The Five Years' Plan
BY MICHAEL FARBMAN. ,
I—Reconstruction by Privation THE Five Years' Plan is nominally a programme of construction. Its full name is the " Five Years' Plan of Socialist Construction." But one cannot take it merely at its face value. Construction, the building of huge factories and power stations, is the basis of the Plan, but is not its essence. The central aim of the Plan is the development of the productive forces of the country and the achievement of a higher productivity of labour. Regarded simply as a programme of construction, the Piatiletka " could claim for itself no extraordinary impor- tance. After all, industrialization in Russia did not begin with this Five Years' Plan. It started in the 'nineties of the last century ; and even the authors of the Plan, who are not given to any excessive admiration, for the work of their predecessors, admit that in this narrow sphere the Piatiletka is merely a continuation, though at a greatly accelerated pace, of a development started forty years ago.
What distinguishes the present from the earlier phase of Russian industrialization, and what, indeed, distin- guishes it from the process of industrialization in any other country and at any other period, is not the scope of construction, but the methods employed. It is unique in that, instead of being a slow process spread over several generations (in the U.S.A. it took seventy-five years), it is to be completed in a few years' time. It is unique in that it is being carried out in accordance with a carefully prepared plan, and that this plan has a definitely Socialist bias and basis. But the most dramatic distinction of the Piatiletka is the unprecedented way in which it is being financed ; not, as is usual, from the accumulated savings of the nation or from foreign loans and credits, but by the mobilization of more than half of the national income. In other words, the development of production is being carried on at the expense of a most drastic curtailment of consumption. Industrialization in Russia may without exaggeration be described as reconstruction by privation. Even a country possessing considerable accumulations of capital cannot attempt the most moderate plan of reconstruction without affecting the national standard of living. But for post-Revolutionary Russia, which was absolutely drained of capital, to attempt to carry out an ultra-ambitious scheme of industrialization in the face of a universal financial boycott, appeared at first merely fantastic. And on the ground of its obvious absurdity, the Piatiletka, upon its promulgation and during the first year of its operation, was treated as a deliberate fraud or as a statistician's nightmare. It was assumed that the Russian masses, only just recovering from the semi-starvation of the years of civil war and famine, would never submit to the suffering involved in the experiment, and that, in any case, their sufferings would be useless. For how could savings thus effected be adequate to such a colossal undertaking ?
It is now possible to estimate to what extent this assumption was justified. In the first place, it was apparently based on an under-estimate of the Russian workers' capacity for suffering. In the discordant chorus of opinion about present-day Russia, there is one note of agreement, the conviction that the Russian people have been and are now passing through a period of great suffering and tribulation. The food queues, the scarcity of meats and fats, the lack of decent clothes, the overcrowded houses and tenements, the soaring prices of goods in the open market, all this has been described so often that any attempt to estimate the extent and character of the suffering so caused is apt to provoke a certain uneasiness and resentment. And yet it must be remembered that the distress now existing in Russia is far from being an absolute or stable condition of things. It admits, fortunately for its victims, of a great deal of variation and mitigation ; and, to do them justice, the Bolshevik rulers of Russia are experts in the manipulation of these variations and mitigations. They know to a nicety what the workers will stand, and so they never allow the stock of all commodities to fall so low as to exasperate the people. A deficiency in one essential food will be compensated for by a comparatively plentiful supply of others. Bread, meat, fats, sugar, vegetables and tobacco may all be scarce ; but they are never allowed to be scarce on the same day and to the same extent. Any day there may be enough of one of them to go round. In this way hope is kept alive. There is a good time coming, and all this privation is only a kind of short cut to a destined goal of plenty.
Moreover, it must not he forgotten that the depression caused by suffering is balanced by the elevation of feeling it stimulates. I do not want to enter into any philoso- phical estimate of the disruptive or creative force of suffering ; I am concerned only with the latter force or phase because it appears to afford an explanation of inexplicable phenomena, the fact that, especially among the younger generation, hardship is being endured not only with patience but with enthusiasm. To suffer from poverty is one thing ; to make a sacrifice for a common cause is quite another. Expressed in general terms this statement will be readily endorsed. But many people will protest that a sacrifice not self-imposed but forced upon a people must fail to exercise any elevating or ennobling effect. Such critics, however, overlook the fact that in great crises it is extremely difficult to find a single clear example of voluntary sacrifice on the part of a nation ; the executive government never abdicates its function, never throws the burden of coming to a decision on the people, which is compelled, willingly or grumblingly to' acquiesce in a fait accompli. - But even so, the sub- mission is none the less a:sacrifice and a conscious sacri- fice, and is therefore elevating and ennobling. The enthusiastic adoption of the Plan by the younger generation of Russians is based on a belief that the Plan will work miracles, and on a consciousness that these miracles will be the result of their own effort and devotion.
The creative force of suffering was the first impression I got when I revisited Russia last year and came into direct contact with the Piatiletka. When people recovered a little from the realization of the ambition, the magnitude and the exacting demands of the big scheme and were crowding the streets of Moscow to study the illuminated maps, with their hundreds of coloured squares, circles, cones and pyramids pointing out the situation of the new foundries, power-stations, factories and railways to be constructed under the Plan, they seemed, so far as I could interpret their emotions, to feel a special pride in the consideration that all the glory of the great achievement would be their own.
But Western critics of the Plan not only under-estimated the capacity of the Russian workers to suffer and to sacrifice. They were equally wrong in the belief that these sacrifices would be useless. Although some of the financial results have fallen short of the provisions of the Plan and so have disappointed the expectations of the Bolsheviks, the fact remains that the accumulation of capital for the financing of the Piatiletka has proved so considerable as to refute the pessimistic forecasts of most critics of the experiment. With all its shortcomings, the Plan has demonstrated clearly and convincingly that, under the new State planned economy, savings and accumulation of capital can be at least as great as under the ordinary capitalist economy.
Previous page
