It was in the national interest that the government should foster a privileged minority consisting of administrators, planners, engineers, and skilled workers. The development of the country's resources depended on them; and they would not have worked without incentive.

Inequality, once encouraged, takes care of itself; the privileged minority seeks to enlarge its privileges. The Soviet bureaucrat, technician, or skilled worker was not satisfied with one pair of shoes — he wanted to have two or three. The same applied to clothing, housing, medical facilities, and so on.

As long as the government was bent on expanding coal-mines and steel mills, producer industries and armament plants, the building up of consumer industries was deferred. Inequality grew and assumed shocking proportions. The greater the scarcity of goods and the more primitive the level of civilization, the more brutal was the scramble for privileges. We know that Russia's urban population grew by about 45 million during the Stalin era. Relatively few houses were built; and during the war many cities and towns were razed by the enemy. The overwhelming majority of the people therefore was, and still is, condemned to live in the most appalling conditions. The few tolerable, good, or luxurious dwellings were allotted to skilled workers, technicians, and bureaucrats.

A more humane government than Stalin's might have tried to promote consumer industries even at the cost of a somewhat slower rate of expansion in basic materials and producer goods. But when the history of these decades, with their armaments fever and war-time destruction, is viewed in retrospect, it seems doubtful that any government would have been able to improve the situation radically, unless it abandoned industrialization altogether or slowed it down to the point of endangering national interest; and this would have resulted in an even lower standard of living for the vast majority than the present.

Stalinism took upon itself the daring and dramatic task of imposing inequality on a people which had just carried out the greatest of all revolutions in the name of equality. This imposition was naturally received with indignation. The old Bolsheviks who had been accustomed to identify themselves with the egalitarian aspirations of the masses branded it as a betrayal of the revolution. Since they spoke with the authority of great revolutionaries their criticism was doubly dangerous to Stalin's policy. Reacting against the clamour for equality Stalinism established a cult of inequality. It was not satisfied with pointing out that egalitarianism would lead to economic stagnation. It declared categorically that the privileges of the minority were of the essence of socialism and it branded the defenders of egalitarianism as agents of counter-revolution. In this way Stalinism freed its hands to provide material incentives in plenty and in excess to administrators, managers, technicians, and skilled workers.

With the passing of time, however, inequality, carried to extreme, tended to change from a progressive into a reactionary factor. It began to hamper Russia's economic development instead of furthering it. It kept the vast majority in a state of apathy and sullenness. Moreover, it rapidly lost its initial justification. The relation between social need and effective supply is now no longer a pair of shoes for only one out of every three Soviet citizens. (The output of the footwear industry has in recent years been sufficient to supply every citizen with at least one pair per year.) Enough essential consumer goods are now being produced to satisfy a very wide range of needs; and far more can be produced in the immediate future.

It is a point of only academic interest whether or when equality may become materially possible. Incentive wages and salaries will remain indispensable for a long time to come. But there is certainly room for eliminating the glaring inequalities of the Stalin era.

In the initial phases of ‘socialist accumulation’ it was possible for the government to teil the people that they must tighten their belts and even starve while they were building the new factories. Stalin's successors cannot continue to demand such heavy sacrifices. The factories are there already; the capacity to produce is there; and the will to produce is also there. Most of Russia's basic and heavy industries are at a level comparable to that of American industry fifteen or twenty years ago; but her consumer industries are far below it. This disproportion is bound to produce a national crisis, unless it is reduced in the next few years.

The protracted Stalinist campaign against the egalitarian heresy has tended to defeat itself. A great cry for equality is about to go up. Audible in whispers even in the last two or three years, it interjected itself into the discussions on the ‘transition from socialism to communism’, to which there was much more than mere propaganda or dogmatic hair-splitting. The new Soviet generation has been taught to regard its present way of life as socialism and it has been led to believe that inequality will be eliminated under communism, the next phase of development. During recent years, discussion in academic institutions, workers' clubs, and party cells has centred on the seemingly unreal question: How rapidly can the transition from socialism to communism be effected? This was only another way, indeed the only permissible way, of asking when and how the present inequalities would be reduced and eliminated.

Stalin's Politbureau at first put out this slogan about transition to communism in a spirit of self-congratulation and self-advertisement. ‘Look how far forward we have brought you!’ it said to the people. At most it wished to provide the intelligentsia and the workers with a theme for harmless dogmatic debate. But once the debate began it was anything but ‘harmless’. The theme attracted and absorbed the unspoken hopes and suppressed egalitarian yearnings. The intelligentsia and the workers had been officially encouraged to indulge in a vision of the future; and they projected into that vision all their grievances against the present. They began to voice the old egalitarian heresy and other ‘unorthodox ideas’ for the professing of which, whether real or suspected, innumerable men and women had paid with their lives in the late 1930's.

Analysing a great debate on communism which took place at the Economics Institute of Moscow's Academy of Science, the present author wrote in the summer of 1951:[18]

‘Visions of the future have a capricious logic of their own. This is true even in a country whose most eminent liberal historian, Miliukov, once said that its social classes and even its thoughts and ideas had always been the product of official decrees or official inspiration. A government may find it easy and expedient to encourage its subjects to indulge in a certain sort of dream as an escape from ugly realities. It may even prescribe, as the Kremlin now does, what the subject ought to dream. But it finds it much harder to intervene in the actual course of the dream and to make it wholly conform to order. Its subjects may begin to see images long banished and to murmur the most terrible heresies in their sleep…. As speaker after speaker tried to produce an answer [to the question about the transition to communism], the ghosts of banished heresies crowded into the conference hall… at that seat of Stalinist learning, the Economics Institute.’ Incidentally, this debate and the heresies voiced in it came under severe attack in the last months of Stalin's life.

Alongside the collectivization of farming and the forcible training of peasants as industrial workers, the need to enforce inequality invested the Stalinist terror with its prodigious momentum and pervasiveness. The terror matched the resistance which those policies encountered. Only with scorpions could tens of millions be driven into collective farms, multitudes be shifted to new industrial sites, and the vast majority of the people be forced to toil in misery and to suppress in silence the fury evoked by the privileges of a minority. The terror worked ruthlessly, sometimes blindly, but on the whole effectively. It owed its effectiveness to a moral backing as well as to the sheer mechanical weight of repression. The government had identified itself with a great national cause, or, as the Marxist would put it, with an historical necessity. This identification, in the last instance, accounted for the helplessness of the Soviet people against the terror, and for the complicity of the politically decisive elements, the party and the army.