1038 Ch. 25 • Economic Depression and DictatorshipOverall, however, living conditions deteriorated in the Soviet Union dur
ing the Five-Year Plan. Shortages of fuel and machine parts became severe.
Hundreds of thousands of peasants had been killed, and perhaps 2 million
exiled to Siberia or other distant places under the sentence of hard labor.
Around 7 million people died of hunger between 1930 and 1933, and 4 to
5 million people starved during 1932 and 1933, most in Ukraine. In Kaza
khstan in Central Asia, about 2 million people (one-tenth of the popula
tion) died or were killed between 1926 and 1933.
The campaign for heavy industrialization was successful, but only if the
human cost is conveniently forgotten. Despite inaccurate and sometimes
misleading Soviet data, the state did meet some ambitious production tar
gets in heavy industry (iron and steel), fuel production (oil and electricity),
new industries (especially chemicals), and in the manufacture of tractors.
While the Depression devastated Western economies, between 1929 and
1934 the Soviet economy may have had an annual growth rate of a remark
able 27 percent. These successes occurred despite inefficiency due to inade
quate planning, chaotic reporting of figures (compounded by the mounting
sense of urgency to report successes), and the replacement of many of the
most able technicians (because of their social class) by dedicated but semi
literate workers or peasants who sometimes mistook mud for oil.
Giant show projects such as the Dnieper Dam and the new industrial
city of Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains attracted international atten
tion. Foreign visitors found many workers who seemed enthusiastic. Party
officials selected “heroes of labor,” praised for surpassing their production
targets by record amounts. A certain Andrei Stakhanov, a Don Basin miner,
was credited in August 1935 with cutting 102 tons of coal during a single
shift. A “Stakhanovite” became the idealized Soviet worker, working as fast
as he or she could, and ready to step forward to denounce “Trotskyite
wreckers and saboteurs.”
The second Five-Year Plan (1933-1937) relied less on the shrill rhetoric
of class warfare, despite ongoing collectivization. By 1936, 93 percent of
peasants labored on collective farms. Stalin relaxed the ideologically charged
campaign against “experts” of bourgeois origins, and technocrats again
appeared in factories. But the quality of Soviet life did not significantly
improve. Centralized planning had its bizarre aspects: the sudden arrival
of women’s red stockings or of ketchup in stores, or of bathtubs, even if
someone had forgotten to order the production of plugs for them. The
promised “radiant” future always seemed to be far away.
In the meantime, Stalin reinforced his hold on power. Even with most
consumer goods still wanting, 4.5 million radios in the Soviet Union broad
cast Stalin’s speeches in the 1930s. The grandson of a Soviet minister
recalled, “Stalin was like a God for us. Somebody told me that Stalin could
be the best surgeon. He could perform a brain operation better than any
one else, and I believed it.” A poem from the 1930s entitled “There Is a
Man in Moscow” reflects this bizarre, troubling adulation: