HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

PIATAKOV: A MIRROR OF SOVIET HISTORY 161illustration of the simplification-moving backward bipole, and it wasPiatakov's personal contribution to the chaos of the First Five-Year Plan. Infact, the reform gave new energy to the inflationary impetus and causedalready primitive accounting practices in the factories to be abandoned sothat, despite the "plan," the factories found themselves operating in thedark. The disaster brought about a further selection of the official economictheory, which then abandoned the dream of a rational, centralized governmentof the economy through a single banking center. The inability of"Marxism" to function as a general economic theory was thus implicitlyadmitted, as was the Soviet state's inability to govern the whole economyunder those conditions.This inability and this retreat were embodied by Piatakov's return tolarge industry, on which he now concentrated as he had in 1921, but underdifferent conditions, as a war against the peasantry was now being waged.The following period, which extends from 1931 to the beginning of1934, can be divided into two segments. The first segment ends with theearly months of 1932, when the retreat begun the previous year was completedwith the launching of the NKTP and the pull back from a unitarydirection of industry. It was a time of reforms, among them the well-knownreforms of 1931, inspired by banal common sense rediscovered after thesenselessness of the previous three years; the treaty with Germany and thesubsequent re-equipping of Soviet industry; and the adoption of the udarnikimethods of "planning" inside industry itself, which meant concentratingon certain large projects and on certain "fronts."At the end of 1931, the attempts to make up for the false start of1929-1930 appeared to be bearing fruit. A few months later, however,industry was overwhelmed by the great disaster of 1932-1933, whichinvolved the whole country. The year from the autumn of 1932 to that of1933 was thus a very difficult one for the leadership of the NKTP, whichcame through the trial thanks to its subjective efforts and to unheard-ofpressures on workers, technicians, and cadres, and thanks to the privilegesthe state granted to heavy industry. At the end of 1933, Ordzhonikidze'scommissariat could, in any case, count itself among the "victors."As was evident from the collection of NKTP prikazy and is nowconfirmed by the correspondence between Piatakov and Ordzhonikidze,Piatakov played a decisive role in this victory. At the beginning of 1932,Ordzhonikidze appointed Piatakov first deputy of the new commissariat, incharge of "general and financial affairs," in other words, of overseeing theentire undertaking. Thus, it was Piatakov who prepared almost all the measurestaken by the NKTP center (in spite of the 1941 fire which destroyedthe majority of the NKTP papers, it is still possible to find in Russian