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The Drive for Growth and the Eighteenth Party Congress, January–March 1939

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The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 7: The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937–1939

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Abstract

In early 1939 the Soviet leaders prepared for and held the eighteenth party congress, the first since 1934. Before and during the congress, they reflected in public and in private on the third five-year plan, the requirements of economic modernisation, the threat of war, and the need for increased regimentation of the workforce in both state industry and collective agriculture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Istoricheskii arkhiv (1992), no. 1: 123–128. For a translation of the decree see Getty and Naumov (1999): 532–537.

  2. 2.

    Zaleski (1980): 163–165. Zaleski thoroughly examines the various stages of preparing the plan; in the present account we concentrate on the defence aspects of the plan, on which Zaleski, writing before the archives were open, had only limited information.

  3. 3.

    SZ (1937), no. 28: art. 115 (April 28, 1937).

  4. 4.

    Memoranda for the defence industries, sent to G. I. Smirnov, then head of Gosplan, are nearly all dated between May 11 and May 20, 1937. The matters they deal with included defence as a whole; aviation; chemical industry; tanks; transport and communications; the work of the GULAG; and agricultural transport (see RGAE, 4372/91/3217 and 4372/91/3222); the memorandum on the GULAG is dated June 13.

  5. 5.

    RGASPI, 17/3/998: 2 (item IV); GARF, 5446/1/145: 83.

  6. 6.

    RGASPI, 17/3/1005 (item I).

  7. 7.

    RGAE, 4372/91/3217: 118–116 (May 20, 1937).

  8. 8.

    RGAE, 4372/91/3217: 115 (May 20, 1937).

  9. 9.

    Industrializatsiya 1938–1941 (1973): 127–145 (reported by Voznesenskii on October 4, 1940).

  10. 10.

    Narodnoe khozyaistvo (1972): 216.

  11. 11.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 17–18, 27.

  12. 12.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 660.

  13. 13.

    Pravda, February 13, 1939 (diskussionyi listok no. 5).

  14. 14.

    Pravda, February 4, 1939 (disk. list. no. 2: A. Neverov).

  15. 15.

    Pravda, February 11, 1939 (disk. list. no. 4).

  16. 16.

    Pravda, February 15, 1939 (disk. list. no. 6: M. Vinogradova and V. Morozov).

  17. 17.

    Pravda, February 11, 1939 (disk. list. no. 4: B. Paskhin).

  18. 18.

    Pravda, March 9, 1939 (disk. list. no. 16: Basaev).

  19. 19.

    Pravda, March 2, 1939 (disk. list. no. 13: D. Shalii).

  20. 20.

    Pravda, February 19, 1939 (disk. list. no. 8: A. Petros’yants).

  21. 21.

    Pravda, February 15, 1939 (disk. list. no. 6: M. M. Kaganovich; despite the name, this was evidently not the recently dismissed commissar of the aircraft industry).

  22. 22.

    Pravda, February 19, 1939 (disk. list. no. 8: V. Egorov).

  23. 23.

    Pravda, February 17, 1939 (disk. list. no. 7: I. Malkin).

  24. 24.

    Pravda, March 9, 1939 (disk. list. no. 16).

  25. 25.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 246.

  26. 26.

    Pravda, February 11, 1939 (disk. list. no, 4: Ya. Plaksin).

  27. 27.

    Pravda, March 9, 1939 (disk. list. no. 16: Bogdanevskii, Moscow).

  28. 28.

    Pravda, February 4, 1939 (disk. list. no. 4: A. Neverov of Glavavtoremont, the Chief Administration of Vehicle Repairs).

  29. 29.

    Pravda, February 11, 1939 (disk. list. no. 4: I. Vlasov, secretary of the Saratov provincial party committee).

  30. 30.

    Pravda, February 17, 1939 (disk. list. no. 7, a summary of letters entitled ‘Strengthen mass defence work’).

  31. 31.

    The Gosbank documents that are quoted here and detailed in the next paragraph are published from the archives in Po stranitsam, 4 (2007): 63–68 (draft memorandum to Sovnarkom, January 15, 1939); 69–82 (discussion of January 17, 1939); 84–89 (draft memorandum to Sovnarkom, January 24, 1939); 90–96 (discussion of January 25, 1939); 98–102 (memorandum to Sovnarkom, January 27, 1939).

  32. 32.

    Tretii pyatiletnii plan (1939): 28.

  33. 33.

    Po stranitsam, 4 (2007): 106 (Gosplan draft directives on currency circulation, May 10, 1938) and 107–111 (unsigned Gosplan memorandum to Voznesenskii on currency circulation from 1932 to 1942, October 23).

  34. 34.

    The senior official who prepared the draft Gosbank memoranda to Sovnarkom was Vladimir Gerashchenko. His son Viktor became the head of the Soviet Central Bank in 1989, and was appointed to lead the Central Bank of post-Soviet Russia from 1992 to 1994, and again from 1998 to 2002. In 1993 the economist Jeffrey Sachs named Viktor Gerashchenko ‘the worst central-bank governor of any major country in history’ (The Economist, October 16, 1993: 90).

  35. 35.

    The contemporary estimate of the increase was 94% (Po stranitsam, 4 (2007): 107). Averaging the monthly figures reported over each of the two years (Po stranitsam, 2 (2007): 40–41) gives 87%.

  36. 36.

    Industrializatsiya 1938–1941 (1973): 128.

  37. 37.

    RGASPI, 17/3/1003: 1, 36–51.

  38. 38.

    GARF, 5446/1/552: 27 (art. 254/37, March 2, 1939).

  39. 39.

    RGASPI, 17/3/1004: 24 (art. 113); Pravda, December 21, 1938.

  40. 40.

    Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh aktov (1956): 20–21 (text of the decree), 72–74 (grounds for dismissal).

  41. 41.

    For the decrees of June 26 and October 19, 1940, and other labour legislation issued at this time, see Bulletins, series 2, no. 6 (1951): 2–3 (G. R. Barker), and Filtzer (1986): 234 ff.

  42. 42.

    RGASPI, 17/3/1004: 38 (art. 219).

  43. 43.

    Industriya, December 28, 1938.

  44. 44.

    Respectively Pravda, January 2, 10, 19, 20, and February 20, 1939.

  45. 45.

    Pravda, January 6, 1939 (O. Yakovleva).

  46. 46.

    See Pravda, January 5, 1939 (I. Chernov) for one of many reports on the Gor’kii motor vehicle factory. In one large shop, seven out of nine time clerks had joined the factory only in 1938, and at least two of them had to cope with over 400 workers each, although 150–200 was regarded as a normal work load.

  47. 47.

    For example, Pravda, January 17, 1939 (an order by the Commissariat of Food Industry).

  48. 48.

    Pravda, January 5 and 10, 1939.

  49. 49.

    Pravda, January 10, 1939 (V. Saparin).

  50. 50.

    Pravda, January 29, 1939.

  51. 51.

    Carr and Davies, Foundations, 1 (1969): 574n.

  52. 52.

    Pravda, January 8, 1939. On January 1, 1941, 35.7% of foremen had worked in their industry for more than ten years, 28.5% for five to ten years, 15.9% for three to five years, and 19.9% for less than three years (Industrializatsiya 1938–1941 (1973): 274). Only 3% were graduates with higher education, and 7.5% with secondary special education; 88.9% were ‘practicals’ with no special training. In 1941 women accounted for 10.3%, compared with only 1.7% in 1933 (Rosenberg and Siegelbaum, eds. (1993): 176 (L. H. Siegelbaum)).

  53. 53.

    Pravda, January 7, 1939.

  54. 54.

    Pravda, January 7, 1939.

  55. 55.

    Pravda, January 7 (V. Mikhailov, Kirov works, Leningrad), and January 8 (P. Kozlov, Moscow watch factory).

  56. 56.

    Pravda, January 8, 1939 (A. Piliyenko, Kiev ‘Transsignal’ factory).

  57. 57.

    Pravda, January 7 (V. Mikhailov), January 11 (P. Romanov, Barnaul weaving factory).

  58. 58.

    Pravda, January 8, 1939 (E. Zhurkov, Stalin iron and steel works; A. Piliyenko).

  59. 59.

    Rosenberg and Siegelbaum, eds. (1993): 179–180 (Siegelbaum).

  60. 60.

    Filtzer (1986): 232.

  61. 61.

    Industrializatsiya 1938–1941 (1973): 121–125. We have not been able to establish to what extent this decree was adopted informally by other industries.

  62. 62.

    On January 2, 1970, one of the authors unwisely turned up at the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad. The librarians were at work, but the workers had not put the central heating on, and he had to retreat from the cold by lunchtime.

  63. 63.

    Pravda, January 14, 1939 (printed in full in with an accompanying order on time recording).

  64. 64.

    Pravda, January 17, 18, 20, 24, and 27, and February 2 and 3, 1939.

  65. 65.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 282–315.

  66. 66.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 296.

  67. 67.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 17–18, 27.

  68. 68.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 340. On February 22, 1941, following the eighteenth party conference, and on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of Gosplan, the party Central Committee and Sovnarkom announced that Gosplan would prepare ‘a fifteen-year general economic plan of the USSR, aimed at carrying out the task of overtaking the main capitalist countries in production per head of population of pig iron and crude and rolled steel, fuel, machines and other means of production, and consumer goods’ (Pravda, February 22, 1941); the plan covered the years 1943–1957. For details see Zaleski (1980): 207–212.

  69. 69.

    Khlevniuk (2009): 221.

  70. 70.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 494–498.

  71. 71.

    For examples of these speeches, see Rees, ed. (2002): 201–205 (E. A. Rees).

  72. 72.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 633.

  73. 73.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 388. In this context the Russian term kooperirovanie is imperfectly translated as ‘collaboration’; it also has the more specialised meaning of subcontracting among specialised partners in a supply chain.

  74. 74.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 438–439.

  75. 75.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 494.

  76. 76.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 299.

  77. 77.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 118–119.

  78. 78.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 302.

  79. 79.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 187–204.

  80. 80.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 260.

  81. 81.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 330.

  82. 82.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 420–422.

  83. 83.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 386–387.

  84. 84.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 28.

  85. 85.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 26.

  86. 86.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 18.

  87. 87.

    XVIII s”ezd (1939): 31–36.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    R. W. Davies

  2. Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Mark Harrison

  3. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Oleg Khlevniuk

  4. School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Stephen G. Wheatcroft

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Correspondence to Mark Harrison .

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Davies, R.W., Harrison, M., Khlevniuk, O., Wheatcroft, S.G. (2018). The Drive for Growth and the Eighteenth Party Congress, January–March 1939. In: The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 7: The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937–1939. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36238-4_8

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