Stalin’s Last Gospel
Stalin himself, in the year before he died, made some illuminating statements about the reorientation of the trade of Eastern Europe. He wrote an article, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., which was published in October 1952, though it had been written earlier in the year. In this article Stalin said that the most important economic consequence of World War II was “the disintegration of the single, all-embracing world market.” Actually there was scarcely a single world market before the war, but Stalin obviously was talking about the change in the trade of those countries that fell into the Soviet orbit during the war or shortly thereafter. He said that “now we have parallel world markets,” confronting one another. He then made the customary charge that the Western countries, through an “economic blockade,” had tried to “strangle” the Eastern European countries. He said the West had thereby unintentionally contributed to the formation of the new parallel world market. On this occasion, however, Stalin went on to say that “the fundamental thing, of course,” is not the Western economic blockade, but the fact that since the war the Eastern European countries “have joined together economically and established economic cooperation and mutual assistance.”
He made it perfectly plain that, in Kremlin thinking, the breakdown of the “one world market” and the establishment of two rival markets was a tremendous boon to the Communist cause, because it shrank the markets available to the “capitalist countries” and intensified a struggle which the Communists always see as going on among those countries. And this, Stalin said, rendered more acute what he called the “general crisis of capitalism.”
To picture the free world as in or near a general economic crisis is of course familiar Communist mythology. But Stalin’s discussion did reveal clearly the Communist indifference to the mutually fruitful and expanding international trade that the West desires. It was an admission of Communist responsibility for—or at least satisfaction with—a divided trade world.
So much for Stalin’s last economic gospel. Stalin’s death was announced on March 5, 1953. Now let us examine what has been going on in his absence.
[CHAPTER II]
The New Regime and the Consumer
After Stalin, the Soviet leadership was taken up by a group of top party officials. Georgi M. Malenkov was the Premier and the most influential, but apparently several other men held important shares of the responsibility and the power. This elite group included, with varying degrees of personal influence, Beria (temporarily), Molotov, Khrushchev, Voroshilov, Bulganin, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan. None of this new group was new to Soviet leadership. All had been close lieutenants of Stalin. All are known to have had important roles in previous policy formulation, and in directing key operations.
The system that this group took over in the U. S. S. R. was their own as well as Stalin’s creation. Under this system, the economy is organized along authoritarian lines and characterized by state ownership of the means of production and state planning of practically all economic activity. It is the Central Committee of the Communist party which lays down the economic and social policies which the state production plans are desired to implement. The new regime modified this system in no essential respect.
In addition to inheriting the system, Malenkov and his associates inherited economic policies and economic conditions which they themselves had helped to create.
In the U.S.S.R., as we have seen, Soviet economic policy had long been to force industrialization by every means. And this objective required such a concentration of capital investment—both civilian and military—as to deprive the growing population of advances in living standards commensurate with the overall expansion of the Soviet economy. That is another way of saying they took it out of the people’s hides.
Each of the European satellites, too, had undertaken, under Soviet direction, to develop an economic structure similar to that of the Soviet Union. By 1953 all foreign trade, nearly all industry, and a very substantial portion of domestic trade had been nationalized in those countries. Where collectivization of agriculture was not completed, the Government controlled agriculture by means of centralized planning and a system of compulsory deliveries. Each satellite government had drawn up a long-term comprehensive economic plan which, like that of the U.S.S.R., emphasized rapid industrialization.
These developments brought the Communist leaders many serious problems—and the people many deprivations. Before the war, as independent states, most of these satellite countries had devoted a much higher percentage of resources to the consumer sectors of their economies than was customary for the U.S.S.R. When the Communists took control, belts were tightened. The standards of living of the satellite peoples began to decline toward the low levels long prevalent in the U.S.S.R. But denying the satellite peoples the fruits of their labors, in imitation of Moscow patterns, still did not bring the overambitious war-economy plans to success. Agriculture and industry both had difficulty in keeping pace. The world has heard how the transformation of satellite agriculture into the Soviet pattern was impeded by the opposition of the rural populations to collectivization and by the difficulties of mechanizing farm output; how shortages of raw materials slowed the textile program in Czechoslovakia and the electric power industry in Hungary; how the mining and metallurgical industries lagged in some areas; how the rights of labor were obliterated in the attempt to shift manpower into heavy industry; how purges furnished scapegoats for Communist failures.