4. From class enemies to working class
In the previous blog posts, we saw that Russia's history is shaped by a deep-rooted belief that the enemy is actively attacking the Russian nation. We discussed how active measures were both aimed at the external enemy (the West/NATO) and Soviet citizens who defied ideological standards. For the KGB, these were two sides of the same coin. In this blog post we will see how this ideology was reflected in the economic developments of the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century. These fundaments are vital to understand the economic climate in which cybercrime was able to develop when the Soviet Union was dissolved, which in turn would be the basis for the rise of an advanced cyber threat.
The transition from agriculture to industry
The Soviet Union was a planned command economy, in which production was directed towards use and not towards sale and profit [1](remember Khrushchev's statement that there was no stock exchange in the Soviet Union from blog post 2). Under the Communist Party, labor was largely transferred from agriculture to industry. This was necessary because classic Marxism presupposed the presence of a developed industrial proletarian class. This was largely absent in 1917 tsarist Russia, in which most of its citizens were farmers or former serfs.
In Marxist theory, private ownership is defined as ownership of something that can generate capital. This means factories, land, capital, machinery, and even manpower. It is however allowed to own consumption goods for oneself. In the Soviet Union, this was legalized by differentiating between socialist ownership and individually owned goods.
Lenin adapted Marxist theory to justify a revolution without the industrial base being present. But industrialization was still necessary to create the proletarian class for the ultimate ascent into a socialist Soviet society. On this, the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s agreed. A debate followed on how to proceed. Economist Yevgeni Preobrazhensky aligned with Trotsky to lead the so-called Left Opposition, insisting on high-tempo industrialization. Their plan was to force grain sales at low prices and to tax peasants heavily, a solution Preobrazhensky named "primitive socialist accumulation".[2] This is a deliberate echo of Marx's concept of primitive capitalist accumulation, but with the peasantry cast in the role that colonies and expropriated land had played in the West. The mechanism was straightforward: the state would purchase grain from peasants at artificially low prices, then sell it in cities or abroad for much higher prices. The resulting margin would flow directly into building new factories, instead of rural development.
Having initially sided against the Left Opposition in 1927, Stalin reversed course the following year in what became known as his 'Great Turn' — adopting a policy that closely resembled, though far exceeded in brutality, what Preobrazhensky had argued for all along. He initiated forced collectivisation; Russia's agricultural life was reformed into collective farms (kolkhozi) took place, a move supported by poorer peasants, but resisted by the middle class and more prosperous families. They were referred to as kulaki in the Soviet Union. The deep distrust of "class enemies" as they were called in socialist fashion was again reflected in the rhetoric of dekulakization, aimed at capturing this middle group by whatever means.[3]
The collectivisation was a way to ensure the supply of agricultural produce to the growing industrial working class.[4] It also served a dual purpose: it broke the last remnants of independent peasant economic power, and it created the mechanism through which that same peasantry, now defenseless against state grain requisitioning, would unwittingly bankroll the industrial base the Soviet Union needed to sustain its military-industrial complex. It was exactly what Preobrazhensky had argued. Ironically, the economist, who was at that time already removed from political office, would be executed in 1937 by the very same Stalinist regime during the great purges of the 1930s.
The growth of an engineering culture
With the means of production and the kolkhozi firmly under state control, the Party issued its first Five Year Plan, which focused heavily on investment in heavy industry over agriculture and light consumer goods. The agency responsible for central economic planning was the State Planning Committee, known by its abbreviation, Gosplan. Everyone was mobilized to participate in the industrialization drive. There was even a slogan chanted by Soviet schoolchildren to fulfill the Five Year Plan faster: "Five in four!"[5]
Schools were a primary instrument in transforming a workforce that consisted mostly of peasants into skilled factory workers. It is estimated that in the 1910s only 27 to 40% of the population was literate.[6] A baseline level of literacy was needed, both to be able to read factory instructions and Soviet propaganda. A campaign to teach the Soviet citizens how to read and write via special courses (likpunkt in Russian) became part of the curriculum across the entire Soviet Union. Furthermore, special preparatory education was provided in the form of rabfaki (worker faculties), in which the peasant youth was rapidly prepared for technical university. All over the country these technical universities (высшее учебное заведение or VUZ in Russian, meaning higher educational institutions) emerged, in which promising workers and peasants could gain admission through recommendations from Party, Komsomol or union members. This was not a single event, but a long term transformation to educate Soviet citizens to supply ever growing demand for skilled industrial workers.
The demand for skilled workers was high because the priorities of the planned economy remained focused primarily on the military-industrial complex (Военно-промышленный комплекс, or VPK in Russian literature) over consumer goods. The First and Second World Wars led to the development of mass military production, the mobilization of the war economy and the emergence of ties between the state apparatus and the military producers.[7] By the late 1980s, defense industry enterprises accounted for 20-25% of the Soviet Union's gross domestic product.[8] The Soviet Union military-industrial complex employed 7 to 10 million people.[9] The defense industry (oboronka in Russian) concentrated the best scientific and technical developments and personell: up to three quarters of all research and development was conducted in the defense industry. [10]The defense industry also produced the majority of civilian goods: 90% of televisions, refrigerators and radios, and 50% of vacuum cleaners, motorcycles and electric stoves.
One of the prime advantages of this planned economy was that prices could be fixed in relation to wages in such a way as to achieve full utilization of resources[11]. It prepared the Soviet Union to be the world leader in select fields like space travel and military technology. But this sweeping industrialization effort also resulted in the entrenchment of an authoritarian political system dominated by a small elite.[12] Urban unemployment evaporated and waves of peasants came to work in the newly built factories. [13] Food was rationed, apartments were overcrowded. The working class could put up with this because they fiercely believed in the dream of the socialist state. And for those who did not believe, the possibilities for being critical of the regime where very limited as a result of the widespread network of infomers and secret services as we saw in blog post 2.
Active measures were having their effect on the Soviet citizens once again.
However, the rapid technological advancement of the Soviet economic system found its limits. In the next blog post, we will see how the downsides of the command economy eventually contributed to the dissolution of the very union they tried to support.
Notes and references
Mazat. N. (2015). Structural analysis of the economic decline and collapse of the Soviet Union. (Paper 029)Anais do XLIII Encontro Nacional de Economia, ANPEC – Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia. (p. 2) Retrieved August 23, 2026 from https://www.anpec.org.br/encontro/2015/submissao/files_I/i3-186e370d13d34b7043cb737da8d75390.pdf. This is a conference paper and not a peer reviewed article. ↩︎
Thompson, J. M. (1996). A vision unfulfilled: Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. D.C. Heath and Company. (p. 253)↩︎
Thompson, 1996, p. 263↩︎
Mazat, 2015, p. 3↩︎
Thompson, 1996, p. 267↩︎
Voroshilova, S. (2023, July 12). Azbuka revolyutsii: Likbez kak samyy gromkiy obrazovatel'nyy eksperiment XX veka [The ABC of the revolution: Likbez as the loudest educational experiment of the 20th century]. Nozh. https://knife.media/fight-against-illiteracy/↩︎
Budanov, I. A., Ivanter, V. V., Korovkin, A. G., & Sutyagin, V. S. (Eds.). (2007). Военно-промышленный комплекс [Military-industrial complex]. In Прикладное прогнозирование национальной экономики [Applied forecasting of the national economy] (Chapter 29). Institute of Economic Forecasting, Russian Academy of Sciences. [https://ecfor.ru/wp-content/uploads/books/uch/29.pdf]↩︎
Bystrova, I. V. (2002, May 15). Otechestvennyy voenno-promyshlennyy kompleks v XX veke [The domestic military-industrial complex in the 20th century] [Conference presentation]. Tsentr ekonomicheskoy istorii, Moscow State University. https://www.hist.msu.ru/Labs/Ecohist/OB8/bystrova.htm↩︎
Oboronnaya promyshlennost' SSSR. (n.d.). su90.ru. https://su90.ru/defind.html↩︎
Oboronnaya promyshlennost' SSSR. (n.d.). su90.ru. https://su90.ru/defind.html↩︎
Mazat, 2015, p. 2↩︎
Thompson, 1996, p. 235↩︎
Thompson, 1996, p. 267↩︎
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