Bukharin's position
Bukharin's position
The social struggle to come was reflected inside the Party. Bukharin, at the time Stalin's main ally in the leadership, stressed the importance of advancing socialism using market relations. In 1925, he called on peasants to `enrich themselves', and admitted that `we shall move forward at a snail's pace'. Stalin, in a June 2, 1925 letter to him, wrote: `the slogan enrich yourself is not ours, it is wrong .... Our slogan is socialist accumulation'.
Ibid. , p. 32.
The bourgeois economist Kondratiev was at the time the most influential specialist in the People's Commissariats for Agriculture and for Finance. He advocated further economic differentiation in the countryside, lower taxes for the rich peasants, reduction in the `insupportable rate of development of industry' and reorientation of resources from heavy industry to light industry.
Ibid. , p. 33.
Shayanov, a bourgeois economist belonging to another school, called for `vertical co-operatives', first for the sale, then for the industrial processing of agricultural products, instead of an orientation towards production co-operatives, i.e. kolkhozy. This political line would have weakened the economic basis of socialism and would have developed new capitalist forces in the countryside and in light industry. By protecting capitalism at the production level, the rural bourgeoisie would have also dominated the sales co-operatives.
Bukharin was directly influenced by these two specialists, particularly when he declared in February 1925, `collective farms are not the main line, not the high road, not the chief path by which the peasant will come to socialism'.
Ibid. , p. 34.
In 1927, the countryside saw a poor harvest. The amount of grain sold to the cities dropped dramatically. The kulaks, who had reinforced their position, hoarded their wheat to speculate on shortages so that they could force a significant price hike. Bukharin thought that the official buying prices should be raised and that industrialization should be slowed down. According to Davies, `Nearly all of the non-party economists supported these conclusions'.
Ibid. , p. 41.
Betting on the kolkhoz ...
Stalin understood that socialism was threatened from three sides. Hunger riots could take place in the cities. The kulaks in the countryside could strengthen their position, thereby making socialist industrialization impossible. Finally, foreign military interventions were in the offing.
According to Kalinin, the Soviet President, a Politburo commission on the kolkhozy established in 1927 under Molotov's leadership brought about a `mental revolution'.
Ibid. , p. 38.
Its work led to the adoption of a resolution by the Fifteenth Congress of the Party, in December 1927:
`Where is the way out? The way out is in the passing of small disintegrated peasant farms into large-scaled amalgamated farms, on the basis of communal tillage of the soil; in passing to collective tillage of the soil on the basis of the new higher technique. The way out is to amalgamate the petty and tiny peasant farms gradually but steadily, not by means of pressure but by example and conviction, into large-scale undertakings on the basis of communal, fraternal collective tillage of the soil, applying scientific methods for the intensification of agriculture.'
Again in 1927, it was decided to focus on the political line of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the rural bourgeoisie. The government imposed new taxes on the revenues of the kulaks. The latter had to meet higher quotas during grain collection. The village Soviet could seize their unused land. The number of workers they could hire was limited.
Davies, op. cit. , pp. 46, 49--50. Nicolaï Boukharine, 
uvres choisies en un volume (Moscow: Éditions du Progrès, 1988), p. 424.
uvres choisies en un volume (Moscow: Éditions du Progrès, 1988), p. 424.
... or betting on the individual peasant?
In 1928, as in 1927, the grain harvest was 3.5 to 4.5 million tonnes less than in 1926, due to very bad climatic conditions. In January 1928, the Politburo unanimously decided to take exceptional measures, by seizing wheat from the kulaks and the well-to-do peasants, to avoid famine in the cities. `Worker discontent was increasing. Tension was rising in the countryside. The situation seemed hopeless. Whatever the cost, the city needed bread', wrote two Bukharinists in 1988.
G. Bourdiougov and V. Kozlov, Épisodes d'une biographie politique. Introduction to Boukharine, op. cit. , p. 15.
The Party leadership around Stalin could see only one way out: develop the kolkhozian movement as fast as possible.
Bukharin was opposed. On July 1, 1928, he sent a letter to Stalin. The kolkhozy, he wrote, could not be the way out, since it would take several years to put them in place, particularly since they cannot be immediately supplied with machines. `Individual peasant holdings must be encouraged and relations must be normalized with the peasantry'.
Ibid. , p. 16.
The development of individual enterprise became the basis for Bukharin's political line. He claimed to agree that the State should expropriate a part of individual production to further the development of industry, but that this should take place using market mechanisms. Stalin would state in October of that year: `there are people in the ranks of our party who are striving, perhaps without themselves realizing it, to adapt our socialist construction to the tastes and needs of our ``Soviet'' bourgeoisie.'
The situation in the cities was getting worse. In 1928 and 1929, bread had to be rationed, then sugar, tea and meat. Between October 1, 1927 and 1929, the prices of agricultural products rose by 25.9 per cent. The price of wheat on the free market rose by 289 per cent.
`(T)he kulak co-operative nests will, similarly, through the banks, etc., grow into the same system ....
`Here and there the class struggle in the rural districts breaks out in its former manifestations, and, as a rule, the outbreaks are provoked by the kulak elements. However, such incidents, as a rule, occur in those places where the local Soviet apparatus is weak. As this apparatus improves, as all the lower units of the Soviet government become stronger, as the local, village party and Young Communist organizations improve and become stronger, such phenomena, it is perfectly obvious, will become more and more rare and will finally disappear leaving no trace.'
Stalin, The Right Danger, pp. 95, 99.
Bukharin was already following a social-democratic policy of `class peace' and was blind to the relentless struggle of the kulaks to oppose collectivization by all means. He saw the `weaknesses' of the Party and State apparatuses as the reason for the class war, without understanding that they were heavily infiltrated and influenced by the kulaks. The purge of these apparatuses would itself be a class struggle linked to the offensive against the kulaks.
At the Central Committee Plenary in April 1929, Bukharin proposed to import wheat, putting an end to the exceptional measures against `the peasantry', to increase the prices for agricultural products, to uphold `revolutionary legality', to reduce the rate of industrialization and to accelerate the development of the means of agricultural production. Kaganovich responded:
`You have made no new propositions, and you are incapable since they are non-existent, because we are facing a class enemy that is attacking us, that refuses to give its wheat surplus for the socialist industrialization and that declares: give me a tractor, give me electoral rights, and then you will get wheat.'
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