In 1940 in Lvov, the poet Aleksander Wat was arrested by the NKVD. He knew that he was in great peril because, having once been an ardent communist and editor of Tygodnik Literacki (The Literary Weekly), a Marxist magazine, he had seen many of his literary colleagues and political associates summoned to Moscow in the thirties for surprise executions and imprisonment, as part of Stalin's purge of the Polish Communist Party.

While Wat was transferred from one Soviet prison to another, moving from the Ukraine to the dreaded Lubyanka, and then to Saratov, his greatest torment was not the lice, interrogations, boredom or starvation – all of which he had his fair share of - but rather not knowing what had happened to his wife, Ola, and their nine-year old son, Andrzej.

_{Aleksander and Ola Wat, 1935}

Ola and Andrzej had, like hundreds of thousands of Poles in 1939-40, been bundled into cattle wagons and deported thousands of miles to a far corner of the Soviet Union. Mother and son landed up in Kazakhstan, where they nearly froze and starved to death, living entirely at the mercy of impoverished Kazakhs who had undergone the process of collectivization. They met with both cruel and kind treatment.

from Wszystko co najważniejsze (1984):

... They welcomed us hospitably, immediately inviting us in to a modest meal. I felt good among them, cosy after the immense space of the dark steppe. In all likelihood the old Kazakh told them my story, because I suddenly noticed sympathetic looks. They started to talk with me and straight away I felt that they were not at all afraid of me, that they trusted me. I told them about Poland, about our lives and the terror which had engulfed us. They listened in silence, but then they suddenly started speaking, recalling what it had been like before, how happily they had lived before the revolution. They had been a nation of nomads, a free nation. They had had beautiful tents hung with carpets, the women had worn coloured robes, earrings, rings; every day there had been meat and bread, which they baked themselves. Flocks of sheep had grazed on the steppe. And now they live in poverty, wear rags and live in constant fear. The rams and ewes are 'kazionne', they belong to the state.

Anyway, I worked with the Kazakhs on the sheep-shearing and this enabled me to draw some general conclusions. Every Kazakh was entitled to only a few rams – I cannot remember exactly how many, but I think it was three. I had to tick off the number of shorn sheep. Then I saw how powerful the property instinct is, and the way it defied the system that wanted to produce Homo Sovieticus. The Kazakhs’ own sheep were shorn in a masterly fashion, with not the slightest nick on the skin and not a snippet of wool overlooked. Whereas the ‘kazionne’, the state-owned, were worked on in the Stakhanovite manner. The aim was to get as many sheep done as possible in the shortest time. After all, that was what was required of them. Norms. And so blood flowed forth and on every sheep pathetic tufts were left sticking out. The Kazakh men worked cheerfully, and when their wives came with their childlren they threw them playfully in the air and laughed with fatherly love. I also saw how huge, towering haystacks were left to rot on the steppe in winter. Nobody touched them or took care of them, even though the cattle were half-starved to death. The stacks were state property.

So the Kazakhs explained how they lived in fear and poverty, without any hope whatsoever for a better tomorrow. You could feel their hatred towards that system, to communism. Not only for their loss of livelihood and well-being, but above all for their loss of freedom, which they now remembered as something beautiful. You could feel their powerlessness. After the revolution they had found themselves in prison, because their entire world had become a prison: those steppes where it seemed the ghosts of freedom and liberty (swoboda) could still be felt. (70-1, Czytelnik, own translation)

It would be difficult to find a clearer illustration of the effects of incentive, or the lack of it.

A Steppe In Western Kazakhstan

From 1929 to 1934, during the period when Soviet leader Joseph V. Stalin was trying to collectivize agriculture, Kazakhstan endured repeated famines because peasants had slaughtered their livestock in protest against Soviet agricultural policy. In that period, at least 1.5 million Kazakhs and 80 percent of the republic's livestock died. Thousands more Kazakhs tried to escape to China, although most starved in the attempt. *

The Stalinist system deployed brazen fictions to bring about real increases in productivity. The exploits of the Stakhanovite shock-workers were pure hype, pushing the boundaries of the credible. The official story had it that Stakhanov had done the impossible: “mined 102 tons of coal in less than 6 hours (14 times his quota).” But the impossible was not enough, the bar had to be raised again, so his ‘follower’, Nikita Izotov was reported to have “mined 607 tons of coal in a single shift.”

_{8 Million Tons Of Pig Iron}

Whether the Soviet ‘proletariat’ swallowed these ludicrous statistics or not is besides the point: the effect of Stakhanovite hyperlabour was to apply psychological pressure to the real cogs in the system. The main incentive for working harder was fear of underperfroming alongside (the myth of) such commiebots. Indeed the pressure was so great that there was falsification of quotas all the way down the line. The Stakhanov Movement did have an impact on productivity – the USSR's growth and development in the thirties was astounding – but the impossible benchmarks set by hyperlabour caused the fictionalizing of output to become the norm at all levels of production. Social Realism might have been the official doctrine for the arts, but Soviet industry and economics was driven and riven by impossibility and falsification.

_{Giants of the 5 Year Plan}

Apart from fear, there were other incentives. For those who fully identified themselves with the Soviet Project and had the Bolshevik-Stalinist meme package firmly installed in their minds, a degree of selfless devotion could be achieved. They attempted the impossible on behalf of the proletariat, for the Soviet Union, for Stalin.

One of the paradoxes of Stalinism is that while the system thoroughly terrorized the population, it was also capable of mobilising colossal energy and of inspiring great sacrifice, by tapping into the Russian people’s patriotism and predilection for unwavering devotion to their Tsar, no matter how cruel he might be. Many of these workers really did seem to be under the delusion that the state (which basically meant the country) belonged to them.

_{Help Build Giant Factories}

The rapid industrialisation and development of infrastructure that Stalin forced into existence was carried out by a highly-motivated Russian proletariat who were largely fed with grain and animals wrested from the non-Russian peasantry of subject nations which had been annexed by the expanding Soviet Union. The farms and livestock were collectivized and their ‘owners’ deliberately starved to death in their millions.

_{Women Adhere To The Cooperation}

Whether these people were sedentary farmers, as in the Ukraine, or nomads, as in Kazakhstan, the system attacked them via their property: the requisitioning of private property meant either annihilation or enslavement for those that were robbed. While being grounded in a rejection of the 'bourgeois' concept of property rights, the communist system exploited labour much more ruthlessly than did any 'bourgeois capitalists'. These farmers or nomads had no right to own the vast majority of the crops or livestock they invested their labour in.

John Locke:

Sec. 27. Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.

Sec. 28. He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. No body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he eat? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? and it is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right.

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