Foundations of A Planned Economy 1926–1929

462 Pages·1978·26.144 MB·English

by  E. H. Carr (auth.)

A HISTORY OF SOVIET RUSSIA
A HISTORY OF SOVIET RUSSIA
by E. H. Carr
in fourteen volumes
I. THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, Volume One
2. THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, Volume Two
3. THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, Volume Three
4. THE INTERREGNUM
s.
SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY, Volume One
6. SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY, Volume Two
7. SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY, Volume Three, Part 1
8. SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY, Volume Three, Part 11
9. -FOUNDATIONS OF A PLANNED ECONOMY, Volume One,
Part 1
10. -FOUNDATIONS OF A PLANNED ECONOMY, Volume One,
Part II
II. FOUNDATIONS OF A PLANNED ECONOMY, Volume Two
12. FOUNDATIONS OF A PLANNED ECONOMY, Volume Three,
Part I
13. FOUNDATIONS OF A PLANNED ECONOMY, Volume Three,
Part II
14. FOUNDATIONS OF A PLANNED ECONOMY, Volume Three,
Part III
-with R. W. Davies
A HISTORY OF SOVIET RUSSIA 14
FOUNDATIONS OF A
PLANNED ECONOMY
1926-1929
BY
E. H. CARR
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
VOLUME THREE-PART III
© E. H. Carr 1978
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1978
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form
or by any means, without permission.
First published 1978
Reprinted 1978, 1990
Published by
MACMILlAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD
London and Basmgstoke
Companies and representatIVes
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Carr, Edward Hallett
Foundations of a planned economy, 1926-1929
Vol. 3. [Part) 3. - (Carr, Edward Hallett. History
of Soviet Russia; 14)
1. Russia - Social conditions - 1917-
I. Title
309.1'47'0842 HN523
ISBN 978-1-349-02904-4 ISBN 978-1-349-02902-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-02902-0
CONTENTS
PAGB
Preface vii
D: THE SOVIET UNION AND THE NON-CAPITALIST
WORLD
Chapter 82. THE USSR AND THE EAST 645
83. THE MIDDLE EAST 667
(a) Turkey 667
(b) Persia 674
(c) The Arab World 683
(d) Mghanistan 694
84. REVOLUTIONARY CHINA: I THE FLOWING TIDE 698
(a) The Northern Expedition 698
(b) Euphoria in Comintern 724
(c) Chiang's Counter-revolution 737
(d) Rifts in Moscow 753
85. REVOLUTIONARY CHINA: II THE EBB 774
(a) The Wuhan DebAcle 774
(b) The Road to Canton 819
(c) Mtermath of Defeat 846
Cd) The Twilight of the CCP 883
(e) The Manchurian Crisis 895
86. INDIA IN FERMENT 911
87. INDONESIA 945
88. LATIN AMERICA 958
89. THE NEGRO PROBLEM 991
90. CONCLUSION 1017
NoteE. FEUDALISM IN CHINA 1023
F. THE PAN-PACIFIC TRADE UNION SECRETARIAT 1040
List of Abbreviations 1043
Index 1045
PREFACE
My first impression, on sitting down to write the preface to this
final volume of my History of SO'Viet Russia, is one of thankful
relief that I have been able to finish the project on which I em
barked more than thirty years ago. Had I realized at that time the
formidable dimensions of the task I might not have been rash
enough to undertake it. My purpose, as I wrote in the preface to
my initial volume, was "to write the history, not of the events of
the revolution ... but of the political, social and economic order
which emerged from it"; and I never intended to go beyond the
final establishment of Stalin's dictatorship, which drew a im
penetrable curtain of silence over discussions and differences of
policy within the party. But even with these limitations the work
grew constandy on my hands, pardy through my own increased
consciousness of the complexities and ramifications of the subject,
and pardy through the publication of materials hitherto unknown
or unavailable; access to rare documents was also rendered pro
gressively easier by the development of microfilm and xerox
facilities. I am not sure exacdy what I envisaged when I began to
research and write. But it was something far smaller and more
restricted in scope than what has emerged.
A minor casualty of this process of growth is the cumbrous
numbering of the volumes. I started with the idea of dividing the
whole into several major sections or instalments with separate
tides: these have taken shape as The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-
1923, The Interregnum 1923-1924, Socialism in One Country
1924-1926 and Foundations of a Planned Economy 1926-1929.
In the middle nineteen-fifties I contemplated that each of these
sections (except The Interregnum, which was a single bridge
volume), would comprise three volumes, devoted to economic,
political and international affairs. This would have made ten
volumes in all. In the final result, two of these volumes split into
two, and one into three, so that the ten "notional" volumes are
represented by fourteen "physical" volumes. The concluding part
now published is the third part of the third volume of Foundations
viii PREFACE
of a Planned Economy. References in the footnotes to the two
previous parts are by page numbers, the volume being continu
ously paginated. References to Vol. 1 or Vol. 2 are to the previous
volumes of Foundations. I know that this numbering has some
times caused confusion, for which I can only apologize.
The lapse of thirty years has brought more substantial changes.
History does not stand still; nor does the historian. Writing today,
I should shape my first volume very differendy, giving less pro
minence to the formal constitutional arrangements of the new
regime, and more to the geographical, social and economic en
vironment in which it operated. Initial attempts at constitution
making, designed to convert the revolutionary Soviets of workers
and peasants into permanent organs of government, were strongly
influenced by western models. The result was incongruous. An air
of unreality clung to the earliest, as well as to more recent, Soviet
constitutions. They made litde impact on the society for which
they were devised, and were moulded by it in ways far removed
from the intentions and professions of those who drafted them. It
is in the structure of the society as a whole that the key to these
developments must be sought. On the other hand, the emphasis
on continuity in Chapter 2 of Socialism in One Country, though
not wrong, now seems to me somewhat overstated.
My enterprise may have been rash in another respect. No
serious history of the French revolution was attempted till half a
century after the event. What, looking back over the past sixty
years, strike me most are the extraordinary variations in the
climate of western reactions to the revolution - variations more
direcdy determined by changing attitudes and policies in the west
than by what was happening in the Soviet Union. The middle
nineteen-twenties were marked by a wave of intense anti-Soviet
feeling in Great Britain and France, and by a continuing boycott
in the United States of America; yet in the Soviet Union the
period was a relatively tranquil interlude of recovery and relaxa
tion, after the miseries and the violence of the revolution and the
civil war, and before the intense pressures of the five-year plan
and the provocations of Stalin's dictatorship. The nineteen
thirties in the Soviet Union were the period of the collectivization
of the peasant, of sharply depressed standards of living and of the
great purges; yet this was the period when uncritical enthusiasm
for the Soviet Union in the west reached its highest point.
PREFACE ix
So volatile a climate of opinion is inimical to the writing of
history, and could hardly fail to weigh on any western scholar
engaged in the study of the Russian revolution. When I first plan
ned my work immediately after the war, it seemed natural (though
no doubt foolish) to hope that the co-operation uneasily estab
lished during the war would be continued and further developed
after the victory. When my first volume was published in 1950
disputes between east and west had reached a high pitch of
exasperation; the "people's democracies" had belied their name,
and the seeds of McCarthyism were beginning to sprout. After
the Khrushchev "revelations" of 1956 a milder climate set in,
which encouraged the historian in the task of holding a balance be
tween the achievements of the revolution and the iniquities of the
Stalinist regime. This lasted for a decade. Then the Paris events
of May 1968, and still more the Soviet occupation of Prague three
months later, brought about another sharp exacerbation of anti
Soviet feelings in the west. Today, a decade later, the atmosphere
of mutual incomprehension and recrimination matches that of the
cold war of the nineteen-fifties or the open animosities of 1927.
These transient fluctuations of opinion have not only affected the
conduct of contemporary relations between the Soviet Union and
the western world, but have cast back their shadow over currendy
fashionable assessments, both east and west, of the past events
with which I have been concerned. I have tried my best to insulate
myself from them, and to arrive at conclusions which would stand
the test of a longer perspective. Others must judge how far I have
succeeded. But I have never wanted to see the Russian revolution
-any more than, say, the French revolution-either as pure
white or as pure black; and I do not think that my verdict on it at
any time would have differed materially from what I have written
in the last chapter of the present volume.
In the preface which I wrote in May 1976 to the first part of
this volume, I recorded my continuing debt to many of the helpers
whose names appear in prefaces to previous instalments of the
History. It is perhaps scarcely necessary for me on this occasion
to follow the normal practice of exonerating them from responsi
bility for any errors or any opinions which may have appeared in
these pages. Nearly half the present third part of the concluding
volume is rightly devoted to Soviet relations with China. Professor
Nikiforov, of the Far Eastern Institute of the Soviet Academy of
x PREFACE
Sciences, guided me to important Russian material; and Professor
Stuart Schram, one of the very few scholars in this country
qualified to master both the Russian and the Chinese sources, has
aided and stimulated my imperfect attempts to surmount the lan
guage barrier. I am most grateful to them for this help, as well as
to Miss Ruth McVey for expert advice on the Indonesian ques
tion. Mr Douglas Matthews has again undertaken the onerous
task of making the index.
In writing these last lines, I must single out for special apprecia
tion, among the many institutions which have furthered and
supported my work, the generous contribution of my own college
and the labours of its library staff on my behalf. I also recall the
invaluable collaboration of Professor R. W. Davies in one of the
key volumes of the whole series. But my final tribute of thanks
must once more be reserved for Tamara Deutscher. I am deeply
conscious that without her unstinting help over the past five years
in every aspect of the work I should not have been able to com
plete it.
B.H.CARR
30 NOfJember 1977