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PIATAKOV: A MIRROR OF SOVIET HISTORY 159(of whom he became a champion), and did his utmost not to come intoconflict with workers and trade unions, leaving labor relations to others.Although his day-to-day practice and style of work changed, his principlesdid not. Piatakov remained true to the programs expounded by Bukharinin 1921, and maintained that the NEP should be used to build "the firststate system of industry in history," the first step in the methodical buildingof that "system" of the entire nationalized economy which the Bolshevikshad "naively" attempted to attain within a few months during the Civil War.Piatakov thus dedicated the four years spent at the VSNKh to the organizationof this "sistema gosudarstvennoi promyshlennosti." 43 Using a speciallycreated organism, the Tsentral' noe Upravlenie Gosudarstvennoi Promyshlennosti(which, as I said, was to exemplify Soviet "superiority," thatis, state ownership of the means of production, over the German model), hesoon managed to transform the trusts, initially endowed with the capacity toact independently on the market, into organs of the central administration,though still autonomous ones. This reorganization, intended to turn industryinto a single organism, agile but centralized, was in Piatakov's view theindispensable prerequisite for the launching of a great investment plan fortechnological modernization, to be worked out centrally and not left to thevagaries of the market.Having finished the first job in 1924, Piatakov dedicated 1925 to thesecond job—creating and leading a new body, the OSVOK, which wascharged with drawing up this plan. The transformation of the original planningconceptions thus took another step forward; now to take shape alongsidethe ideas worked out in 1920 was the notion of the plan as a long-terminvestment program of an industry effectively reduced to a single "corporation."Because of this "single" character and because of the conception of theUSSR as a "large integrated economic area" to be built by concentratingcertain types of production, specializing in each "region," and installingrelations of mutual interdependence, the investment plan outlined underPiatakov's leadership clashed with the interests of many of the republicanleaders as well as with those of the working classes. The conflicts with theUkrainian SNKh of the 1920s are to the point here: appealing to what hebelieved to be abstract concepts of economic "rationality," Piatakov foundhimself representing the interests of the high economic bureaucracy, whichwas one of the main forces locally opposing korenizatsiia (Lenin's prophesyabout Piatakov's "imperialist economism" thus came true in newforms). With regard to the working classes, as a recently published 192543See my " 'Building the First System of State Industry,' " (fh. 2 above).