[MUSIC] Last time we spoke about Stalin's struggle with the opposition. Today, we shall speak about Stalin's revolution from above. This was perhaps the most important period in his whole career. New Economic Policy brought some relief to the Soviet population. Grain was collected regularly and there were no bread shortages in the cities. Food returned to shops. And if you look at the picture, really, that was the picture of a shop unthinkable just a few years before Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy. But there was a price, because first of all, prices were high. Second, there was no abundance. And markets did not always satisfy the communists because that is how it looked. This is one of the markets in Moscow, which was organized right in the middle of the street. And you can see that people are happy. They are buying everything. But on the other hand, it doesn't look from the point of view of the government and the communists, it doesn't look nice, because it doesn't look organized, orderly. It looks, well, like a market, peasant market, if you want. There was something else that communists did not like about New Economic Policy. It brought back social inequality. It brought back the rich. And the rich, the new rich, the nouveau riche were called NEPmen. This is a picture of one of the NEP restaurants. Look at these people, they flaunted their wealth. They behaved in a very bad taste. And this is not what the communists wanted. This is not what they organized the revolution for. Worst of all was, for the party, the fact that some of the communists were drawn into all that, and they also went to these shops and to these restaurants. And basically, they became corrupted by this whole bourgeois way of life. The other side of NEP was unemployment, poverty, and squalor. New Economic Policy was not capable of reorganizing the whole society. A New Economic Policy did not mean that there would be no industrialization. Some industrialization did indeed, start during New Economic Policy. Here is the poster advertising Volkhovstroy. Volkhovstroy was the first hydroelectric power station. Its construction was started in 1921 together with New Economic Policy. The poster says communism is a Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country, and this is a quote from Lenin. But NEP had obvious limitations. First of all, New Economic Policy could not provide the expansion and restructuring of the economy for industrialization. Industrialization was needed and everybody understood that. Success of the New Economic Policy was limited, because there was state control over big plants and monopoly on the foreign trade. That meant that the New Economic Policy was not a real capitalist economy. It was sort of half capitalist economy, half something else. That meant that the full potential of industrialization simply could not be realized through New Economic Policy. This was the reason why in the late 1920s, both industrial and agricultural production stalled. In 1927, the state did not manage to procure enough grain. Stalin watched it carefully. During Stalin's struggle with the opposition, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky accused him of rightist deviation, because they said that he was moving too slowly. He did not industrialize fast enough. Now that Stalin defeated the opposition, he immediately started to implement the ideas of that opposition. Early in 1928, Stalin went on a long trip to Siberia. Here he is at the party conference in Barnaul in January. The trip was prompted by Stalin's wish to see how grain collection is going on, in person. He wanted to check on, in person, what was going on. So when he came, he insisted on collecting as much as possible grain by force. So grain requisitioning was back. First of all, this policy was aimed at the kulaks, but not only. Generally speaking, any peasant who tried to hide any grain for his family or for the future harvest, this peasant was beaten, intimidated, arrested and sometimes shot, irrespective of whether he was rich or poor. As a result of Stalin's pressure, double the amount of grain set for the region was collected. Stalin was pleased, and this experiment was considered from now on a model for the whole country. Grain requisitioning started in earnest. Everybody understood that industrialization and intensification of the agricultural production were necessary. But even among Stalin's colleagues, some thought that the pace of reforms was too fast, and that Stalin's turn to industrialization and collectivization was far too abrupt. These are members of Politburo who supported Stalin, Viacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, Sergo Ordzhonikidze. But they were in the minority. Actually, the majority of the Politburo thought that Stalin should proceed more carefully. Nikolai Bukharian was at that time editor of Pravda. Mikhail Tomsky, who was head of the Soviet Trade Unions. Mikhail Kalinin, who was chairman of the Supreme Soviet, that is, head of state. And Alexei Rykov, who was chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, which is head of government. They were all important communists. Stalin was not deterred, but he had to tread carefully. He preached unity at the top. But at the same time, he unleashed the campaign against the rightist threat. Simultaneously, he directed the OGPU to watch the opposition, and to blackmail the opposition, and to create falsified documents against it. They organized rebellions among the staff of the organizations where the opposition worked. They saw what was going on, but could do nothing. Then Bukharin made an awful mistake. He met Kamenev, disgraced Kamenev, and told him about what was going on in the party. Kamenev wrote an account of it, another inadmissible mistake. The account was stolen, probably by OGPU and sent to Trotsky. Trotsky in his wisdom turned it into a leaflet and distributed widely. This was a complete disaster for the so-called rightists. Stalin accused them in the rightist deviation, and during 1929, 1930, they were expelled from the Politburo. And they were not even opposition. They were not his rivals. They just wanted a more rational approach to collectivization. [MUSIC]
