Lynne Viola, ?'he Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivisation, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp285, £8.95

This book is a well researched and detailed study of the workers who, in response to an appeal launched by the Soviet Communist Party at its Central Committee plenum in November 1929, volunteered to help organise the crash agricultural collectivisation scheme, which was announced at the same time. Of the 70,000 volunteers, 27,519 were selected, and they became known as the 25,000ers. They were predominantly factory activists, members of factory committees, party cells and union committees, shock workers, etc. Nearly 80 per cent of them were party members, or in the party's youth section. Over half of them were under 30 years old, and 7.7 per cent of them were women. In order to ensure their reliability and loyalty to the regime, in most areas a four tier screening process was run to weed out workers with close connections with the countryside, troublemakers, heavy drinkers and anyone who had been associated with party opposition groups.

After a two week (!) training course, the 25,000ers were despatched with much fanfare into the rural areas in order to help assert the centre's control over the crisis wracked countryside. By mid-¬February 1930 they were all in rural areas, ready to take on such tasks as chairmen of collective farms and party secretaries and administrators. Not surprisingly, the existing rural officials resented the volunteers' entry onto their patch, cold¬-shouldered them, and often relegated them to menial work. The peasantry, generally bitter at the harsh treatment they had been receiving since grain requisitions had commenced in 1928, were mainly hostile to the volunteers, and were often contemptuous of their unfamiliarity with rural life. Even though Viola claims that the volunteers' attitude towards the peasants was on the whole better than that of the average rural officials, several volunteers were brutally murdered. By the time the campaign ended in late 1931, there were still 18,000 of the volunteers in the countryside, many of them by then having gained leading posts in rural party and government bodies.

For all the extensive research behind this book, Viola emerges as an apologist for Stalinism, albeit of a curious kind. She claims that collectivisation was supposed `to be a revolution which would undermine the old order, modernise agriculture, institute a reliable method of grain collection, stimulate a cultural revolution, and build a new social and administrative base in the countryside' (p91). However:
`Although centrally initiated and endorsed, collectivisation became, to a great extent, a series of ad hoc policy responses to the unbridled initiatives of regional and district party and government organs. Collectivisation and collective farming were shaped less by Stalin and the central authorities than by the undisciplined and irresponsible activity of rural officials, the experimentation of collective farm leaders left to fend for themselves, and the realities of a backward countryside and a traditional peasantry which defied Bolshevik fortress storming. The centre never managed to exert its control over the countryside as it had intended in the schema of revolution from above.' (pp215 6)

Notwithstanding the efforts of the volunteers, the centre apparently could only assert its authority over the coun¬tryside through `a network of strict repressive measures' and by ruling `by ad¬ministrative fiat', which `did not represent effective control, but its opposite' (p216).

True, rural officialdom did act in a bureaucratic manner, alternating between collectivising everything within sight, and merely collectivising on paper. But whose fault was that? There were no detailed plans for collectivisation for the rural of¬ficials to subvert, nor could there have been. Soviet agriculture was quite unready for all out collectivisation. The material prerequisites for it were just not there. On the eve of the collectivisation drive there were only 35,000 tractors in the Soviet Union, 5.5 million households still used wooden ploughs, half the grain harvest was reaped by sickle or scythe, and 40 per cent of it was threshed by flails. Under Stalin and Bukharin theoretical myopia and factional zeal had ensured that little attempt had been made to initiate measures to modernise agriculture and increase in¬dustrial capacity, measures which would have enabled a realistic collectivisation drive to proceed smoothly. Their policies led directly to the grain crisis of 1928, when peasants started to withhold grain as they saw no purpose in selling it to the state when there was little industrial pro¬duct to buy in return.

Collectivisation was in no sense a fully worked out scheme. It was a desperate at¬tempt by the Soviet bureaucracy to reassert its faltering authority over the peasantry. It grew spontaneously and haphazardly from the enforced grain re¬quisitions of 1928, themselves an emergency measure. The alternating lack of instructions and floods of contradic¬tory diktats to the rural areas from the centre, the continually changing central policy statements, the sudden charges and retreats, and the general application of coercion against the peasantry all con¬tradict Viola's bizarre claims that the pro¬blems were essentially caused by rural of¬ficialdom's sabotage.

Viola holds the 25,000ers in high esteem, considering them as `the cadres of the Stalin revolution who, as advanced workers, served in the vanguard of the revolution' (p169). But the `Stalin revolu¬tion' was a disaster, not least in the agricultural sector. The peasantry, rich or poor, was overwhelmingly hostile to the coercive methods of collectivisation, and reacted by destroying their stock. From 1929 to 1933 the number of cattle fell from 70.5 to 38.4 million, pigs from 26 to 12.1 million, horses from 34 to 16.6 million, and sheep and goats from 146.7 to 50.2 million. Shortages and disloca¬tions led to famine. The human cost was terrible. At least six million people, pro¬bably more, perished during the collec¬tivisation drive. Viola admits that many of the volunteers who made a career in the countryside adopted the siege mentality common to Soviet officialdom at the time. They were of that generation `who would replace the cadres purged in the late 1930s and who would later come to be identified as the cohort of the Brezhnev generation' (p211), which, incidentally, is not (as far as I can tell) intended as a criticism.

Returning to their arrival in the rural areas, the 25,000ers did see themselves as enthusiastic fighters for Socialism (but, then, so did the Red Guards during Mao's Cultural Revolution) and may have been at first more humane than the average Soviet official. But when they are con¬sidered in the general context of the col¬lectivisation scheme, their story, far from being a revolutionary epic, is just one chapter, and a fairly minor one at that, in the tragedy that was Stalin's Soviet Union.

Paul Flewers
Kenneth Neill Cameron, Stalin: Man of Contradiction, Strong Oak Press, Stevenage,
1989, pp204, £15/£8.95

Glasnost notwithstanding, we know that the Stalinists have yet to produce a half¬way honest account of Soviet history. But many years have surely passed since anything like this rolled off the presses:
`National conspiracy turned to interna¬tional conspiracy. As war loomed closer, the Bukharinites advocated economic deals with the Germans and Japanese whereby they would grant concessions in return for being recognised as the govern¬ment when, as they and most interna¬tional observers believed, the USSR would go down to inevitable defeat.
`A picture of the extent of this sabotage emerged only in the trials of the various opposition leaders between 1936 and 1938, which also revealed that sabotage was linked with plans for the destruction of the Soviet Union in war. These public trials of the "opposition" leaders, however, had revealed only the tip of the iceberg. They indicated the existence of followers everywhere   wrecking machinery, making the wrong parts, sen¬ding materials to the wrong places, poisoning farm animals, starting pit fires in mines, planning railway sabotage to build up to the immobilisation of the railways in the coming war... Sergei Kirov, the popular head of the party in Leningrad, was assassinated, and terrorist plans seem to have been afoot to assassinate the whole top party leader¬ship.'

Professor Cameron is a genuine unreconstructed Stalinist    not one who merely despairs at Gorbachev, but who rubbishes Khrushchev (or `Krushchev' or `Khruschev', consistency is not his strong point) for sullying the good name of his hero.

Well, our Professor says that Stalin may have been a duffer at dialectics, and should have left genetics to experts like Lysenko, but these are mere spots on the sun. Under Stalin's sublime guidance, the Soviet Union became an industrial and agricultural giant, and has 1936 Constitu¬tion gave Soviet citizens `a broader spec¬trum of rights ...than any in world history'. As for the chronic inefficiency, disproportionalities and wastage of Soviet agriculture and industry, the deportations of entire nationalities, famine, the handing over of German Communists to the Gestapo, Stalin's ugly anti Semitism, it's as if they never existed. And just like another learned Professor, Vic Allen (The Russians are Coming, 1988), Cameron points to the arguments amongst Sovietologists over the numbers held in prison camps, to imply that the Gulag never existed. Academic titles do not pre¬vent men from being fools or charlatans, or both.

Why go on? All the tall tales that Cameron trots out have been convincingly refuted time and again over the last five decades. If this book has any worth, it does confirm Stalin's adage that paper will take anything that's written on it. Otherwise it would, I suppose, make an ideal present for those geriatric Stalinists who pine for the days when wreckers were routed, Trotskyists trounced, and Uncle Joe gazed down benignly upon us all.
Paul Flewers