communes to family farming.

Even in the industrialized capitalist countries with their highly mechanized agriculture, family farms—not large-scale corporate farms—predominate in grain production, for both economic and cultural reasons.

Marxist theory has traditionally viewed peasants, once they move from subsistence farming to the production of a surplus for the market, as petty bourgeois. Trotsky even considered the peasants as natural enemies of socialism. A fundamental difference exists, however, between the peasant as a petty bourgeois and the urban petty bourgeois. Peasants have deep cultural-historical roots to the land they have traditionally tilled. They do not view themselves as entrepreneurs, and in this sense, they are a class in themselves with interests coinciding more with the working class than with big capital. For example, in the United States, right-wing political leaders raise arguments against farm subsidies on the grounds that the government has no business subsidizing unsuccessful businesses. Farmers who are forced by the agribusiness monopolies to sell their grain at prices below the cost of production actually are not failed business people, but victims of capitalist exploitation. In my home state of Minnesota, where we have 100,000 family farmers, the Minnesota Farmers Union—a progressive farmers’ organization—has established a close political alliance with the state’s labor movement, which in turn supports (as does the Communist Party USA) federal subsidies for farmers when the price they receive for their products is below the cost of production.

Why is grain being produced by 100,000 highly mechanized family farms in Minnesota, rather than by corporate farms? Despite mechanization, grain farming requires dawn-to-dusk labor that can be organized more cost-effectively by putting family members to work for long hours on land to which they are deeply attached culturally rather than by employing a landless rural proletariat.

While collective labor is a necessary precondition for the development of a truly socialist consciousness, it does not necessarily follow that collectivization of agriculture was the best path to increase marketable grain production under the conditions of technological underdevelopment that prevailed in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. The primary problem in 1927 about the shortage of marketable grain, however, was not the technological organization of grain production, but the lack of incentives for the peasants to produce and market more grain.

The decision of the Fifteenth Congress of the CPSU to accelerate collectivization was based on more than ensuring increased grain production. It was anticipated that collectivization would have an ideological impact in developing a socialist consciousness among the peasants. Also important was that collectivization would make it more difficult for peasants to deceive tax collectors on the size of the harvest and it would eliminate the hoarding of grain by individual peasants for later sale at higher prices, thereby making more grain available for purchase by the state.

A Fifteenth Party Congress resolution also gave the following directive:

To develop further the offensive against the kulaks and to adopt a number of new measures which would restrict the development of capitalism in the countryside and guide peasant farming towards Socialism. (History 1939, 189)

The peasants were not to be coerced into joining the collectives. Loans and promises of machinery and other aid were to be used as inducements. Collectivization was not to be an excuse for reverting to the forcible requisitioning of grain as had been advocated by the Left Opposition. Roy Medvedev writes that at the Fifteenth Party Congress, Vyacheslav Molotov, then already the Politburo member closest to Stalin, “declared that those who proposed a ‘forced loan’ from the peasantry were enemies of the alliance between the workers and peasants; they were proposing the ‘destruction of the Soviet Union.’ At that point Stalin called out “Correct!” (Medvedev 1989, 218). Referring to the resolution on restricting the kulaks, Stalin cautioned:

Those comrades are wrong who think that we can and should do away with the kulaks by administrative fiat, by the GPU: write the decree, seal it, period. That's an easy method, but it won’t work. The kulak must be taken by economic measures, in accordance with Soviet legality. (cited in Medvedev 1989, 217)

Mikoyan’s proposals for increasing grain procurement were to correct the imbalance between prices for manufactured goods and those for agricultural products and to deliver increased supplies of low-priced manufactured goods to villages even at the cost of temporary shortages in the cities. Mikoyan’s proposals were incorporated into the congress resolutions (218).

Once the congress was over, Stalin, flushed with the victory of having defeated the challenge to his leadership from the Left Opposition, immediately reversed course. Medvedev writes:

Stalin made a sudden sharp turn “to the left” in agricultural policy. He began to put into effect the forced requisition of grain that the entire party had just rejected as “adventurist.” In late December, Stalin sent out instructions for the application of extraordinary measures against the kulaks.... Then on January 6, 1928, Stalin issued a new directive, extremely harsh in tone and content, which ended with threats against local party leaders if they failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough in grain procurements in the shortest possible time. There followed a wave of confiscations and violence toward wealthy peasants throughout the entire country. (218)

According to Molotov, who never faltered in his worship of Stalin and defended his own actions until his death, the extraordinary measures were not directed just against the kulaks.

On January 1, 1928, I had to go to Melitopol on the grain procurement drive. In the Ukraine. To extort grain. . . .

From everyone who had grain. Industrial workers and the army were in a desperate situation. Grain was all in private hands, and the task was to seize it from them. Each farmstead clung to its stock of grain. . . .

 ... We took away the grain. We paid them in cash, but of course at miserably low prices. They gained nothing. . . .

 ... I applied the utmost pressure to extort the grain. All kinds of rather harsh methods of persuasion had to be applied. . . .

Soon I returned to Moscow. Stalin met with the most experienced grain collectors. I reported on how I used pressure tactics and other ruses. . . .

 ... He said then, “I will cover you with kisses in gratitude for your action down there!” I committed these words to memory. . . “for your action.” He wanted that experience, and soon afterward set off for Siberia. . . . After that we went out seeking grain every year. Stalin no longer made the trips. But we went out for grain five years in a row. We pumped out the grain. (Chuev 1993, 241–42)

Medvedev writes that the extraordinary measures adopted immediately after the Fifteenth Party Congress led to a significant, but brief, increase in grain procurements; soon nothing remained to seize.

In the spring and summer of 1928 new directives went out to back off from the “extraordinary measures”; grain prices were raised 15 to 20 percent and more manufactured goods were made available for purchase by the peasants. These new measures proved to be too late, since less grain had been sown; many kulaks liquidated their holdings by selling off their means of production. Middle peasants, fearful of being labeled as kulaks, were hesitant to increase their production. In the fall of 1928, grain procurement again fell short and the extraordinary measures were again repeated (220), which is why Molotov and other Party leaders had to go again on their “grain-extorting” missions. In 1929, despite a good harvest, rationing of grain in the cities was introduced.

To deal with this continuing debacle of his agricultural policies, Stalin once again reversed his strategy. Quotas were established region by region to drive the peasants into the collective farms despite the fact that the original Five-Year Plan (1929–34) envisaged that 17.5 percent of the total sowing area would become part of the socialized sector (Kim et al. 1982, 261). By 1931, in the principal grain-growing districts, “80 per cent of the peasant farms had already amalgamated to form collective farms”; 200,000 collective and 4,000 state farms “cultivated two-thirds of the total crop area of the country” (History 1939, 315). By the end of 1934, collective farms “had embraced about three-quarters of all peasant households in the Soviet Union and about 90 percent of the total crop area” (318).

On 30 January 1930, a Central Committee resolution endorsed Stalin’s proposal to change the decision of the Fifteenth Party Congress from restricting the kulaks by economic rather than by administrative means to the elimination of the kulaks by administrative means. Their property was confiscated and their fates were determined by how their attitudes toward collectivization were assessed. Those who were accused of engaging in terrorist acts or sabotage were imprisoned or shot and their families exiled; others were exiled to distant lands with their families, still others were resettled in nearby regions or allowed to farm on land outside the collective, retaining only the necessary implements and possessions (for a more detailed account, see Medvedev 1989, 230–40). Molotov boasted that he personally “designated districts where kulaks were to be removed.... We exiled 400,000 kulaks. My commission did its job” (Chuev 1993, 148). Medvedev gives the official figures for deportations in 1930–31 to distant regions as 381,000—close enough to Molotov’s figures (234).

The violence with which the peasants were herded into the collective farms immediately produced such negative affects on grain procurement that Stalin, in his “Dizzy with Success” article published 2 March 1930, denounced the local officials for carrying out the excesses that he had ordered. This hypocritical behavior of giving orders and then condemning those to whom the orders were given for carrying them out became a pattern that he employed repeatedly for the rest of his life. The policy of forced collectivization was resumed, and increasingly draconian measures had to be taken to prevent the complete collapse of agricultural production.

The net result of forced collectivization was a drop in gross agricultural output from 16.6 billion rubles in 1927–28 to 13.1 billion in 1933. Livestock production dropped to 65 percent of the 1913 level (227). The published figures on the fulfillment of the plan, as Khrushchev was later to reveal, were falsified by a change in the way agricultural statistics were handled. Not until the 1950s did grain production rise above the pre-Revolutionary level.

Stalin’s measures to procure grain by forcible collectivization aroused concern among veteran Communists. In 1928–1929, three Politburo members, Nicolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky, and Alexei Rykov, proposed continuation of the NEP policy of using market forces to stimulate grain production, but were unsuccessful in their efforts to sway the majority of the Politburo and the Central Committee away from support of Stalin, who promptly labeled them the Right Opposition. The three warned about the consequences of rupturing the alliance between the working class and the peasantry. They were correct in predicting that forced collectivization would encounter strong peasant resistance.

To stop peasants from fleeing the collective farms, Stalin, in November 1932, introduced a system of internal passports for travel within the USSR. Passports were issued only to urban dwellers, not to peasants. Peasants were again tied to the land, as under feudalism.

Subsequent events indicate that many of the Old Bolsheviks (Communist veterans of the October Revolution and the Civil War) shared the concern of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. Although no organized opposition to Stalin’s leadership emerged, Stalin was able to sense the growth of widespread concern among the Old Bolsheviks. His response was physical extermination.

In his report to the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev disclosed that 70 percent of the members of the Central Committee of 1934 were executed. Of the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested on charges of counterrevolutionary crimes (Khrushchev 1962). Medvedev cites additional evidence that the Old Bolsheviks were particularly targeted by the purges. At the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930 and Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, some 80 percent of the delegates had joined the party before 1920; the comparable figure was only 19 percent at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 (450).

The official basis for the large-scale executions of the Old Bolsheviks was provided by show trials of former Soviet leaders that were held in Moscow in 1936, 1937, and 1938. The convictions were based on confessions extracted from the defendants by beatings and other forms of torture and with few exceptions were followed by execution. Some, like Tomsky, committed suicide before their arrest. Bukharin, in a personal letter to Stalin written just before his trial and execution, and kept secret until 1993, wrote that he had no intention of recanting to the world at large at his public trial the confessions he had signed during his interrogations, but that he was in fact innocent of the crimes to which he had confessed (Getty and Naumov, 1999, 556). A secret trial of military leaders followed in 1938, in the wake of which almost all military commanders of the Red Army, Navy, and Air Force, and thousands of officers were executed.

Examination of the now available Soviet archives has established that 681,692 executions (largely political) were carried out during the years 1937–38 (Getty et al. 1993, 1022). In his secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev discussed only the cases in which nonpublic trials were held. These included the trials of Marshall Michail Tuchachevsky and other high-ranking military officials on the charge of conspiring with Germany, Poland, and Japan to give them Soviet territory in exchange for their support for a military coup (the same charge for which Bukharin and Rykov were executed). In discussing the grounds for the rehabilitation of Tuchachevsky and others, Khrushchev cited the text of a message sent by Stalin to the NKVD authorizing the use of physical torture to extract confessions (1962). No documentary evidence was presented at any of the trials. Khrushchev explained in his memoirs why the victims of the public trials had not been rehabilitated:

The reason for our decision was that there had been representatives of the fraternal Communist parties present when Rykov, Bukharin, and other leaders of the people were tried and sentenced. These representatives had then gone home and testified in their own countries to the justice of the sentences. We didn't want to discredit the fraternal Party representatives who had attended the open trials, so we indefinitely postponed the rehabilitation of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov. (1970, 352–53)

For details on the trials, I again refer readers to Medvedev’s revised edition of Let History Judge (1989).*

What then was the net effect of Stalin’s rush to collectivization? Had Lenin’s policy adhering to the alliance of workers and peasants been continued by allowing the peasants, including the kulaks, to market their surplus at reasonable prices, while providing them with a greater supply of manufactured goods, a greater amount of grain would have been available to feed urban workers and as a resource for industrialization. This would have allowed a faster rate of industrialization than had been achieved in the course of the first two five-year plans. The kulaks, though not enamored with socialism, had not represented a counterrevolutionary force committed to the overthrow of Soviet power.

A most negative consequence of the forced collectivization was the fear that it generated in Stalin and those closest to him that it would give rise to a challenge to their leadership from those Communists who wanted to continue on Lenin’s course—Communists Stalin arbitrarily labeled “Rightists.” In his conversations with Chuev in 1973, Molotov states, “The confessions seemed artificial and exaggerated. I consider it inconceivable that Rykov, Bukharin, and even Trotsky agreed to cede the Soviet far east, the Ukraine, and even the Caucasus to a foreign power. I rule that out” (1993, 264). But this was precisely the main basis for the execution of Bukharin and Rykov in 1938. This nonexistent plot was also the basis for the execution of Tuchachevsky and almost all the military commanders. It is clear from other comments by Molotov that Stalin’s real reason for the executions was that he considered the victims rightists who might challenge his leadership: “We could have suffered greater losses in the war—perhaps even defeat—if the leadership had flinched and allowed internal disagreements like cracks in a rock.... Had no brutal measures been used, there would surely have been a danger of splits within the party” (256–57). Further, “It is indeed sad that so many innocent people perished. But I believe the terror of the late 1930s was necessary.... Stalin insisted on making doubly sure: spare no one, but guarantee absolute stability for a long period of time.... It was difficult to draw a precise line where to stop” (278).

Nikolai Yezhov was put at the head of the NKVD by Stalin in 1936. Molotov states that Yezhov “set arrest quotas by region, on down to districts. No fewer than two thousand must be liquidated in such and such region, no fewer than fifty in such and such district ... he just overdid it because Stalin demanded greater repression” (262–63). After uneasiness over the executions began to surface, Stalin’s had Yezhov executed for the excesses that he, Stalin, had demanded. Molotov states that Stalin, as head of the Party, would sign the lists of people to be arrested and that he, as head of the government, would sign whatever lists Stalin signed (as did other members of the Politburo). “I signed lists containing the names of people who could have been straightforward and dedicated citizens. The Central Committee was also to blame for running careless checks on some of the accused. But no one could prove to me that all these actions should never have been undertaken” (297).

When one member of a family was shot, it was common practice to arrest the other family members or send them into exile. “They had to be isolated somehow,” explained Molotov. “Otherwise they would have served as conduits of all kinds of complaints. And a certain amount of demoralization” (277–78).

It is beyond the scope of this commentary to go into arrests and executions beyond the Party. Suffice it to say that outstanding scientists, scholars, engineers and other technical personnel, artists and cultural workers were also enmeshed by the terror.

Stalin was nevertheless able to convince the bulk of the urban population that these measures were necessary to protect the Soviet Union from the domestic enemies who had been corrupted and bribed by imperialism to destroy the achievements of the October Revolution, the benefits of which the population was just beginning to enjoy as industrialization began to improve the living conditions of the urban population toward the end of the thirties.

Had a Leninist course been pursued in agriculture and in party governance, and socialist legality respected, industrialization could have moved ahead at a faster pace and the military forces would have been better equipped and better commanded so that the Nazi blitzkrieg could have stopped well before it reached the outskirts of Moscow.

Stalin’s great skill in political intrigue and his brutality of character enabled him to use the political and economic problems unavoidable in the creation of a new socioeconomic system to ascend to a level of state and Party leadership with unchallenged personal power. The socialization of agriculture is, of course, a necessary step on the path to a communist society. Experience in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cuba has shown that it is worth experimenting with a variety of organizational structures on the basis of a substantial level of mechanization. Premature attempts at socialization amount to a form of voluntarism that borders on utopian socialism.

Stalin used the victory of the proletariat in the October Revolution as a vehicle to satisfy his desire to go down in history as an adulated god-like figure. He was determined that the benefits anticipated by the working class from social ownership of the means of production be attributed to his great genius. During the second five-year plan, the Soviet media consistently credited Stalin’s masterful leadership for the rise in living standards and social welfare resulting from the progress of industrialization. The gains were indeed impressive, but they could have been far greater had the Leninist collective leadership of the Party and the principle of “All Power to the Soviets” not been abrogated by Stalin’s unbridled lust for personal power

--Originally written in English and publishe in German translation under the title “Politische und ökonomische Folgen der verfrühten Vergesellschaftung der Landwirtschaft in der Sowjetunion” in Philosophie und Politik: Festschrift für Robert Steigerwald, edited by Willi Gerns, Hans Heinz Holz, Hermann Kopp, Thomas Metscher, and Werner Seppman in cooperation with the Marx-Engels Stiftung, Wuppertal, 262–79 (Essen: Neue Impulse Verlag, 2005). An abrdiged version was published in English in the Communist Review, Fall 2005 (journal of he Communist Party of Britain). 

NOTE

   *The draft of the first edition of Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, in most respects a Marxist-Leninist critique of the Stalin period by Soviet historian Roy Medvedev, then a member of the CPSU, began circulating informally in the USSR in 1964. After Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as leader of the CPSU in 1964, criticism of Stalin was limited to the phrase cult of the individual; no details about the terror of the 1930s were permitted, nor criticism of forced collectivization other than what had been allowed in Stalin’s time. Stalin was, in effect, rehabilitated. Soviet publications such as History of the USSR, written in 1974, again justified the excesses—for example, the 1928 Shakhty frame-up trials in the course of which confessions were beaten out of members of fictitious organizations of wreckers and saboteurs “in the service of Russian and foreign capitalists and foreign intelligence;” Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were again referred to as leaders of the Right Opposition, who “expressed the interests of the kulaks and other well-off elements in the villages that were opposed to the socialist reconstruction of agriculture” (Kim et al. 1982, 252, 259). Medvedev was expelled from the CPSU in 1969 after his book was published in the West. His Party membership was restored in 1988.

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