RESTORATION of CAPITALISM in the USSR - Collectivization

RESTORATION of CAPITALISM in the USSR

Collectivization

In the 1920s the Soviet industrial proletariat was still an island -- though a growing one -- in a vast peasant sea. 

While in the state-owned industries the retreat toward state capitalism had been halted and a definite forward march toward socialism was underway in the late 1920s, out in the countryside capitalism was in full bloom. 

Agricultural laborers and poor peasants were being ground into misery; middle peasants were being squeezed down, and the richest capitalist farmers -- the kulaks -- were accumulating grain and power. 

The kulaks' arrogance can be measured from an anecdote Stalin reported in April 1929 to the Party's central committee. In grain-rich Kazakhstan, "one of our agitators tried for two hours to persuade the holders of grain to deliver grain for supplying the country, and a kulak stepped forward with a pipe in his mouth and said, 'Do us a little dance, young fellow, and I will let you have a couple of poods of grain.'" (Works, Vol. 12, p. 95) 

The harvests had been good; yet the state was menaced by famine. The resistance and -- in many areas -- armed rebellion of the kulaks threatened to reverse the progress toward socialism in the cities and to undermine the power of the Soviet state. 

In this emergency, and after heated intraparty struggles against the "left" and right opposition, the central committee, led by Stalin, resolved to launch an all-out offensive against the last great bastion of capitalism in the USSR: capitalism in agriculture. 

This was the campaign for collectivization of agriculture. Its aim was to combine the millions of small- and medium-sized peasant plots into tens of thousands of collective farms (kolkhozes). In a collective farm, the individual patches of land are merged (apart from small plots for household consumption) into large tracts which the farmers cultivate collectively. A portion of the harvest is taxed off by the state; but the remainder is the property of the collective, to be sold by it to its best advantage, with the proceeds divided among the collective farmers in proportion to their work. 

(In state farms [sovkhoz] by contrast, the entire crop goes to the state and the farmers receive a predetermined wage, just as in a factory. There were already state farms in the USSR at that time, based mainly on expropriated big landlords' estates; but the majority of the peasantry was not ready for this higher form.) 

In order to achieve the collectivization of agriculture, however, it was necessary to deprive the capitalist forces in the countryside of their strongest and leading elements, the kulaks. For this purpose the party put forward the slogan to "liquidate the kulaks as a class." This meant to deprive them of their economic base, their property, their possibilities for exploiting the middle and poor peasantry and laborers and for resisting the Soviet state. 

The struggle that began in agriculture in late 1928, lasting some five years, amounted to a second Bolshevik revolution. It was a revolution carried on both from above, by the Soviet state including the Red Army, and from below, by the masses of agricultural laborers, poor and middle peasants. 

Like all genuine revolutions, it was "not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture," it was not so "refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous." It was, much like the peasant movement in Hunan described by Mao 

Tsetung In 1927, "an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." (Selected Works, Vol. 1 p. 28.) It therefore did not lack instances when the peasantry went "too far," and liquidated the kulaks (as well as some who were mistaken for kulaks) not only economically but also physically. But, as the chief bourgeois critic of this revolution, Prof. M. Lewin, admitted, "In order to understand this process of wholesale dekulakization, it is also essential to bear in mind the misery in which millions of bednyaks [poor peasants] lived. All too often they went hungry; they had neither shoes nor shirts, nor any other 'luxury items.' The tension which had built up in the countryside, and the eagerness to dispossess the kulaks, were in large measure contributed to by the wretchedness of the bednyaks' condition, and the hatred they were capable of feeling on occasion for their more fortunate neighbors, who exploited them pitilessly whenever they had the chance to do so." (Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, Evanston, 1968. p. 488.) 

There were also excesses committed "from above," by overzealous party leaders, who were often members of the intraparty opposition intent consciously or unconsciously on sabotaging the process. Inexperience, shortage of cadre and honest errors played their part as well. The opposition -- echoed by the bourgeois press abroad -- lost no opportunity to focus on these excesses and errors, to magnify them out of proportion and damn the general line of the revolution because of its tactical blunders. But there was in reality no other socialist alternative, and those members of the opposition who were dedicated to the cause of Soviet power, as Prof. Lewin records, soon came to see this truth. "He does the job badly," said these repentant oppositionists of Stalin, but he does it." The "most intelligent cadre," in Lewin's estimate at least -- meaning the more enlightened followers of Leon Trotsky and of Nikolai Bukharin, then the chief "left" and right opposition faction leaders -- complained of Stalin's "iron hand" and "despotic methods," but conceded that "thanks to this man's indomitable will, Russia is being modernized. Despite his shortcomings, a few more years of this terrible, almost superhuman effort will bring an all-round increase in prosperity and happiness." 

By the end of 1933, the long road of the New Economic Policy (NEP) had been completed. The initial retreat toward state capitalism, the consolidation, and then the general offensive toward socialism had been successfully executed. About two-thirds of the peasants were in functioning collective farms; private industry had all but vanished; socialist principles in state industry had gained the upper hand and the first five-year plan had been triumphantly completed ahead of time, unemployment was abolished. After 16 years of political rule, the new Soviet power had succeeded in remolding the capitalist economic foundation it inherited, and in creating the foundation appropriate to itself -- the foundation of a socialist economy. 

At the 17th party congress in January 1934, Stalin -- speaking for the central committee -- was able to make the landmark declaration that the socialist economic formation "now holds unchallenged sway and is the sole commanding force in the whole national economy." (Works, Vol. 13, p. 316.) 

At the time that the USSR entered the new era in its economic development, the rest of the world was plunging into the depths of the Great Depression. A front-page editorial by Pravda in 1931, on the occasion of the 14th anniversary of the October revolution, threw into sharp relief the contrast between the achievements of the Soviet power and the sufferings in the capitalist world: 

"Proletarians! Workers of all countries! Today in the squares, at meetings, demonstrations and rallies you will sum up the results attained by two economic systems -- capitalism and socialism. 

"Remember: 

"In the capitalist countries -- 

"Tens of millions of unemployed. The deepening world crisis. Thousands of bankruptcies, tens of thousands of closed enterprises. Growing poverty, hunger and plunder of the colonies. Preparations for fresh imperialist wars. 

"In the country which is building socialism -- 

"Powerful growth of industry. No unemployment. 

Creation of large-scale mechanized agricultural production on the basis of state and collective farms. Improving material conditions of the working people. The rallying of the working people around the Bolshevik party and its Leninist central committee." (Quoted by Borisova et. al., Outline History of the Soviet Working Class, Moscow 1973, p. 168.) 

And in fact the triumphant march of socialism in the USSR in this new period appeared as a beacon amidst the gloom of the capitalist world. It was a period when phrases that today may seem strained and trite -- "glorious, triumphant, brilliant, dazzling" and the like -- came naturally to the lips of those who lived or saw it. It was as Marx had foretold: the integument of capitalist relations burst asunder, and the tremendous potentials slumbering in the lap of social labor began to stir. Momentous productive forces that the capitalists had tried for decades, in vain, to whip into life now suddenly found liberation. It was as if the country exploded with productive energy. It did not march ahead; it leaped, it stormed, it flew ahead. It left its critics in the dust as so many carping dwarves. It threw terror into the world's bourgeoisies. It traced out for the first time in history the magnificent future that opens before the world's oppressed and exploited people once they have seized state power. 

Today these achievements are in danger of being slowly forgotten. The period of socialist economy in the USSR lasted only slightly more than two decades, from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s. The reversals that have occurred in the last 20 years have tended to obscure what existed during the socialist period, and to efface from consciousness not only its achievements, but its very character. What really is socialism? Was the USSR really ever socialist at all? If it was socialist, how could it have turned capitalist afterwards? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to have a somewhat closer look at Soviet socialism in theory and practice. 

5 Socialist Economy

In the early 1930s the Soviet Communist party proclaimed that the USSR had entered the period of socialist economic development. 

The country could now call itself the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" not in the future sense that Lenin had employed when he said, in 1921, that the name "implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the existing economic system is recognized as a socialist order." It was now socialist rather, in the actual sense. 

What were the theoretical and practical grounds for recognizing the economic order of the 1930s as socialist? 

Though Marx and Engels, as is well known, refrained from drawing up any blueprints for the new society, they drew certain basic deductions from their analysis of the old society which have served Marxists since their time as general guidelines. 

What began in the USSR in the 1930s was not full communism, classless and stateless society in which the antithesis of town and country, of mental and manual labor has been overcome. It was a long way from that. It was rather what Marx called the "lower stage of communist society," a long period of transition between the end of capitalism and the beginning of full communism. It contained therefore both the seeds of the distant future and the traces of the recent capitalist past. By common Marxist usage since Marx, this first stage is termed socialism and the term communism is reserved for the classless society. 

According to Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme," which served Lenin as text for his chapter five of "State and Revolution," -- the key writings on this question -- the working class during the period of socialism can dispense neither with the state, as an organ of repression by one class against another, nor with certain economic and legal relations taken over from the old bourgeois society. 

As far as the Soviet state was concerned, this was and remained in the period, a dictatorship of the proletariat. After the battles of 1917, of the civil war period, of NEP and collectivization of agriculture, there was no longer any doubt about that. The many hundreds of thousands, perhaps a few million, of defeated, expropriated and embittered former kulaks, NEPmen: unreconciled old-regime officials, managers and privileged intellectuals with their families, offspring and hangers-on who remained in the country might have liked nothing better than the implementation of Trotsky's demand, voiced from exile abroad, for the "freedom" to form political parties rivaling the CPSU. But the party had no intention of allowing the state to "wither away" as a repressive force in this manner. 

"Democracy for the vast majority of people, and suppression by force, i.e. exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people," this was the role Lenin, following Marx, laid out for the proletarian state in the period of socialism, and the party stood by that program, though not without making some political errors that proved in the long run very costly. 

As for economic relations, Marx and Lenin, in the abovementioned texts, had laid out plainly that the motto of socialist distribution could not yet be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." This was for the communist future, when the progress of the productive forces permits the abolition of scarcity, and when social consciousness, ingrained desire and sheer force of habit leads all workers voluntarily to participate according to their ability in everyday production, so that distribution of articles of consumption can be a matter of each one taking freely from the public stores according to need. 

The motto, rather, was ". . . to each according to the amount of labor performed." This meant not taking freely, but paying money in exchange for commodities; and being paid at work not according to need but according to productivity. It was straightforward commodity-money exchange, such as existed not only under capitalism but even earlier. It necessarily resulted in inequality of wages between workers in different kinds and grades of jobs, and between slow and fast workers on the same job. The gap between the lowest and the highest wages even increased during the 1930s, as an enormous influx of new recruits from the countryside more than tripled the ranks of the industrial proletariat between 1929 and 1940. Yet, while a growing inequality of wages was incompatible with the advance toward communism, wage inequality -- and the commodity-exchange relations in distribution of consumer goods on which it rested -- were not in themselves in violation of the theory of socialism. Marx and Lenin were amply clear on this point. Socialism, as Lenin pointed out, does away with the injustice that consists in the means of production having been seized by private owners, but it "is not capable of destroying at once the further injustice consisting in the distribution of the articles of consumption 'according to work performed' (and not according to need)." The socialist order of society, as distinct from the higher, communist order, "does not remove the defects of distribution and the inequality of 'bourgeois right' which continue to rule as long as the products are divided 'according to work performed.'" (State and Revolution, Ch. 5, Sec. 3.) 

As regards the distribution of consumer goods, the advance made by socialism over capitalism therefore does not lie in the abolition of wage inequalities. What it abolishes is rather the class of consumers standing far above even the highest-paid workers, who draw stratospheric incomes not deriving from wages but from profits, i.e. not from their own labor but from the labor of others. Such a social layer did not exist under Soviet socialism; it has reappeared today, however, as will be shown. 

There was thus a wide sphere of commodity-exchange relations in the USSR, embracing not only the output of the state consumer-goods factories but also much of the food produced by the collective farms. All this was an objective breeding ground for what Marx and Lenin called "bourgeois right [narrow self-interest] which compels one to calculate with the coldheartedness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than somebody else, whether one is not getting less pay than somebody else. . . ." to quote State and Revolution. These were among the traces left over from the past, obstacles in the path toward communism, potential nuclei, among others, of a restoration of capitalism. But, for all that, Soviet economy during this period was not capitalist, it was socialist. 

Marx, in analyzing and comparing different historic forms of production so as to identify the specific characteristics that defined capitalism, noted that money and commodities existed in many other forms of society, to varying degrees, without capitalism arising. "The historic conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It [capitalism] can spring into life only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free laborer selling his labor power." (Capital, Vol. I, International ed., p. 170.) 

Or, as Marx writes later in the same work, "In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation can only take place under certain circumstances that center in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sums of values they possess, by buying other people's labor power; on the other hand, free laborers, the sellers of their own labor power and therefore the sellers of labor. . . . With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the laborers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labor. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale." (Capital, p. 714.) 

Lenin likewise, in his study of the "Development of Capitalism in Russia," showed that only "the separation of the direct producer from the means of production, i.e., his expropriation, [signified] the transition from simple commodity production to capitalist production (and [constituted] the necessary condition for this transition). . . . The home market . . . spreads with the extension of commodity production from products to labor power, and only in proportion as the latter is transformed into a commodity does capitalism embrace the entire production of the country, developing mainly on account of means of production. . . ." (Collected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 68-69.) 

Thus in order to demonstrate that a given society was capitalist, in the scientific sense of the term, it would be necessary to show not merely that articles of consumption were commodities (which was true but proves little), but also and principally that commodity exchange, based on expropriation of the direct producers, embraced and governed the means of production and labor power. If the direct producers, the workers, are not divorced from the means of production, and if consequently neither these means nor labor power function as commodities, then no survivals of "bourgeois right," nor any amount of other inequities and injustices, can allow of such a society being properly termed capitalist. 

Inversely, if the direct producers have been separated from the means of production, and consequently both labor power and means of production are exchanged as commodities, then no amount of social welfare benefits, no nationalizations, no statutory curbs on excess profiteering, 

no ameliorative measures whatever can conceal or modify the capitalist character of such a society. It is important to keep these elementary, but necessary and sufficient characteristics of capitalism firmly in mind in order to grasp the left and right, the forward and backward of Soviet development. There exists an enormous abundance of superficial definitions, half-truths and irrelevant notions in the literature about what is capitalism and what is socialism, all of which either innocently or with forethought serve to mystify or to distort the historical process and the present situation.

6 New Shoots

The history of the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s was like a long march to reunite the workers with the means of production. 

It was a complex and protracted struggle to revoke the great historic divorce arising at the dawn of capitalism, between the peasant and the land, between the weaver and the loom. This schism, constantly reproduced and universalized by the capitalist order, creates and recreates on the one side the millions of empty-handed workers and on the other side the relative handful of owners of the means of production. On this separation are founded the twin markets in commodities that characterize the capitalist order and distinguish it from all others: the market in labor power between the capitalist and the worker, with the workers always the sellers and the capitalist in the buyer's role, and the market in means of production, with the capitalists buying and selling from each other. Once the basic schism is suspended, these markets lose their reason for being; labor power and means of production shed their commodity character and become transformed step by step into social property. Such, in broad outline, was the path of Soviet development toward socialism and in the socialist period. 

What were some of the specific steps that were taken by the Soviet power to reunite the working class with the means of production? Certainly, the nationalization of the means of production by the workers' state was the political basis for the whole process. But had the process ceased with the signing of nationalization papers, it would have been a paper "socialism." In fact the nationalization decrees in many cases only legalized factory seizures taken by the workers on their own initiative; and from then on, wave after wave of mass initiatives and movements spurred on the socialist transformation of Soviet society and gave it life. 

One of the earliest of the innovative mass movements pioneered by the Soviet working class was the practice of subbotniks, or "Communist Saturdays." The first was organized on their own initiative by the workers at the chief repair shop of the Moscow-Kazan railway in May 1919. Working voluntarily and without pay after the regular shift had ended, the workers toiled out of political inspiration alone, in order to save and to strengthen the Soviet power against its foes during the Civil War. Despite end-of-the-week fatigue, the workers' productivity during the subbotniks regularly was two or three times higher than during regular hours. 

"Communist subbotniks are extraordinarily valuable as the actual beginning of communism," Lenin wrote, identifying the subbotniks as one of the "new shoots" pointing ahead of the then existing stage of social development toward the ultimate goal of a classless society. Following the first local initiatives, the party organized nationwide subbotniks with excellent results throughout the Civil War period, and the practice was revived again and again. In the late 1920s, a new form of the subbotnik arose, the voskresnik -- voluntary overtime work to raise funds for the great industrialization drive projected by the first five-year plan. Like the subbotniks, these initiatives also were quickly popularized by the party and government press, and mobilized millions of workers. 

The "shock-work team" movement, initiated in 1926 by the same railway workshop that had begun the subbotniks, was in part a drive to bring the subbotnik spirit into regular working hours. It laid emphasis at the same time on reorganizing the work, discarding the old patterns of division of labor inherited from capitalism and inventing new ones that promoted greater productivity. Led by the Komsomol (Communist youth league) activist Nikolai Nekrasov, the movement produced not only higher production but far greater enthusiasm by workers in participating in production meetings, where all aspects of the existing work methods were criticized and reshaped to bring out the workers' initiative. (Borisova et al., Outline History of the Soviet Working Class, pp. 121-124.) 

The Stakhanovite movement, beginning in 1935, was the successor of the shock-work teams. Like the latter, it emphasized reorganizing the division of labor, and developing teamwork to achieve higher output. But it contributed also a stress on quality output, and, above all, on improved work technique and technology. The redesign and innovation of machinery and machine processes by the workers themselves -- frequently, as Stalin pointed out in his "Economic Problems of Socialism" (1952, p. 28), over the objections of conservative engineers and technicians -- was the keynote of the movement. A bourgeois U.S. scholar, David Granick, in his study "The Red Executive" (1960), defended the movement against Western charges that it was mainly a form of speedup. "Primarily, it was aimed at motivating workers to use improved techniques on the job," he wrote, "and to innovate new ones. Its emphasis was thoroughly modern, being on rationalization rather than on sweating." (p. 213.) It too was popularized by the party, not without opposition from engineers and managers, and spread to large proportions of industry, mining and transport. 

Such mass initiative brought about extremely rapid increases in labor productivity. During the first five-year plan, beginning in 1929, labor productivity had risen 41 percent; during the second plan, when the Stakhanovite movement began, it leaped 82 percent; and it grew by another 33 percent on top of this higher base during the third plan period. (Borisova, p. 206.) By this time unemployment, the chief spur to greater worker effort (speedup) under capitalism, and also the chief result under capitalism of technological "rationalization," had ceased to exist in the USSR. 

An ingenious and telling form of mass initiative that arose during the first plan period was called the "public tugboat." According to Borisova's account, "it commenced in the Donets Basin on the initiative of the workers of the Artem mine. At one of the production meetings the discussion turned to a neighboring mine whose workers systematically failed to cope with the plan. A veteran worker-rationalizer found a way of helping them. Having once served in the navy he recalled that sometimes it was necessary to tug ships and barges which could not sail under their own steam, and proposed to do the same to the workers of the neighboring mine. . . . 

"His proposal was approved and shortly afterwards the first 'tugboat team' arrived at the backward mine, only to receive a hostile welcome: 'You've no business to be here. We can get along without your help. So turn around and head for home.' 

"'We've come here not to chitchat, but to extend comradely assistance,' the Artem miners replied. 'And we shall stay here until we have fulfilled our assignment.' 

"Assisted by the party organization they grouped the foremost workers around themselves and got the socialist competition going. Within a short space of time the backward mine caught up with the plan. At the end of the five-year plan period public 'tugboat teams' were operating at many industrial enterprises." (p. 148.) 

A more thoroughgoing form of mass initiative was the participation of workers in criticizing the five-year plan and drawing up revised plans of their own. This was called "counterplanning." Borisova writes that "it was first advanced in the summer of 1930 by the shock-workers of the Karl Marx Works in Leningrad. This was done in response to the address of the shock-workers of the Znamya Truda Factory to the Leningrad shock-workers. The address was published in the Leningradskaya Pravda on April 9, 1930 under the heading, 'Znamya Truda Shock-Workers Are Drawing Up an Extended Counter Industrial and Financial Plan.' At the time the workers of the Elektrozavod Factory in Moscow were devising counterplans for the enterprise as a whole and for each of its shops and lathes. Through their participation in the elaboration of counterplans thousands of workers became acquainted with the organization and management of production. Many of them acquired an inclination for planning and enrolled at higher educational institutions offering specialized training in this field." (p. 147.) 

Counterplanning, even more than the Stakhanovite movement, frequently upset those engineers and managers who had retained or acquired a basically bourgeois outlook. Numbers of them fled to the capitalist countries, where intelligence services and scholars would pump them for inside information on Soviet conditions. One such scholar, Joseph Berliner, gave the following transcript (in his 1957 study, "Factory and Manager in the USSR") of an account of counterplanning by a renegade plant manager: 

"All the workers, all are called to the production conference. And then begins the so-called 'counterplanning,' in a very crude form, which quickly ends in a fiasco. They read off the plan. Here, our chief administration has given us such and such information, such and such indices, of course we have to meet them, we all understand that this has to be done. Thus, the agitation proceeds further. This we have to do, we have to fulfill and overfulfill. 'I hope that some of the workers -- this is said by some engineer or a representative of the party organization -- will bring forth counterproposals.' Now everyone wants to manifest his 'activity.' Some 'butterfly,' some milkmaid gets up in her place and says 'I think we should promise Comrade Stalin to overfulfill by 100 percent.' She takes no account of materials, no account of supply. Then a second stands up and says 'We should all promise 100 percent and I personally promise 150 percent" In short, it piles up higher and higher, and the engineers and economists scratch their heads. Nevertheless, this is called 'counterplanning,' a manifestation of the new socialist morality and higher socialist enthusiasm. All this goes to the top and there, you understand, there is confusion, downright confusion, a complete muddle." (p. 275.) 

Dripping with chauvinism, contempt and sarcasm, such a factory manager as the one who furnished this account naturally saw the workers' enthusiasm as contradictory to "efficiency" and "rationality." What about materials, what about supply? It did not occur to such bourgeois minds that if the enthusiasm were to spread to the other factories producing materials and supplies for this factory, and so on in a chain reaction, then a forward leap in production might very well be achieved all around. 

This narrow bureaucratic spirit also had its partisans in the office of Gosplan, the central state planning bureau, as the bourgeois Sovietologist M. Lewin, in his 1968 "Russian Peasants and Soviet Power," recounts. "At the outset," Lewin wrote, "Gosplan in a body tried to stem the flood of unreasonable demands. . ." which reached them from the factories below and the Central Committee above -- demands for vastly increased production. But the party leadership had little tolerance for this footdragging. An "atmosphere" was created within Gosplan, Lewin recounts, "such that it would have been an act of 'civic courage' on the part of the planners to insist that there were sectors on which the brake should be applied. . . . The planners were aware of the risks involved in arguing too much, or raising objections on technical or other grounds. In the privacy of their own offices, they remarked that it was 'better to comply with the demand for rapid growth rates than to go to prison for having advocated more moderate ones.'" (p. 346.) 

The party leadership, in purging from Gosplan the most outspoken of these "brakemen," sided squarely with the so-called "butterflies" and "milkmaids" who were engaged in counterplanning at the point of production. When the shock-worker team at a Lugansk factory, drawing out the implications of counterplanning for the whole economy, raised up the call to "finish the five-year plan in four years," the Central Committee picked it up and broadcast it throughout the country. 

Thanks to such worker initiatives, generalized and popularized by the party leadership, the phenomenal development of the productive forces projected by the first five-year plan was achieved in four years and three months. It was a triumph that still has bourgeois political economists and historians scratching their heads, and it was followed by further, almost equally spectacular advances. 

But there was really no mystery about it. Such advances in the development of the forces of social production were the fruit of the reunion between the working class and the means of production. The mass initiatives and movements both reflected and deepened this profoundly new relationship of production, whose political precondition was the dictatorship of the proletariat. 

However, not all the elements in Soviet society were as cheered and gratified by the triumphs of socialism as was by all accounts, the great majority of working people and party cadre.