Nor has the perennial clash of interests between town and country been finally resolved. It has only been kept within bounds; and it is now passing on to ‘a higher level’, as Stalin himself indicated in his last published essay on economics.
The outlook of the town is determined by public ownership and planning. In agriculture, on the other hand, a precarious balance between public and private interest has so far operated; and agriculture has up to a point retained a market economy. Planning and market relations are antagonistic to each other.
In the long run, as Stalin argued, the planned sector of the economy will strive to eliminate the rural market and to embrace farming as well. The collective farms, in which ‘group ownership’ is still dominant (as it is in any co-operative enterprise), would eventually become national property, in one form or another. In his last essay and correspondence Stalin sketched something like a long-term plan of agricultural policy pointing in this direction. He insisted that the transition should be carried out gradually and slowly so as not to antagonize the peasants. It remains to be seen whether it can or will be effected in the mild, evolutionary manner or whether it will lead to new violent conflicts between State and peasantry.
Whatever the prospects, industrialization, collectivization, modernization, and planning are enduring elements in the domestic balance of the Stalin era.
As Russia looks back, with pride or resentment, upon the road which she has travelled in blood, toil, and sweat during these last decades, she must know in her heart that there is no way back for her from the stage of development she has reached.
There is no way back from industrialization.
In this respect Russia is sharing the fate of older industrial nations, who have not been able to conjure out of existence the tremendous productive forces they have brought to life. The Cervanteses of the industrial age, for instance Tolstoy in Russia and Ruskin in England, have mourned the chivalries of faded epochs, depicted the curses of science and technology, and implored mankind to retrace its steps and recapture the beauty and integrity of a primitive, ‘natural’ way of life. But mankind, even if it listened with forebodings to their warnings and injunctions, could not retrace its steps.
Chicago cannot again become the idyllic little market town of the farmers of Illinois, which the late John Dewey still saw in his young days and described wistfully to the author shortly before his death. No more can Chkalov, Malenkov's home-town, or Sverdlovsk (in the Urals), with their giant engineering plants and power stations, change back, the first into the dreamy meeting place of the Orenburg Cossacks and the second into the für traders' market-place of old.
Industrialization is now for Russia a matter not merely of national pride and ambition but of physical survival. In a country where the State employs over 40 million people in its industries and administrative establishments, and where even the functioning of mechanized agriculture depends entirely on the nation's mines, steel mills, engineering plant, and means of transport, any serious hitch or halt in industrial development, not to speak of de-industrialization, would bring unemployment and starvation to scores of millions. In telling the Soviet people that it alone of all conceivable Russian parties and groups stood for the programme of industrialization, Stalinism succeeded in identifying itself in the eyes of the people with their most vital interests. It derived further strength from telling them that in case of war the West would aim at ‘reducing the Soviet Union to colonial status’, that is at obliterating the industrial achievements of the Stalin era.
As it will be argued later, there may be ample room for certain shifts of emphasis in the programmes of industrialization. But it cannot be expected that post-Stalinist Russia will renounce this part of Stalin's legacy.