The world outside the Soviet Union first heard of the Five-Year Plan as a wildly extravagant scheme of Moscow. We who travelled the distant parts of the Soviet country saw it take form in villages, factories, cities, provinces. We saw it grow from the need of farmhands for a living, from the hunger of unemployed youth to create, from the vast unexplored, unexploited resources of prairies and mountains, public property whose owners willed to enjoy their wealth. Then we saw the passion of these tens of millions hammered by the brains of local Communists and by the State Planning Board into a plan to industrialize the country and make it independent of foreign powers.
Not by accident was it in Soviet Central Asia that I first heard of the Five-Year Plan. The Tashkent paper ran a seven-column headline: You Won’t Know Central Asia in Five Years. There followed a half-page map of the region, dotted with new constructions, railroads, factories, each with the date on which it was planned to begin and to complete it. This was the joint project of the organizations of Central Asia, yet to be correlated in Moscow’s central plan.
The following year, I again visited Central Asia and rode on horseback to the Pamirs, that high wild area between Russia, India and China that is known as “the roof of the world.” Some days on the trail beyond the railroad, I chatted with an Uzbek roadmender. He knew three words of Russian: “road,” “automobile,” and “piatiletka,” (Five-Year Plan). With these and with many proud motions, he told me that the camel trail would be a road for autos as far as the frontier, then ten days by horse. The Five-Year Plan would do it.
A year later still, writing for the newly organized Moscow News, I journeyed to the opening of the Turkestan-Siberian Railway, May-Day, 1930. “First of the Giants of the Five-Year Plan to Open,” the railway proclaimed on banners and in the press. A thousand miles of rail had been driven in a north-south line over uninhabited plains and deserts. My old friend, Bill Shatoff, veteran of a hundred free speech fights in America, veteran also of the Russian civil war, was construction boss. They built in record time, a year and a half faster than the “Plan” calculated. Thus, they ran into a financial crisis; the workers had to be paid for finished work while the government budget gave funds only for the following year. Shatoff stormed Moscow, cadged money from all sources, yelling: “Shall I lay off victorious workers while a budget catches up?”
All this was past. Four special trains were coming to the opening. Ours carried delegates from a hundred factories, “champions” rewarded for good work by this trip. Soviet journalists came from a score of cities; foreign correspondents from all the world filled two cars. All of us knew that this railway changed the history of Asia, united Siberian wheat and timber with Central Asan cotton, brought Soviet trade to the edge of Western China, and bound the far southeastern border of the Soviet Union with a thin, steel line of defense.
Our train ran by no schedule, for ours was the first train. On new-placed rails the cars swayed drunkenly behind a festival locomotive painted green. It was a gift from the Repair Shops of Aulie-Ata, repaired by volunteers in spare time without wages. It flamed with banners. An engine crew chosen from the volunteer repairmen, rode day and night on “their engine.” This was their victory also, the opening of Turk-Sib.
New towns were growing on the line already, rough settlements of pioneers. Shatoff spoke to them in meetings at every station. He recalled details of their struggle, hunger and thirst in the desert, blinding blizzards in winter, when “bureaucrats” had failed to send warm clothes. He noted babies “still in the arms of mothers, yet older than this town.” He spoke of the new world their work created, a better world for workers of all nations. I heard a gaunt woman mutter with tears in her eyes: “Swell guy, our boss!”
Under a hot sun, a Russian-Kazak festival went on at the junction. Nomad Kazaks had come horseback hundreds of miles to greet the great “Iron Horse.” A giant crane called “Marion,” from its trademark “Marion, O.,” picked up couples, a Russian and Kazak together, and gave them joy-rides in the air. Young men danced on the rails and sang new songs about the “black steed, swifter than a hundred horses,” whose coming brought jobs and schools and freed them from tribal oppressors. But the chiefs still had power; when the young men tried to keep for themselves the prizes they got for good work, their fellow tribesmen threw them to the ground and took the prizes for the chiefs. Such were tribal manners, now at last challenged by the new road.
Under the eyes of ten thousand people, who had come to this naked wilderness, the north and south rail-laying crews put the last steel in place. The last spike was driven by high officials of Russia and of Kazakstan, by Shatoff for the builders, and by 70-year Katayama, leader of Japanese Communists, delegate from the Communist International. The meaning of Katayama’s blow on the joining spike was clear. This railroad was more than the joining of wheat with cotton, more than the opening of new lands to pioneers, more than the weapon of young herdsmen against tribal oppressors. This road was world revolution marching down through Asia.
The workers all along the line, knowing its great importance, asked the people of our train who had come to open the railway. Not Stalin? Not Kalinin? No? Then they resigned themselves to lesser dignitaries, knowing that from Moscow and return was two weeks journey and that all across the land were equally important enterprises yet unfinished. Far to the West, the world’s biggest power-dam was rushing to completion on the Dnieper. Far to the North, the new steel town of Kuzbas was struggling into life. In Stalingrad, the world’s biggest tractor plant was almost ready to open; in Sverdlovsk, the world’s biggest plant for heavy machine-building was being built.
“First of the Giants to Open,” the Turk-Sib claimed the honor. But it was only one of scores of giants reared in the thundering Five-Year Plan.
American engineers who came to help the Plan on contract, liked to say that it wasn’t really a “plan” at all. Technically, they were right. The Plan was never a blue-print to be followed precisely—it was a challenge to be met and then surpassed. It was not made solely by Moscow, but simultaneously by Moscow and the farthest ends of the land. In factories and villages, people discussed what they wanted, what they could make, what they needed in order to make it; their local plans went by channels to “the center,” were correlated and sent back for local adoption.
In all the land, from Leningrad to Vladivostok, there rose a mighty hum of building. In 1931, I went for Moscow News to cover these constructions. Twenty years later, when I was arrested in Moscow, the cop seized all my notebooks of those trips as evidence of “spying.” The giants of the Five-Year Plan had suddenly become war secrets. But in the early thirties they were showing off to any who would look.
Some said in 1931 that the Stalingrad Tractor Works was a failure; some said it was a huge success. Both were liars. Stalingrad Tractor Works was neither a failure nor a success—yet! It was a war. A war for the first Soviet conveyor. In America, the conveyor took a generation to grow. Here, it was won quickly by battle. Stalingrad Tractor Works cost lives and youth. Strong men fainted at the forge on hot summer days. Three Americans—Zivkovich, Covert and Ninchuk—worked sixty hours, without sleep, to repair Machine No. 7, which held up “The Line.” They staggered from victory, more dead than alive; they were met by cheers and medals. That’s not work. That’s war.
Strong men held back tears when “the camel” went up on their shop—the laughing camel, sign posted on shops that lagged. Men who had done their utmost sobbed because their shop had not done its utmost, and turned back to make it do more. It wasn’t enough for one man, or a hundred, to do the utmost. Organization had to be built. They no sooner conquered one detail, then another slipped up to stop them. There were a thousand details to concentrate on at once. That had never been done in Russia.
The works lay twenty minutes north of the city by an abominable road. The road was part of the works; it broke machines. A new water main had been laid; for by depending on the city system, they had been without water in the heat of July. They were building more storage warehouses—a year late. For lack of proper storage, nobody knew what spare parts were available. The Line would stop for lack of a certain part; yet there might be hundreds of such parts stored somewhere a month ago. It was clear why Stalin stressed “system, accounting, responsibility.”
Every shop had its “production conference.” In the machine shop they were discussing “quality” and “lack of small tools.” A worker said: “The parts stand around in the sandy wind and then go into the motor with grit on them; parts should first be washed in kerosene.” Another called attention to the bad timing of inspection; radiators should be inspected before they were fastened to the tractor, to avoid the labor of taking them off later.
All praised the Pravda reporter who fixed a mistake that had ruined sixty motors. He had no technical knowledge but he found the line held up for lack of motors. He located sixty motors that were “defective,” discovered that the same part was bad in all of them, and traced that part back to the shop that made it. The cause, he learned, was a cutting tool badly dented, a green hand who thought it didn’t matter, a careless engineer who paid no attention. “You, you, YOU have held up sixty tractors,” he accused the engineer. The tool was fixed, the parts arrived properly. Just one of ten thousand things that had to be done. More sinister troubles like sabotage, with which we will deal in a later chapter, also disorganized production.
Would all the ten thousand things ever be done right—all at the same time? Yes, the curve of production sometimes went up, sometimes down, but in the main the trend was upward. Twice, the hosts of the Works had rallied to a battlecry, fought without counting the cost and won. First, when they opened the plant for the Party Congress in June, 1930, an incredibly swift job in spite of difficulties. Next, when they finished the 5000th tractor by the end of the first year. Both times, many of the upper personnel and nearly all the American specialists, thought it couldn’t be done. Both times, the will of the workers—especially of the Komsomols—Young Communists—put it through successfully.
“We have forces to call on that they do not know,” said Tregubinko, secretary of the Party organization in the works, as he lay on a sick bed, handling his job by phone while giving me an interview. He stressed piece work, system, strict accounting between departments—“system, accounting, responsibility,” demanded by Lenin and again by Stalin—the hardest, most necessary thing for a not-yet-mechanized land to learn.
Signs that they were learning were everywhere: in the road repair between the city and the works; in the first classes graduating from the plant’s technical schools; in the newly opened “factory kitchen” serving 11,000 meals a day; in the improved relations between American specialists and Russians; even in the kiosks that served soda pop and cold beer so that hot, thirty workers would not have to drink Volga water and get typhoid (as they had the previous year).
Four months after my August visit, the works reached a steady 110 tractors daily. It was “up to plan.” The war for the first Soviet conveyor was won. Twelve years later, the men of the Stalingrad Tractor Works drove the armies of Hitler back from the ruined yards of the works, driving their own tanks.
Everyone in the Kharkov Tractor Works—Russians, Ukrainians, Americans—said what an improvement it was over Stalingrad. That was true but not fair. The Stalingrad Works pioneered; its pains helped all who came after.
The American specialist, Raskin, took me through the plant. In Stalingrad, the foundry had been a laggard shop, marked with “the camel”; in Kharkov, it had over twenty improvements. The Stalingrad Plant had fine machines, straight from America, but green peasant help half ruined them. Workers in Kharkov knew better; they learned from Stalingrad. All the departments, like transport, storage, service, had benefited from experience, and were better in Kharkov. Improvements which, under capitalism, are forced by competition, had here been freely exchanged. Kharkov took over a whole year’s experience from Stalingrad.
The Kharkov Works had a special problem. It was built “outside the plan.” Peasants joined collective farms faster than expected; their need of tractors could not be met. Kharkov, proudly Ukrainian, built its own plant “outside the Five-Year Plan.” Americans cannot imagine the difficulties. All steel, bricks, cement, labor were already assigned for five years. Kharkov could get steel only by inducing some steel plant to produce “above the plan.” To fill the shortage of unskilled labor, tens of thousands of people—office workers, students, professors—volunteered on free days. Since the working week at that time was five days, staggered, one-fifth of the people were free every day.
“Every morning, at half-past six, we see the special train come in,” said Mr. Raskin. “They come with bands and banners, a different crowd each day and always jolly.” It was said that half the unskilled labor that built the Plant was done by volunteers.
There were two places from which to see Kuznetsk Construction Job. You could see it from Main Street; there you saw chaos. You could look at it from the hill; there you saw what had been built. Here are my notebook pictures.
“Main Street” is what I call the road, still nameless, that runs across the center of construction, narrow, between heaps of dirt, iron pipes, long girders, where two carts can barely pass, bumping in deep gullies. You go along it at noon. “Hi! Don’t run me down!” You shove away the horse’s head and duck into a nook between timbers. Twenty men pass with a heavy rail; they block the string of carts for a moment. Footwalkcrs have found a better path by dodging into a line of pipes, waist-high, that parallels the road. They hurry through the pipes, crouching.
A dozen railway lines cross Main Street. Cart traffic stops while a line of cars passes back and forth, loaded with great steel plates for the blast furnaces. They hunt a spot in the chaos to deposit plates; there are few such spots, so the cars shunt for twenty minutes while the carts are blocked. When the cars have gone, a giant hay-wagon blocks the road; the cart traffic gets criss-crossed in passing it. And here a big truck halts right in the road, while a dozen husky peasant girls shovel dirt into it from under the nose of the power-plant, dirt that should have been removed a year ago. A million cubic yards of dirt is still in wrong places.
From Main Street the paths diverge on both sides: on one side to coke-ovens, blast furnaces, the power plant; on the other to the boiler shop, foundry, open hearth and the skeleton of the coming rolling mills. They are perilous paths, clinging to hillsides and climbing piles of debris. They change daily as construction changes. Only men on the job know the way.
Two days it rains. Then all the chaos of Main Street is sunk under Siberian mud. Mud flows into shoe-tops; side-hill paths become impassable to carts. All work loses twenty-five percent in efficiency.
A thousand criticisms are heard from American engineers, Russian engineers, inspectors, editors. Why does everything get in its own way? Why must blast furnace and coke ovens and power plant fight each other for tracks? And for men? And for a little space in which to unload. Why isn’t there a decent road? Anyone on the job can tell you how this steel mill should have been built. First the roads, railroads, carpenter shops, housing, storage yards, excavation, water supply, sewerage; then the dirt removed, then the building. When the building is done then installation of equipment, then testing, then operation. Anyone tells you that.
Frankfort, construction boss, also tells you. “The plans were changed while we built. Japan moved into Manchuria; we needed more steel. There was a choice of proceeding in orderly fashion—this meant a year’s delay—or doing everything at once. We took the second way. Then, too, we Russian engineers have no experience in this modern type of steel mill. And we can never expect materials by plan.
“In America, you order ten carloads of firebrick by phone and get them in a few days. We ordered some of ours a year and a half ago. We waited without firebrick for the blast furnace for four months. Then it all came at once; there was no space for it and we dumped it everywhere in the way of other work. Our steel should have come in May; it came in September. Trainloads of equipment come from all parts of Russia and from abroad; cars get sidetracked and delayed.”
A day after the talk with Frankfort, when the mud has dried a little, we go up on the hill. We rise above the planned houses and reach the colony of mud shacks built by tens of thousands of peasants who flooded over the hills for jobs. Not finding housing, they dug in, each stealing from the construction a few timbers, a few firebricks, a few panes of glass. This mounts up, causes unexplained shortage, calls for police action.
From the hillside, we look down on Kuznetsk. The coming steel mill stretches three miles along the valley. Directly in front rise eight giant black cylinders of the blast furnace. A year ago, when I last was here, there was just the start of excavation, where men dug dirt with small spades and carted it off on boards or in boxes, in ancient Asian way. Now, the first furnace prepares to open. A wisp of vapor curls from its chimney, which must dry out for weeks. Then loads of iron ore, coke and limestone will be hoisted to the top and begin to burn their way slowly down. The coal is here. “The iron is on the way,” wires Magnet Mountain, 1500 miles away in the Urals. The time is counted in days when steel will be made in a modern plant for the first time in Siberia.
Beyond the eight great cylinders are a dozen mighty structures: the tall black chimneys and massive concrete walls of the coke ovens; the factory school, turning six thousand peasants into steel workers. Seven stories high rises the power plant; one turbine will operate in a few days. Next comes the many-peaked roof of the foundry; only half excavated and finished, it has already produced two hundred tons of castings. Beyond to the left is the Open Hearth, to open later, made on the biggest scale of any in the world. Still further are lofty steel columns rising from concrete foundations; they are the beginning of a blooming-mill equal to that of Gary, now the world’s largest.
Nor is this all. For under the brow of the hill far off to the left, we glimpse the two-and-a-half million dollar firebrick plant, just making replacement brick for the furnaces; the rambling shops of Stalmost, which rivet boiler-plate for the furnaces; the boiler shop and machine shop, already working. Dim in the distant mists are the brick kilns making ordinary brick for the new city; and the wood working plant that turns out standard houses.
Two years ago, this was a lonely valley with a sleepy village of fifteen hundred souls. Last year there were a few barracks and dugouts, some excavations. Now the new city stretches down the valley beyond the limits of vision, some people living in dugouts, some in barracks, some in four-storey brick houses of the “socialist city.” A steel mill that ranks with the world’s largest has arisen in Siberian wilderness.
It wasn’t Frankfort who built it. Nor the American specialists, nor the 45,000 workers on the site. All over the USSR they built it, in steel mills of Leningrad, in shops of the Ukraine. Everywhere went the call: “Hurry for Kuznetsk.” The workers hurried and followed through on their work. During my visit a train came from Leningrad; it started as one train and arrived as two. A “shock-brigade” came from the Leningrad works as escort, to see their shipment past lazy Siberian stations. In every station they searched for cars bound for Kuznetsk that had been side-tracked. They started with 39 cars and arrived with 90. They had stirred up station-masters all along the way.
That was Kuznetsk Steel Mill. Sleepy Siberian hills, unskilled peasants, shipments scattered along two thousand miles of track. And against this, the shock-brigades of workers across the USSR, who would not let Kuznetsk fail. For Kuznetsk opened Siberia to industrialization. Already, it had turned thousands of peasants into steel workers and given experience to hundreds of engineers. Another steel mill, twice as large, was next to be built a little way down the valley. “Twice as large” everyone said quite calmly. For after Kuznetsk, no other plant in Siberia would be as hard to build.
Magnitogorsk—the name means Magnet Mountain—was bigger than Kuznetsk. Here is no space for its tale. Let us only note that a city of 180,000 people sprang full grown in a year and a half on the slopes of the Ural Mountains, five hundred miles by rail from the nearest other city. It w7as the world’s biggest construction camp, boasting the most highly concentrated iron ore deposit in the world. A city of youth, with youth’s energy, with sixty percent of its workers under twenty-four. A city of thirty-five nationalities, which already had opened thirteen schools, a technical high school and two technical universities, one for metallurgy and one for building trades. Already, they had a city theater, half a dozen movies, a circus “better than Sverdlovsk.”
This city, too, existed to bring forth a steel mill, to be for the Urals what Kusnetzk was for Siberia. This, too, was built by the tense effort of workers all over the USSR. Here, also, young workers invented new ways of work and new short-cuts, competing in records with Kuznetsk. And these were only two among scores of giants that the Five-Year Plan produced.
In January, 1933, Stalin reported to the Central Committee that the former backward peasant Russia had become the second industrial nation in the world. The Five-Year Plan had been basically completed in four and a quarter years, from October, 1928, through to December, 1932. The number of workers in industry had doubled, from eleven million to twenty-two million; output also had doubled.
“Formerly we did not have an iron and steel industry. Now we have such an industry,” he reported.
“We did not have a tractor industry. Now we have one.
“We did not have an automobile industry. Now we have one.
“We did not have an engineering industry. Now we have one.” He went on through the aviation industry, the production of farm machinery, the chemical industry and others and added: “We have achieved these—on a scale that makes the scale of European industry pale.”
The plan had cost heavily in dislocation of populations and disorganization of harvests. But never in history was so great an advance so swift. Had the pace been less swift, the Soviet people believed that not only their Socialism would have been postponed but their existence as a nation would have been in danger. For, in 1933, Japan already probed their borders from Manchuria and the German Nazis published claims to the Ukraine. The Soviet people believed that they might have faced invasion on both borders but for their swiftly rising economic might.
“We could not refrain,” said Stalin in that January report, “from whipping up a country that was a hundred years behind and which, owing to its backwardness, was faced with mortal danger. We would have been unarmed in the midst of a capitalist environment which is armed with modern technique.”
With the conclusion of the first Five-Year Plan, the USSR plunged into a second, which proposed five times as much new industry as the first had built, and a technical reconstruction of the whole economy. Yet, as Stalin said, the task was “undoubtedly easier”; no future Five-Year Plan would be as hard as the first. Five-Year Plans became the pattern by which the country moved ahead.
By 1935 the Soviet leaders began to speak of socialism as “victorious.” Its economic base was secure.
A year earlier, when over the land thundered the 1934 slogan: “Quality and surplus are the next battle,” a Moscow News reporter came back from a Siberian tour. “Guess the news from Kuznetsk! They’re competing with Magnet Mountain in flower-beds.”
The office burst into a gale of laughter. Kuznetsk, that mud hole, where they crawled through lice and dirt to build a city of steel! Blast furnaces they might compete in. But flower-beds? No!
“It’s a fact,” said the reporter. “I’ve the competition terms—they include parks, boulevards, workers’ clubs. Magnet Mountain has lawns, trees, and the best auto-buses. But Kuznetsk has a street-car line and a theatrical troupe from Moscow. The Meyerhold company was playing there.”