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The Political Context of the Foundation Pit Chapter 4 The Political Context of The Foundation Pit If Platonov is a Soviet writer, in the sense that his works always in some way originate in changes brought about by the October Revolution of 1917, The Foundation Pit is a response to a very specific moment in Soviet history: the transition from Leninism (which is to say, roughly, Bolshevik Party rule) in the 1920s to the distinctly different period of Stalinism, which ensued after 1928 when Joseph Stalin consolidated his control over a Party that, though hardly liberal by any definition, in the period since Lenin’s death in 1924 had at least had a plurality of powerful figures negotiating policies on its Central Committee. The political life of 1920s Soviet Russia thus parallels (in fact, underlies) the relative tolerance prevailing in its literary life. The 1920s were also a period of relative economic liberalism in the Soviet Union. In the interests of sheer political survival, during the civil war that followed the October Revolution the Bolsheviks had pursued a policy called “War Communism” which in fact fairly closely followed the measures outlined for the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in Marx’s and Engel’s Communist Manifesto: they nationalized banks and industry, forcibly requisitioned grain from peasants, subjected the populace to the control of a secret police force (the “Cheka,” whose Russian initials stood for the “Extraordinary Committee for the Battle Against Counterrevolution and Sabotage”), and imposed a number of radical measures such as (briefly) establishing equal pay for all and abolishing ranks in the military. Within a few years, however, the combined effects of revolution, war, and civil and economic upheaval had reduced the Soviet Union to a dire condition. Realizing that the economy needed to recover, in 1921 Lenin beat a tactical retreat from ruthless state intervention and introduced a series of measures called the New Economic Policy, or NEP. The Soviet state retained 83 Chapter Four control over the “commanding heights” of banks, railways, and heavy industry, but otherwise reintroduced profit as an economic motive and even allowed some forms of private ownership. One result was a distinct improvement in the supply of consumer goods, but NEP also produced a group of beneficiaries, the so-called “NEPmen,” who received concessions to run factories, stores, cafés, etc., and were roundly regarded with suspicion, at least by still-ardent supporters of the proletarian revolution. In Fedor Gladkov’s 1925 novel Cement, for example, the zealously pro-Bolshevik characters are morally affronted by the thought that their beloved cement factory, idle and half-looted after the civil war, might be leased as a concession; and for one character the opening of “cafés-chantants” epitomizes the horrors of this apparent capitulation to the bourgeosie (though the lesson of the day in Gladkov’s novel is that NEP is the product of the Party’s higher wisdom, and must be accepted). Even in Yuri Olesha’s 1927 Envy, a far more ambivalent cri de coeur of the old intelligentsia, the object of “envy,” both loathed and feared, is a plump NEPman named Andrei Babichev whose greatest achievement is to open a discount cafeteria. The events in Soviet social and political life on which Platonov draws in The Foundation Pit, however, belong not to the NEP era but to the second “revolution”—it was no less than that—undertaken by Stalin and the Party elite when, in an abrupt change from ambigui- ties of the 1920s, they inaugurated a Five-Year Plan involving an aggressive campaign to industrialize the economy as rapidly as possible, and, simultaneously, to collectivize Soviet agriculture. The motivations for this shift lay partly in Marxist ideology, which saw the fate of the proletariat—in essence, factory workers—as the central political cause of the modern era. Although Marx and Engels wrote harsh critiques of capitalism, they were no pastoralists and in fact admired the technological accomplishments of capitalism, even as they deplored what work in its factories had done to the working class. The Soviet perspective on the value of industrialization per se is interesting and complex. In their critiques of capitalism Marx and Engels primarily had advanced economies like those of England and the Ruhr valley of Germany in mind. They paid little attention to Russia and other 84 The Political Context of The Foundation Pit underdeveloped economies, and did not believe that the proletarian revolution would take place in the primitive conditions that prevailed in such places. Soviet ideology usually tried to get around this contra- diction between what Marx had said and the claims they wanted to make for their Revolution by citing the “furious pace” of industrialization (“burnyi rost kapitalizma”) in the years leading up to World War I rather than its actual level as the Revolution’s cause—the pace supposedly having concentrated the forces of capitalism to a greater degree even than that found in far more advanced industrialized economies. Stalin’s herculean effort to industrialize the country overnight can thus, in part, be understood as a way of catching up with the Marxist understanding of history, of erasing the embarrassing discrepancy between the Marxist view and Soviet reality.* There may, however, have been an even deeper element in the Russian historical consciousness for which orthodox Marxist consi- derations served simply as a rationalization: the nation’s lingering sense of inferiority vis-à-vis “the West,” with whose economies (includuing military) and societies (to a lesser extent) it had been trying to catch up since tsar Peter the Great seized on this idea as the centrepiece of national policy in the early eighteenth century. Some- thing of this anxiety can be sensed in a literary work like Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward, which portrays the frenetic efforts to pour the cement foundations for a smelter in the Ural mountains—a signi- ficant location, as it turns out, not only because one of the largest Five-Year Plan projects was the construction of a smelter at Magni- togorsk in the Urals but also because the Urals mark the boundary between European and Asian Russia (that is, Siberia and other east- ern territories annexed by Russian tsars beginning in the fifteenth century). The novel makes a point of reminding its readers that the site for the smelter lies beyond the Urals, in the “Pugachev steppes”; and when the workers at the plant at last meet the ambitious goal of cement-pouring that they have set themselves, it declares, at once * See Kotkin’s related remark that “The Soviet plan, with its proposals for astronomically large increases in industrial capacity, can be read as both an enraptured paean to industrialism and a terrified acknowledgement of industrial inferiority” (33). 85 Chapter Four nervously and triumphantly, “We will never again be Asia!” One senses the same complex of emotions in a famous speech by Stalin (which characters in Kataev’s novel recite) in which he cautions that “To slow down the tempo [of industrialization] means to lag behind. And those who lag behind are beaten. The history of Old Russia shows . that because of her backwardness she was constantly being defeated. By the Mongol Khans, by the Polish-Lithuanian gentry, by the Anglo-French capitalists . Beaten because of backwardness— military, cul tural, political, industrial, and agricultural backward- ness . We are behind the leading countries by fifty-one hundred years. We must make up this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we go under” (quoted in Ulam 340). The certain sense of anxiety which attends the characters’ decisions to make their foundation pit successively larger in Platonov’s tale—the sense that their task is undertaken less to realize a utopian opportunity than out of despe- ration—partakes of a similar complex of emotions. Whatever the ultimate motivations, industrialization had always been a goal of Soviet policy. In a famous statement Lenin asserted that “electrification plus Soviet power equals communism” (Riasanovsky 485; Platonov’s stories of the mid–1920s about efforts to bring electricity to the village are direct responses to Lenin’s initiative, as were his work for GOELRO, the state agency created to implement it and his pamphlet Elektrifikatsiia). Gosplan, the state planning agency, was created in 1921 in order to co-ordinate industrial policy, and it was the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925, some four years before Stalin launched his initiative, which first issued the call for mass industrialization. In the struggle for power among leaders of the Communist Party which followed Lenin’s death in 1924, however, the proper approach to industrialization was a matter of heated debate. Leon Trotsky and his associates (the “left” wing of the party leadership, which included Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev) advocated rapid progress toward socialism, but in conjunction with the spread of the revolutionary movement abroad. The opposing “right” faction consisting of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky and their associates, advocated a gradualist approach to social and economic transformation because they 86 The Political Context of The Foundation Pit considered Russia to be still unprepared for mass industrialization; they thus defended the continuation of NEP (Cohen 19). Stalin initially sided with the gradualist Right against the Left. Then, as the first Five-Year Plan was set in motion and Stalin consolidated his position at the head of the Party, he turned the arguments of the Left against the Right (or the “rightist deviation,” as it now came to be called), lambasting the “Bukharin group” for the heresy of resistance to his program for rapid industrialization (Riasanovsky 477–9). He now injected an unprecedented sense of urgency into the process. Mocking his rival Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution,” which regarded the success of socialsim in other, more advanced countries as a prerequisite for its advance in Russia (a view Lenin had also expressed), Stalin instead promoted the alternative pursuit of “socialism in one country,” according to which the Soviet Union would blaze the path on its own (Riasanovsky 481).
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